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Author Archives The Oracle Alchemist

Learn Databases from Tico the Fairy!

It seems I’m not the only one who has thought to use cartoons to explain databases to others. On Amazon, you can now pre-order The Manga Guide to Databases, a graphic novel about database technology.
Follow Tico the Fairy as she teaches Princess Ruruna how to simply management of her nation with a well made [...]

Posted 10 October 2008 § Uncategorized ‡ Comments Off °

The Best Oracle Headline You’ll See All Year

For those of you who know me, you know that I like to keep an air of professionalism both in my work and in my online communications. However, this was just too good to pass up…The Register has given us the best double entendre I’ve ever seen in an Oracle related article:
Actual Headline: [...]

Posted 09 October 2008 § Uncategorized ‡ Comments Off °

12g Says Goodbye to Raw

A colleague sent me an interesting note today. Specifically, Metalink Note 578455.1, which announces that Oracle 12g will not support raw volumes for Datafiles, controlfiles, redo logs, OR voting disks and OCR.
Those of us acquainted with RAC might be shouting “WHAT?!?!” at about this time. This is because without raw volumes, our only [...]

Posted 07 August 2008 § Uncategorized ‡ Comments Off °

Amazing - Multitouch 3D Hologram

I just wanted to pop in and plug something that is absolutely incredible: a 3D holographic display with multitouch capabilities.
Don’t you love it when sci-fi comes to life? Imagine setting up your system architecture using technology like this!

Posted 05 August 2008 § Uncategorized ‡ Comments Off °

The Adventures of Ace, DBA

So I was reading through some of my favorite xkcd comics, and I decided it might be fun to make my own comics about Oracle.
And so I’d like to introduce The Adventures of Ace, DBA. Ace is a Jr. DBA trying to make it in a tough corporate world. The comic is about [...]

Posted 26 July 2008 § Uncategorized ‡ Comments Off °

This Bug Brought To You By The Letter “U”

One silly bug. Ah ah ah ah!
Bugs come in all shapes and sizes. Big bugs, little bugs, bugs that crash your database, bugs that make a query run oddly. Some believe there are even bugs in human existence.
There is a running joke that has been around forever regarding bugs vs. features. [...]

Posted 25 July 2008 § Uncategorized ‡ Comments Off °

The Sin of Band-Aids

Let’s take a trip to the past…we weren’t actually there, but we can pretend. Let’s look into a conversation between a DBA, developers, and management at some time ‘way back when.’
Management: Our system has been performing poorly for months now.
Developers: We didn’t change anything.
DBA: I didn’t change anything.
Management: We need [...]

Posted 21 June 2008 § Uncategorized ‡ Comments Off °

Ladies and Gentlemen, Meet Hellraiser

Sometimes you just need to take a moment and appreciate the things you have in life. And while I always appreciate my lovely wife and my darling kids, this time my appreciation is for something a little more material.
Hellraiser
Okay, so Hellraiser is just a computer, but what a fine computer it is.

The CyberpowerPC Gamer [...]

Posted 18 June 2008 § Uncategorized ‡ Comments Off °

Comments Fixed

To anyone who has tried to post comments to my blog entries, I greatly appreciate it and I am sorry that the comments did not go through! I recently updated the mod_security parameters on my server, and it appears that the new rules break some WordPress functionality. I have approved all comments that [...]

Posted 15 June 2008 § Uncategorized ‡ Comments Off °

An Oracle Schema Filesystem

I’m one of those types that always needs a project. If I run out of projects using the things I know, I take on a project that involves something I don’t know whatsoever.
For instance, building a filesystem in C that connects to Oracle and uses queries in order to create inode structures.
It’s not done [...]

Posted 15 June 2008 § Uncategorized ‡ Comments Off °