• PL/SQL Vs. Oracle JVM: Speed Comparison for Mathematical Operations

Cheers

Tim…

Cheers

Tim…

• Using Oracle SQLDeveloper to access SQLServer (The “Check for Updates” functionality doesn’t seem to work properly on my SQL*Developer running on CentOS 5 (64-bit), so I had to install the JDBC driver manually.)

I made liberal use of the following tip when dealing with TEXT and NTEXT types.

• How to use REPLACE() within NTEXT columns in SQL Server

The joys of dealing with multiple engines…

Cheers

Tim…

Do you ever get that feeling that one day people are going to realize you don’t have a clue what you are talking about? I think that day just got a little closer.

Cheers

Tim…

The answer was pretty simple in that case. We were refurbishing the existing (fairly simple) warehouse as well as adding a completely new one. We were replacing some AVGs with a very complex conveyor layout, which required some difficult routing decisions. The basic “find me a space in the warehouse” decisions were replaced by pretty complex searches that had to take account of conveyor routing, system load and potentional sorting (and defragmentation) of the content in the warehouse. The customer needed a highly available solution, hence the use of ServiceGuard, so we more than doubled the hardware and software costs for no perceivable performance improvement. From the outside looking in it seemed like nothing had changed. It was still, “Here’s a pallet, put it in the racking”, but the process required to do that operation efficiently had increased in complexity manyfold.

So Wirth’s Law, “Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster”, is true because people’s expectation of what software can do for them is constantly expanding, without realizing the impact those expanding expectations have on the programming and hardware requirements. Added to that we have a generation of cut & paste developers and DBAs who also don’t understand the impact their lack of understanding has on the software they develop (see Gate’s Law).

I look forward to writing a post in 10 years where I can moan about Exadata V12 boxes struggling to complete my weekly loads before the end of the weekend. Of course I will forget to qualify that I’m loading Yottabytes of data in that time…

Cheers

Tim…

Anyway, I had a play around with it.

• Fedora 13 (F13) Installation
• Oracle Database 11g Release 2 (11.2) Installation On Fedora 13 (F13)

Cheers

Tim…

• Oracle Database 11g Release 2 RAC On Linux Using VirtualBox

This is pretty good news as that was the last feature that tied me to VMware Server. I’ve now moved pretty much everything I do at home on to VirtualBox and it’s working fine.

It’s worth taking a little time looking at the VBoxManage command line. Some of the operations, like creating the shared disks, have to be done from the command line at the moment. It’s also handy for running VMs in headless mode if you don’t want the GUI screen visible all the time.

Cheers

Tim…

Cheers

Tim…

Answer: Knowing how to search the Oracle documentation.

The Oracle database is a massive product. There are sections of it I’ve never ventured near. Do I spend my time trying to remember syntax and procedures for every possible occurence? No. I try to understand the principles of what is going on and regularly refer back to the docs to fill in the gaps. I search the docs constantly. There are some very basic tasks that I would probably fail to complete without reference to the manual (or one of my articles). Whenever I see an error message I search the docs for that error message to see what the action against it is. I can’t imagine anyone being able to function as a DBA or developer without constant reference to the docs.

I am frequently asked questions that are very easily answered by searching the docs for the relevant keywords in the question. So the original poster has wasted the time taken to type the question, plus the time it takes for me to come online and answer it. Since most of my readers live in a different timezone to me, it can be several hours between the post arriving and me answering it.

So if you want to get good at Oracle, learn to search the docs. Every time you want to know something:

1. Go to “http://tahiti.oracle.com/“.
2. Type in some relevant keywords. Stick to keywords, not whole sentances.
3. Click the “Search Doc Libraries”
4. Select the section relevant to your product/version.
5. Rinse and repeat.

Over time you will become an Oracle Certified Professional Documentation Searcher…

Cheers

Tim…

While answering a question today I confidently proclaimed that while you can move the AUD$ and $FGA_LOGS tables to another tablespace, it’s not a great idea and could make things go bang when you come to patch/upgrade the system. Whilst looking up some links for further reading to send to the poster, I noticed note 731908.1, which says the DBMS_AUDIT_MGMT package has been backported to 10gR2.

It’s not included in the database documentation until 11gR2, but it is available from the patches listed in the note if you need it.

Pesky Oracle improving older releases…

Cheers

Tim…