Archive for March, 2011
More on oracle.com
This is just a quick update (basically agreeing with Robin Moffat in the comments here and Dom Brooks here ).
One of the blogs I follow is that of the optimizer team. . They’ve recently just released quick update because their excellent white papers have moved – and er there’s no redirection in place.
Oracle, this kind of stuff sucks. Yes, there will be technical reasons behind it, but really for a technology company to be moving stuff around unannounced (and just leaving a 404 in place) isn’t good enough.
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oracle.com inaccessible
Well not really, but it is for me at the moment.
A while back I could not log onto the oracle.com website with my personal account details. I kept getting invalid/username password. I clicked the link to reset my password and got a new password. This also did not work, so I tried my work account. This too did not work. At this point I assumed that the authentication service was down (but sadly that the password reset service was up! ). I now had a new random password and sure enough the next day the password worked. I chose a new password.
I have of course now forgotten the new password, so couldn’t log on. So today I went to the password reset apex app. This is up, but not apparently processing requests. There is however an account help button at the front that takes me to an old fashioned web form where I can say what my issue is, where I encountered it and so on. I do this, press submit and … 404!
the moral of the story. Oracle.com can have parts of its authentication infrastructure up and parts down at any given time and navigating it can be “interesting”. ah well.
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Distinctly Odd (Update)
Greg Rahn points out that the improved NDV estimation arrives in 11.1 not 11.2 (which my article distinctly odd implies) see http://structureddata.org/2007/09/17/oracle-11g-enhancements-to-dbms_stats/ for more on this.
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Curiouser and Curiouser
It looks like England are going out of their way to make this World Cup interesting, but following them maddening. That ridiculously laboured effort in Nagpur followed by a stunning tie against one of the best two sides in the world before succumbing extremely poorly to the excellent Irish. Yesterday what do we get, a capitulation to (IMO) the best ODI side in the world, followed by an outstanding bowling and fielding performance. Meanwhile on Friday we learn that KP will have hernia surgery after the world cup only for him to bowl 8 overs yesterday and put himself out for the rest of the tournament. It’s all completely bonkers and utterly enthralling, even the PCB could learn inconsistency from this particular English side.
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Intellisense
Just a quick note (because as a smartphone user this sort of thing bothers me a *lot*) to point out that today’s XKCD has an excellent example of how if you are going to anticipate your application’s client requests in some form of intelligent response, you really need to get it right so as not to annoy the user even more.
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St Paddy’s Day starts early
What an amazing day, What an amazing innings, what an awful charity hairdo. Well done Kevin O’Brien, Alex Cusak and John Mooney. Legends and well worth your Guinness tonight.
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Testing, Testing, 123
This is the second post in a row inspired by a comment on Twitter. The tweet that inspired this is here. The author was expressing her frustration at test hardware that did not reflect the production system.
This approach was recently well illustrated on the BBC Top Gear show as you can see in the excerpt below.
In the case of cars it is rather obvious that substituting a 56bhp, 1 litre 20 year old cheap car for a 512hp, 6.75 litre v8 supercar costing $285,000 is somewhat stupid – hence the comedy value of the clip. In the case of software however we often make similarly stupid decisions. So for example a commodity 2 processor server offers not only different horsepower, but different parallel execution options to a 4 node quad cpu RAC setup. Oracle 11.2.0.2 on Linux is not the same piece of software as Oracle 11.1.0.7 on AIX. A table with 1024 partitions and 100 million rows may well behave differently to an unpartitioned table with 1 million rows.
For straightforward “does this piece of code actually run” testing economizing on test kit and software may be perfectly adequate. For performance testing , it’s the Clarkson approach.