Archive for September, 2005
Thing 1 and Thing 2
Apparently around Don’s way there is a classic database problem. No-one has surnames and they all have the same first name. One could of course use an artificial key, but Don has hit on a better solution. Sequence numbers for surnames. You never know it could be the way forward, in fact it might make the UK National ID Card a simpler implementation.
Niall 666
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Oracle Executive Blogs
I just noticed that OTN has a new (to me) section for blogs from Oracle Executives.
At the moment there are precisely 3, all apps, Senior VP blogs there. (What a terrible job title by the way – I’ll bet my bottom dollar there isn’t anyone with a post of Junior VP out there).
It will be interesting to see how these blogs pan out – I hope that they represent a long term committment from Oracle to more informal as well as formal communication from Oracle executives. I’d love to see a Larry Ellison blog as well (even if was just about fast sail boats).
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Confidentiality and Blogging
Mark Rittman posted some interesting thoughts on confidentiality and blogging today. Tom Kyte picked up on them as well. Don Burleson has posted a number of links regarding hypothetical legal issues as well. Anyway Mark asked for thoughts from other bloggers, and partly by way of making a point, I thought I’d comment here.
I happen to think, and am as confident as an educated layman can be that the legal position will be somewhere around the same place as well, that common sense and the concept of duty of care will go a long way here.
I’m commenting on Mark’s blog – I haven’t notified him or asked permission to do so. This is because, it seems to me, that by posting opinion in the public domain it is fair to comment upon it.
Having looked through my blog history it occurs to me that there is almost nothing there that reflects upon my work, this is because of a duty of care (and arguably a contract of employment). Equally there are emails I have received that I have not commented upon. Same thing goes, private conversation isn’t public knowledge. I’m not a consultant – but it seems to me that the consultant/client relationship is equally a private one. I’d not expect to see client problems shown on a blog, except where they illustrate a general point (“a client of mine had this slow batch job, turns out it committed every 100 rows to save rollback space”).
So far, so straightforward. If it is in the public domain – its fair game, you may or may not converse with the author beforehand some I would others aren’t worth the hassle, but commentary is fair. If it is private or you have a duty of care then don’t publish without generalizing.
There are a couple of other issues that do come up from time to time. The first is what to do when you mess up. I personally leave the mess up in place (unless I spot it as I post – doh!) and post an update, probably elsewhere, or an acknowledgement in the comments. Others publicly correct the original, which is OK but sometimes the original error is education itself, and yet others silently correct the article, this last I find really annoying because although the article gets corrected the publisher has no control over where it has been replicated to and commented upon.
The second (its an american constitution thing I think) is whether bloggers are Journalists or not. For me, we aren’t (except rarely), journalism is (in my book) a valuable and important profession holding authority to account and explaining the world. Blogging is op-ed. Valuable and important, not Journalism. I respect the BBC,the Telegraph, the Economist etc not for the opinion (though I wish I could write that well) but for the real journalism that makes up the bulk of the output.
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UKOUG Conference 2005
The annual conference of the UK Oracle Users Group is now only 5 weeks or so away. This conference, which is the largest Oracle gathering in Europe and is a user driven rather than Oracle marketing driven event, takes place in Birmingham UK from October 31 to November 2nd. For those of you that book early enough and can get there on Sunday this year we are introducing an Oak Table day. 10 presentations you won’t get to see at the conference (including Graham Wood on why you don’t need 10046) and with limited audience (meaning you get to pester the oakies afterwards). The conference agenda is up here, and I am lucky enough to have had two presentations accepted. These are
This will be a practical biased introduction to and demo of performance tuning based on extended sql trace. If you’ve read Cary Millsap’s book or heard of response time based tuning, but haven’t really seen how it might apply to your day to day work, then you are the audience I have in mind. It won’t be a rehash of Cary’s book, it will attempt to show how you can apply this approach to performance tuning in real life.
