As seems to be the norm for me, the weather has taken a turn for the better and I’ve got a cold. 
I’d like to say a quick sorry to a couple of people from the BGOUG conference who are waiting for feedback from me about some questions. I will get round to it, but the return to work and this blasted cold have made life complicated.
I spent Friday at work with my face buried in tissues, between necking Covonia. I spent Friday evening until this morning asleep in bed, with occasional periods of sleep in the bath. It’s amazing what 30+ hours in bed can do to a cold and how much damage it can do to your back!
Today I am being sponsored by Lemsip Max All In ON Cold and Flu Capsules. I must be feeling better as I’m bored and hungry, neither of which I have felt for the last 30+ hours. A couple more days and normal service will be resumed. 
Cheers
Tim…
I recently wrote about installing SSDs in my Laptop and Desktop. I thought I would write a quick follow up post to mention how things are going.
I’m really happy with the changes to the performance of the desktop. As mentioned previously, it is now much quieter and really fast. A lot of my VMs run from the 1TB internal data drive, but the things I use most frequently are now sitting on the SSD. I’m starting to forget what life was like before SSD, except when I go to work and use the slowest PC that was ever built.
The laptop upgrade was a really good move. Just before my first BGOUG presentation the projector seemed to freak out my MacBook and I was forced to reboot. With the old hard drive I would have been filling while waiting for the thing to start up. As it was, it restarted in a similar time it used to take to come out of hibernation and I was moving.
Having done the disk swap in the laptop so close to a conference I was a little bit nervous, so in addition to the laptop I had my old 500G external drive, my new 1TB external drive and the oringial internal hard drive in my bag. Unpacking all that, along with my Nexus 7, Nexus 4 and Kindle was very time consuming and a little embarrassing.
If you were at all in doubt about making the move to SSD, I can definitely recommend it.
Cheers
Tim…
PS. I reserve the right to start moaning about it when it wears out after a few weeks.
We’ve had a couple of short lived, but very inconvenient I/O latency issues recently. I’ve been using the awesome Latency Heat Map Visualization by Luca Canali as one of the tools to investigate this.
I’m guessing this isn’t the type of I/O latency heat map most people would want to see from a production system.
This is the same system that has been reporting Warning “aiowait timed out x times” in alert.log [ID 222989.1], which only appears if an asynchronous I/O takes longer than 10 minutes…
The pictures look much nicer when things are going wrong!
Cheers
Tim…
Chapterhouse Dune is the last in the Dune series by Frank Herbert.
It’s really hard for me to make a judgement about Chapterhouse: Dune. On the one hand there are some excellent characters and the general story line is great. On the other, there are parts I found really boring. I got a bit sick of the teasers without any explanation. At first is was intriguing, but as they continued I just got a bit fed up with them and decided to stop second guessing the outcome and just let it happen. I think there are two ways an author can play this game:
1) Make the outcome fairly obvious from the start, but make the journey to get there exciting. Kind of like The Dresden Files.
2) Make the outcome a mystery, but subtly lead you in the right direction.
I think this book is trying to do the latter, but is quite clumsy about it. Having said all that, I’m glad I read it. The overall outcome is more than satisfactory.
I’m not going to read the books by Frank Herbert’s son. I’ve been told they are not good, and the brief snippets I’ve read seem to reinforce that.
I guess the end of a series of books like this needs a bit of a summary. I think the first book is a total classic. The rest you can take or leave. There are definitely interesting elements to all of them, but they are not nearly as accomplished as the first.
Cheers
Tim…
How do you want to start the day? I’m guessing it’s not to be called out to the front of the room by a speaker and used as a guinea pig, while they ask you trick questions to make you look stupid. Tom Kyte, you will pay. Oh yes! You will pay!!!
The sessions I attended on day 2 were:
- Tom Kyte : What’s new in Oracle database application development
- Tim Hall (me) : A cure for Virtual Insanity : A vendor-neutral introduction to virtualization without the hype
- Georgi Kodinov : Quick Dive into MySQL
- Tim Hall (me) : From Zero to Hero : Using an assortment of caching techniques to improve performance of SQL containing PL/SQL calls
- Husnu Sensoy : ZFS Storage can backup your Exadata
- Tom Kyte : 5 SQL and PL/SQL things in the Latest Generation of Database Technology
Another very useful day indeed. I had some good feedback and interesting questions about my talks. This sort of feedback is really important when you are presenting regularly as it allows you to continuously refine your material and presenting skills. It can sometimes give you a fresh perspective on a subject, that inspires you to alter the focus of your presentations entirely. I’m very grateful to anyone who takes the time to provide this sort of feedback. Big thanks to Tom Kyte, who has given me some very useful advice over the last couple of days, but then he owes me for making me look stupid in his first session of the day!
In the evening we went out for dinner at a restaurant just down the road from the hotel. I ate plenty of cheese, so I was in heaven. Not surprisingly, much of the talk ended up being about Oracle. It may seem a little sad to some people, but when I’m surrounded by people with brains the size of a planet, I can’t help myself quizzing them about this stuff. I love it!
