Learning is not a spectator sport

Firstly, I hope everyone had a great Christmas…I took a few weeks off in December which explains the blog hiatus…but back to the grind stone now Well, day 2 started much like day 1….4am the internal body clock told me to get up, and thus I did some work on my slides, and then promptly Read more

Well, as per normal when attending a conference in another country, it started very early….very early indeed.  4am the body clock decided it was time to get up, so eventually just gave up on trying to get back to sleep and started the day First up was Kyle Hailey’s talk on SQL Tuning.  Kyle is Read more

UKOUG talks for me if you’re keen Monday 11:05, Hall 9 Partitioning 101 A look at the partitioning options at your disposal in Enterprise Edition from its inception in Oracle 8 up to array of improvements that have arrived in 11g. We’ll look at the various types of partitioning, how to decide whether you should Read more

There is nothing better than a) bumpy flight from Perth to Dubai b) bumpy flight from Dubai to Birmingham then to open the laptop bag and find a) a laptop b) NO laptop power supply So this morning was mad panic, getting taxis to PC-World to buy a universal power supply, which beeps when the Read more

Well, its off to the UK for one of the best conferences going…the UKOUG conference in Birmingham.  If you’re coming, please join me at my talks – I’m giving one every single day, including Sunday, so you’re spoilt for choice 🙂 Read more

(Disclaimer: I’ve published titles through Apress, but they are not paying me to post this …) Just noticed on the Apress site that you can buy ebooks today for $15. Read more

I’ve dragged this little demo up from the past, because friend Toon (http://thehelsinkideclaration.blogspot.com) has been blogging about triggers. This demo shows the overhead of triggers in terms of doing things that can be easily done without triggers. But I do stress – I’m with Toon on this one – this is not the same as Read more

If you’re in Birmingham in the first week of December, (and you’re reading this blog), chances are you are coming to the UKOUG conference. This is one of my favourite conferences – the organisers treat the speakers brilliantly, the venue is perfect (even if the weather is not), and the quality of the presentations is Read more

Sometime things just leap out at you when you least expect it. Let’s say I’ve got a table that I’d like to shrink the space on. No problems there. SQL> drop table T purge; Table dropped. SQL> create table T as 2 select rownum x from dual 3 connect by level create index IX on Read more

Fellow Ace Debra Lilley stayed a day with us after the conference, and in true local style, we wanted to show off our wonderful Perth spring weather. It didn’t really pan out as we expected   (Debra is in the middle, basking in the sunshine…)   Read more

I didn’t get to see as much content as I liked on day 2, because I had still plenty of slides to complete on my own presentation, so I locked myself away in a room at the casino (the conference venue) and worked on content and delivery. However, once I was happy with it, I Read more

The AUSOUG conference program this year was bolstered by a number of international speakers on the tail end of the OTN series of talks held all over the world.  As such, speakers such as Debra Lilley, Graham Wood, Kai Yu, Chris Muir, Tim Hall and many others added some amazing content to the already impressive Read more