Snatches of Eternity:
This is a suggestion as to how one might implement end to end tracing in the versions of Oracle currently in wide use for connection pooled and uninstrumented applications. Hopefully it will address a whole class of applications that are currently almost untunable. It will however require some experienced dba intervention in application setup.
Mogens normally press gangs me onto the server panel as well. A brief glance at the agenda suggests that Wednesday morning will therefore be somewhat intense for me.
In addition I now am co-chair of the Oracle on Windows special interest group and intend therefore to be around for the focus pubs on Monday night. Come see us. Suggest content for the SIG meetings in 2006 and even better volunteer to present. It may become an out of focus pub later on but there you go.
Monday night is also I think the night of the bloggers dinner that Mark Rittman suggested. As Mark is also a sig chair I think it is clear that this will happen after the focus pubs. I intend to be there, I’m sure Lisa Dobson of the Oracle Newbies blog, and an excellent SIG deputy chair will be there (we’ll keep her supplied with alcohol rather than water just in case) and hopefully Tom Kyte might make an appearance as well.
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Trace Changes in 10.2
I was intrigued by one of Cary Millsap and Tom Kytes favourite new features in 10.2 I thought I’d have a look at a 10.2 trace file. There surely is a lot more information in there. I have a table t1 which is just a copy of all_objects with no indexes etc. I ran select count(*) from t1; against it in 10gr1 and 10gr2. About as simple a test case as you can get.
The 10.1 output
PARSING IN CURSOR #9 len=23 dep=0 uid=61 oct=3 lid=61 tim=8536154153 hv=2648217100 ad='25729404'
select count(*)
from t1
END OF STMT
PARSE #9:c=20029,e=403533,p=343,cr=116,cu=0,mis=1,r=0,dep=0,og=1,tim=8536154147
EXEC #9:c=0,e=52,p=0,cr=0,cu=0,mis=0,r=0,dep=0,og=1,tim=8536154621
WAIT #9: nam='SQL*Net message to client' ela= 5 p1=1111838976 p2=1 p3=0
WAIT #9: nam='db file scattered read' ela= 40330 p1=4 p2=5148 p3=5
WAIT #9: nam='db file scattered read' ela= 1646 p1=4 p2=5153 p3=8
WAIT #9: nam='db file scattered read' ela= 13053 p1=4 p2=5162 p3=3
WAIT #9: nam='db file scattered read' ela= 765 p1=4 p2=5166 p3=3
...
WAIT #9: nam='SQL*Net message from client' ela= 19237 p1=1111838976 p2=1 p3=0
Now here is the 10.2 output
PARSING IN CURSOR #4 len=23 dep=0 uid=61 oct=3 lid=61 tim=881471072 hv=2648217100 ad='6cf05b48'
select count(*)
from t1
END OF STMT
PARSE #4:c=265625,e=1683003,p=544,cr=274,cu=0,mis=1,r=0,dep=0,og=1,tim=881471065
EXEC #4:c=0,e=75,p=0,cr=0,cu=0,mis=0,r=0,dep=0,og=1,tim=881471221
WAIT #4: nam='SQL*Net message to client' ela= 5 driver id=1111838976 #bytes=1 p3=0 obj#=52566 tim=881471274
WAIT #4: nam='db file scattered read' ela= 28810 file#=4 block#=548 blocks=5 obj#=52566 tim=881500264
WAIT #4: nam='db file scattered read' ela= 1658 file#=4 block#=553 blocks=8 obj#=52566 tim=881502205
WAIT #4: nam='db file scattered read' ela= 16724 file#=4 block#=562 blocks=7 obj#=52566 tim=881526262
WAIT #4: nam='db file scattered read' ela= 1091 file#=4 block#=569 blocks=8 obj#=52566 tim=881527647
WAIT #4: nam='db file scattered read' ela= 321 file#=4 block#=578 blocks=7 obj#=52566 tim=881528277
WAIT #4: nam='db file scattered read' ela= 332 file#=4 block#=585 blocks=8 obj#=52566 tim=881528833
WAIT #4: nam='db file scattered read' ela= 32976 file#=4 block#=594 blocks=7 obj#=52566 tim=881562089
WAIT #4: nam='db file scattered read' ela= 2543 file#=4 block#=601 blocks=8 obj#=52566 tim=881565062
WAIT #4: nam='db file scattered read' ela= 10338 file#=4 block#=610 blocks=7 obj#=52566 tim=881575679
WAIT #4: nam='db file scattered read' ela= 6777 file#=4 block#=617 blocks=8 obj#=52566 tim=881582714
WAIT #4: nam='db file scattered read' ela= 1402 file#=4 block#=626 blocks=7 obj#=52566 tim=881584403
......