Great big thanks go out to Milena and her gang for organizing this event and inviting me. Thanks also to Stoyan for being my driver again. No offence to other user groups, but BGOUG conferences are my favorite events of the year. I will keep coming back as long as you will have me! Also, a big thank you to the Oracle ACE program for making this possible.
Cheers
Tim…
So Day 1 (part 2) didn’t go to plan because I forgot to take my camera or my phone to the party.
Suffice to say, lots of food, lots of drink (for those that do) and most importantly lots of dancing. Yes, I once again murdered the traditional dances of Bulgaria, but it’s the takling part that counts right?
I had good intentions of leaving early, but I ended up chatting about Oracle until about 02:00. Day 2 is going to be tough…
Cheers
Tim…
Last night we all got together to eat some food and chat. Julian Dontcheff is practically a savant where Bulgarian Poetry, World Cup match results and random Oracle facts are concerned. Although Christian Antognini was pretty impressive on the random Oracle facts too.
I didn’t have any presentations today, so I got to sit and watch. I’ve done loads of typing, mostly of syntax for 12c features, but it’s not really stuff that is worth posting, because I have no way to validate it out, so I’m just going to keep it as a reminder for when I get hold of 12c and can try it out.
The sessions I went to included:
- Joze Senegacnik : Is my SQL Statement Using Exadata Features
- Christian Antognini : SQL New Features in the latest generation of Oracle Database
- Julian Dontcheff : Upgrading to the latest generation of database technology
- Christian Antognini : How the Query Optimizer Learns from its Mistakes
- Clive King : Solaris 11u1 performance and stability : features and frameworks
- Tom Kyte : Tom’s Top 12 Things about the Latest Generation of Database Technology
There was a lot of material I had seen at OOW2012 and UKOUG2012, but also a lot I had not, so I’m glad I went to them. The smaller setting also made it easier to ask questions, which can be quite daunting at the big events.
Tom gave me a couple of tips that have gone straight into one of my talks for tomorrow. I’m gonna have to name check him for it, or I’ll feel like I’m passing it off as my own.
I said this after OOW2013 and I’m sure I will say it again, but the number of changes in 12c is pretty daunting. I guess the fact it’s been about a 3 year wait, rather than the normal 18 months adds to that. In many cases (but not all) it’s not the scope of the individual changes that are the issue, but the sheer volume of them. I think people are going to be blogging for a long time before they’ve got through them. It will be interesting to see what gets selected for inclusion in the OCP DBA upgrade exam.
I’m off to dinner now. I will try to get some photos and post them in “Day 1 (part 2)@ tomorrow.
Cheers
Tim…
It’s stupid o’clock in the morning and I’m waiting for my taxi to arrive. Considering how close Bulgaria is, it takes me a very long time to get there.
I am a mix of excited and nervous. This is my first conference this year, so all the usual insecurities are in full effect, from fear of flying to the constant nagging thoughts that perhaps I don’t know anything about Oracle and maybe I shouldn’t be on stage acting like I do.
I’m sure it will go OK and it will be nice to meet up with the gang again.
Cheers
Tim…
On Thursday I’ll be flying out to Bulgaria for BGOUG Spring 2013. It’s been about 18 months since I’ve visited the people over there, so I’m really looking forward to getting stuck in.
This will be my first conference of the year, so I’m feeling a little nervous at the moment. I’m sure the adrenalin rush will kick in and get me through.
I’m signed up for the southern leg of the OTN Tour of Latin America (Chile, Peru, Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil), but it will be a while before I get any confirmation, so there are no guarantees yet.
Fun, fun, fun…
Cheers
Tim…
I wrote a couple of days ago about replacing my MacBook Pro hard drive with SSD. At the same time I bought a little SSD to use as the system drive for my desktop. I fitted that this morning, installed a fresh copy of Fedora 18 and mounted the original 1TB hard drive as a data drive.
Like the MacBook Pro, my desktop is a few years old, but still has plenty of grunt (Quad Core and 8G RAM) for what I need it for. I do run the odd VM on it, but any heavy stuff is run on my server, so there is no incentive to go out an buy the latest kit for what is essentially just a client PC.
The addition of the SSD means the start up time is a much better and it just feels a lot more responsive. Most apps start up almost instantly. Even GIMP, which used to take an age to start, is mega quick. I’ve put a couple of VMs on it and not surprisingly, they are fast to start up too. Overall I’m really pleased with the outcome.
The funny thing is, I never noticed how noisy spinning rust was until I switched to these SSDs. The Mac is silent and runs for a lot longer before the fan kicks in. The desktop is also silent, until I pull something from the data disk, at which point I hear that slight grinding noise.
I don’t think I would invest in large capacity SSDs for home until the prices drop considerably, but having witnessed the before and after results on these two old machines, I can’t imagine ever running without an SSD system disk again.
Cheers
Tim…
PS. While I was reconfiguring my desktop I tried out Dnsmasq. Much simpler than BIND.
Update: I worked through some of the suggestions here to enable TRIM support and reduce wear.
