Learning is not a spectator sport

(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

Its common to have an instrumentation infrastructure where you might be calling DBMS_UTILITY.FORMAT_CALL_STACK to record where in the code path you may be.. But this can bite you in 11.2 A simple demo of how much slower it has become is shown below. Relevant parameters are below: NAME VALUE —————————————- ————- plsql_ccflags plsql_code_type INTERPRETED plsql_debug… Read more

Is doing the OCP exams worthwhile ? Yes, but not for the reasons you may be thinking. The OCP exams are a relatively cheap way of identifying possible weaknesses in your knowledge base on Oracle. For example, when I did the OCP, all of the database sites I had worked on did not use MTS… Read more

Tuesday was dedicated to attending sessions.  Most were good, but there is that unfortunate thing when speakers are employees of Oracle.  You can tell by the occasional snippet of information that they are very sharp and very passionate about what they want to talk about, but that’s not necessarily what they’ve been given on the… Read more

Spectacular organisation by the Ace Director team (Lillian and Vikki) meant that my exit from San Fran went just as smoothly as my entrance.  A fantastic week. So – its all about “c” now, Cloud Cloud Cloud. On the last day, I saw some great sessions on security and migrating to Exadata.  The main hassle… Read more

Welll, today was a bit of a selfish day.  Didn’t really want to spend time on sessions etc, because I had my own session to give, and seeing as its been 7 years since I’ve given a talk at OOW, I wanted it to be “just right”.  So this morning was spent pretty much in… Read more