WAIT #4: nam='SQL*Net message to client' ela= 3 driver id=1111838976 #bytes=1 p3=0 obj#=52566 tim=887316187
WAIT #4: nam='SQL*Net message from client' ela= 40457 driver id=1111838976 #bytes=1 p3=0 obj#=52566 tim=887356685
So 10.2 has the timestamps for the wait events (as Tom mentioned), in addition the p1 to p3 data items get a meaningful description emitted where there is one.
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Of mice and men
Well of mice and small children.
I have a Microsoft wireless mouse. I have a not quite two year old boy called Sam. I have a toilet. The three have interacted in a perhaps predictable manner. Suggestions for a suitable replacement mouse (must work with Linux) are welcomed.
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Good News – Bad News
Just saw via orablogs that Scott Spendolini has moved on. HTMLDB is, in my view anyway, probably the must have new feature that Oracle have released in the recent past. Apologies to Sue Harper but I’d much rather folk used HTMLDB than JDeveloper for almost all normal size developments. This is partly a healthy disregard for java/j2ee, but partly a suggestion that HTMLDB has nearly all most normal organisations would want from an in-house dev tool. For those interested in terms I’m approximately defining normal organisation as <5000 employees, single country of operation and maybe <$500m turnover. People serious about data, but those that tend to buy business apps and do in-house development for custom apps only. (alternatively people like my employer though Im not always tempted to use the word normal to describe them).
Anyway I trust that this works well for Scott and he benefits from the change of emphasis. I hope that HTMLDB doesn’t suffer too much from his absence.
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foolish things
two daft things today,
1. I don’t have an iso utility that can extract files from an iso image. (long story – not looking for recommendations here; I just don’t have one). So that is fire up vmware, use the iso of the SQLServer CTP that was just released as the cd drive, then copy the contents of the virtual cd drive (which was a file on the host) back to the host so as I am ready to install this. roll on the day when the os can mount an iso image as a cd/dvd drive. (tomorrow its vs.net 2005 RC all 3.5gb. )
2. Show developer around HTMLDB 1.6 explain cool features but slightly shoot myself in the foot by saying that I should really wait for v2 due any day now. Get home discover that HTMLDB 2 is here already (linux is here as well.)
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Like watching a car crash
In which Burleson consulting employees (and a part owner) break their own guidelines in order to offer largely baseless attacks on fellow professionals.
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Home at last
Nope, not posts to forums from people who ban their employees from posting to forums. Not vendors explaining that ‘we never have this trouble with SQL server’, not designers^H^H^H architects saying that integrity will be handled by the n-tier xml based client, nope pretty much nothing can prevent my joy tonight.
16 years we’ve waited. 16 years of second – or to be honest more often than not 8th – best. Not Now.
At the end of any series though, there are champagne moments and reflections. Here are mine.
Champagne moments
Dodgy decisions
Leading Lights
Man of the Series.
No question for me. 40 wickets at under 20, 250 runs at 27. That innings of 90 that should, should have been a century. The fact that no-one, except just possibly Pietersen, had any clue about what was happening next. The man who very, very nearly won two test matches on his own. Shane Warne. Come back in 4 years mate – we’ll give you stick, but when you are gone we’ll tell our kids about the blonde magician. Its been an utter privilege to watch.