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AUSOUG Perth…

Tim... — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 15:22:29 +0000

The AUSOUG Perth conference finished a few hours ago. It’s a really good size event, about 400 people, which is big enough to feel busy, but small enough to feel personal. I met a bunch of familiar faces and many new ones.

The best speaker prize went to Connor McDonald. If you get the chance, check out his presentation style. It’s not the normal thing you see on the Oracle conference circuit.

I did two talks, which must have gone down OK with the audience as I got the second prize behind Connor. It was very nice surprise.

So tomorrow morning I leave Perth and head to Sydney for a couple of days on my way to Gold Coast…

Cheers

Tim…

Doug: I’ve already had the Number Two’s joke, so I’ll head you off at the pass on that one…

Rottnest…

Tim... — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 14:28:38 +0000

I took a trip out to Rottnest Island a couple of days ago. The beaches look tropical, but the center of the island is a mix of scrub land and unusual salty lakes. It’s pretty cool.

From 2008_Perth

Here’s another shot…

From 2008_Perth

The island was named Rottnest (Rat’s Nest) because William de Vlaming thought the native Quokkas were big (cat sized) rats. Here’s one of the little fellas.

From 2008_Perth

They are really tame. They walk right up to you without a care.

After taking a bike ride round the island I spent some time on the beach. Sorry to anyone present who was subjected to my incredibly white body.

Cheers

Tim…

4 Useful Links for 2008-10-07

Eddie Awad — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 09:59:06 +0000

Oracle Demos

Demo categories: Products, Solutions, Industries, Services and Technologies.
nls_lang faq

Frequently asked questions regarding NLS_LANG
SELECT * IS EVIL

Why you should not SELECT *
Database Limits

Limits of values associated with database functions and objects.

Oracle Exadata Storage Server: A Black Box with No Statistics.

kevinclosson — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 03:46:26 +0000

A question came in about whether it is possible to measure how much data is filtered out when running a query serviced by a Smart Scan in the Exadata Storage Server grid. The following is the long answer. An Example of SQL Offload Processing Effectiveness Accounting I’d like to answer this question by taking real information from [...]

ORA-01403:no data found

Jake — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 23:35:57 +0000

Curious? That seemed like a clever title, given the subject, and my lack of pithy title for the post.

I’ll back up a bit. I’m still slogging through feeds from before OpenWorld, which is pretty tough considering Paul’s got me cranking hardcore on a new project. I plowed through Slashdot today and found an item linking to “The Thirteen Greatest Error Messages of All Time“.

Stop now and see if you can guess the winner. No hints.

Error messages are an interesting subject to me, and I found it extremely funny (and awesome) that someone has built a t-shirt business around errors, called Errorwear. Bonus points for 403 Forbidden available in women’s sizes only, “You don’t have permissions to access /girl on this server.”

As a product manager, error messages are a necessary evil. I design and build a product to work, not fail, which makes the prospect of planning for failures a bit icky. No one wants to write error messages, and often, developers end up writing messages during testing when unforeseen failures occur.

The best error messages are are clear and concise, but the reality of software makes writing clear and concise error messages a near impossibility. I would often wonder if anyone bothered to read error messages.

According to another gem in my Reader from a few weeks ago, a recent study of users failed to read popup warnings, mindlessly clicking OK just to dismiss a dialog box, regardless of what OK meant. Hard to excuse this, even for web browsing.

Even if they ignore error messages, people expect to be told when something goes awry. Think about the last time an application just quit or froze unexpectedly. Bummer, eh? Rich and I whipped up a funny (in our estimation) version of the generic “something went wrong” error message we use for Connect.

We throw a genric Error 500 page with “game over man” and some other general verbiage. The page also includes the sound bite of Bill Paxson’s “game over man” line from Aliens, for giggles. I guess funny error messages aren’t expected either because at least one user thought the site was a joke and sent us feedback asking just that.

Anyway, if you use Oracle at all, you’re familiar with the error codes book (or HTML page). A few of my favorites:

ORA-00600:internal error code
ORA-00942:table or view does not exist
ORA-01031:insufficient privileges
ORA-01034:ORACLE not available

No Oracle errors made the best list, and the winner wasn’t really a surprise. It’s your old friend, BSoD in all its incarnations. I’d like to say I’m done with BSoD, but alas, my wife’s XP box still throws it from time, to time.

So, what’re your favorites? Have any insights into error messages? Find the comments.

addthis_url = 'http%3A%2F%2Ftheappslab.com%2F2008%2F10%2F06%2Fora-01403no-data-found%2F'; addthis_title = 'ORA-01403%3Ano+data+found'; addthis_pub = '';

Missing Open World

APC — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 17:16:52 +0000

A belated post, because it still hurts that I wasn't able to go to Open World this year. But I console myself with the thought that many people probably couldn't go either. Besides, if I had to skip a year, OO2K8 was a good one to skip: no announcements on Fusion Middleware, nothing on 11gR2. I suppose the lack of big product launches and the concomitant absence of marketing hoo-hah left more space for useful technical sessions, but those would have been focused on 11g and 10gR2, which is still as far away as it ever was for my project.

Such announcements as there were seem rather ho-humish. Is there more to Oracle's support for the cloud than jumping on a fashionable bandwagon? Well there is <a href="http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/017548_EN.doc" title="Oracle and Intel(R) Collaborate to Accelerate Enterprise-Ready
Cloud Computing">Oracle's partnership with Intel. It's official: Larry now likes x86 chips more than he likes SPARCs. In fact, I think the big story from Open World is the dissolution of the Sun-Oracle relationship. For over a decade, Oracle on Solaris has gone together like a horse and carriage. Not any more.

The most significant thing about Ellison's keynote was not Exadata appliance itself - it's a rather niche product - but the fact that the hardware is supplied by HP. In the old days the hardware would have been Sun, but then Sun went and bought MySQL and things went rather sour. Funnily enough last week Sun announced a remarkably similar sounding device they
were building for Fox Interactive Media, albeit using "Greenplum's data warehousing software on Sun's Solaris/ZFS based OpenStorage platforms".

Despite what I said earlier there were many interesting sounding presentations. Jared Still recently listed a few of them on Oracle-L. I hope that they will eventually be made available to the masses. At the moment there's only Oracle on demand which is demanding - oh ho! - $700 for streaming access to the presentations. I think I'll pass.

A bug perhaps

Ric Van Dyke — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 16:00:00 +0000

OK in talking with Karen Morton and Jonathan Lewis it looked like a bug with the trace mechanism might be the root of the problem with the stat lines for a sort and not some new fancy way Oracle is doing the sorts. And I think that is true. Here is a look at getting the stats directly from v$sql_plan_statistics_all for my test SQL:

Select * from emp, dept where emp.deptno = dept.deptno
/

Now all the times look very nice. So I'm going with the BUG theory for now. (EDIT1 - Sorry I thought I had a way to keep the spacing but NO!) (EDIT 2 - Well let's try this little screen shot, a little small, but the numbers are easier to read.)

ApexBlogs.info fixed

Dimitri Gielis — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 13:15:00 +0000

The last couple of weeks the blogger sites didn't get updated in the Apex Blogs aggregator. Apparently the site is getting popular as I got a lot of mails to tell me.

The problem was the comments were not retrieved due to a change somewhere in the xml. As a quick fix I don't try to get the comments anymore, but at least you should see the new blog posts again.

Once I've more time, I'll update the packages again to retrieve the comments as well.

I used a backup to bring back all posts and updated from there, so all APEX posts should be there.

where is my database link listed?

Laurent Schneider — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 10:01:44 +0000


$ sqlplus scott/tiger@DEVL
SQL> select * from all_db_links;
no rows selected
SQL> select * from dual@PROD;
D
-
X

Hey, why does this work???

Ok, after some research I found out that this seems to be an implicit loopback database link. The fact that the DEVL database has the global name set to PROD is just to annoy more


SQL> select * from global_name;

GLOBAL_NAME
--------------------------------
PROD.LAURENTSCHNEIDER.COM

addthis_url = 'http%3A%2F%2Flaurentschneider.com%2Fwordpress%2F2008%2F10%2Fwhere-is-my-database-link-listed.html'; addthis_title = 'where+is+my+database+link+listed%3F'; addthis_pub = '';

Useful blog

Jonathan Lewis — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 20:03:01 +0000

Browsing around over the weeend, I came across this blog. I didn’t spend much time reading through the material, but at first sight I got the impression that a number of the articles might be useful to people who were starting to experiment with RAC systems and could do with some step by step guidance when [...]