Stephen Booth

Not Oracle but since we're having to multi-platform these days might be relevant to some. When you install SQL*Server Management Studio on 64 bit windows the Management Studio (SSMS, equivalent of SQL*Plus) is 64 bit but it installs the 32 bit version of Import Export Wizard (SSIS).  This is fine if you have the 32 bit version of Office installed or only import and export CSV or other Stephen Boothhttps://plus.google.com/107526053475064059763noreply@blogger.com0

On 20th May 2014 Oracle Midlands User Group will be hosting a couple of talks by Christian Antognini.  For full details see: http://oraclemidlands.com/ The first talk covers adaptive query optimisation in Oracle 12c and how it can be used to ensure that the query optimiser generates better plans more often.  The second talk delves into the internals of row chaining and migration. The venue is: Stephen Boothhttps://plus.google.com/107526053475064059763noreply@blogger.com0

The last few months I've been having to work with Microsoft SQL*Server 2008 R2 for a project I'm on.  I'm not finding it fun for a variety of reasons, including that it doesn't seem as capable as I recall Oracle being and that the source data I'm having to work with is very, very dirty. One of the complicating factors is often there will be exactly, or almost exactly, duplicate rows when each Stephen Boothhttps://plus.google.com/107526053475064059763noreply@blogger.com0

Is touch screen really expensive to do or something. I've been tossing around the idea of getting a tablet PC to stick OneNote on to use for note taking, reading documents and some web surfing (including Gmail) via WiFi. I'm having to attend a lot of meetings/briefings where the ability to take notes and link them to documents and web pages would be incredibly useful.Looking around the web the Stephen Boothhttps://plus.google.com/107526053475064059763noreply@blogger.com0

Interesting article on ComputerWeekly.com about how Oracle are looking to secure the future of Sparc, Solaris and Sun Hardware. They don't mention it but I wouldn't be surprised if we see 'Database as an Appliance' coming soon with Oracle Database running on Sun Hardware with management taken out of the hands of the local DBA and automated or made accessible only to Oracle themselves. This Stephen Boothhttps://plus.google.com/107526053475064059763noreply@blogger.com1

Oracle announced today that they will be buying Sun Microsystems. Their plan is to produce 'pre-integrated' systems where everything from the bare metal, silicon and spinning rust up to the application front end is from themselves. The idea is that customers will save money on systems integration costs but reliability will go up.Stephen Boothhttps://plus.google.com/107526053475064059763noreply@blogger.com1

Apparently today is Ada Lovelace Day. Ada Lovelace (aka Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace) is widely recognised as the first computer programmer. The daughter of Lord Byron, she was encouraged away from her father's dissolute lifestyle by her mother, who encouraged her interest in mathematics. Ada excelled at mathematics and became a friend for Charles Babbage.When Babbage created his Stephen Boothhttps://plus.google.com/107526053475064059763noreply@blogger.com0

As I'm now beginning to work on SAP I've started a blog about it, mostly just somewhere to make notes about interesting/useful things I come across. If it also helps anyone else then great but if it doesn't then no worries.One of the things I have noticed, comparing Oracle with SAP, is that whilst for Oracle you can find online free resources at pretty much any level (both official Oracle sites Stephen Boothhttps://plus.google.com/107526053475064059763noreply@blogger.com1

Note an Oracle post, but I know a lot of DBAs and into tech as well.Yesterday I found my old Psion3 mx (which I used before having to switch to Palm handhelds due to work). I had a play and was reminded why I liked it so much. The key advantage it had, and still has over many more modern devices, is the size. It's small enough to fit in a suit jacket or coat pocket whilst being large enough toStephen Boothhttps://plus.google.com/107526053475064059763noreply@blogger.com0

We're looking at implementing Dataguard as part of an implementation of Documentum (a document management system from EMC) and I have been asked to look at producing documentation and scripts for non-DBA users to use during a failover. The actual failover of the database itself will be handled by our DBAs, this is for the sys admins, network admins, application admins &c who may need to do Stephen Boothhttps://plus.google.com/107526053475064059763noreply@blogger.com1

This just came up on the mailing list for my local Linux Users Group following last night's meeting (which I didn't attend), the original mail and my response is below:> In the pub, there was an interesting conversation going on regarding> validation of data in databases.>> Excuse the omissions, as I said, it was overheard>> Someone brought up the point that in databaseX If say, you have a> Stephen Boothhttps://plus.google.com/107526053475064059763noreply@blogger.com2

This entry is partly an aide memoire for me, partly to try to get something that has been keeping me awake for the past hour or so out of my brain so I can sleep and partly in the hope that someone can suggest a way forward.A quick bit of background. Until April 06 most of our major systems were looked after by an external Faccilities Management company. In April 06 IT was kind of outsourced toStephen Boothhttps://plus.google.com/107526053475064059763noreply@blogger.com7

We have a situation where we need to rationalise the range of installed Oracle clients (i.e. the bit that sits between the app and the network stack) we have installed. We currently have versions from 7.x through to 10.2 installed accross approximately 12,000 desktops (accross various locations in an area of around 26 square miles) running various apps on Windows versions from NT4 to XP (mostly Stephen Boothhttps://plus.google.com/107526053475064059763noreply@blogger.com1

We have a NetApp FAS filer attached via Gigabit Ethernet to a Sun V440 running Oracle databases the files for which are stored on the filer The NetApp volume is mounted under NFS version 3 at $ORACLE_BASE/oradata. Under that directory are 7 directories .snapshot, dctm, dchr, dctm_backup, dchr_backup, dctm_nobackup, dchr_nobackup. .snapshot is where the NetApp filer stores snapshots of the Stephen Boothhttps://plus.google.com/107526053475064059763noreply@blogger.com1

I was just looking at my stat counter analysis for this blog, it's usually a good way to find out if anyone has linked to me. From the results it looks like the vast majority of people (around 97%) find this blog through a search engine, virtually all (over 99%) through Google. Most common search strings are or include "ORA-07445", "opmnctl failed to start process" and "ORA-01031".Stephen Boothhttps://plus.google.com/107526053475064059763noreply@blogger.com0

During his presentation on "Inside RAC" Julian Dyke appeared to suffer laptop difficulties so asked for 4 volunteers to assist in a demonstration. Being the helpful soul (i.e. idiot) that I am, I volunteered. Mr Dyke did seem remarkably wellprepared in terms of props, almost as if he had been expecting his laptop to have problems :-)!Photographic evidence (courtesy of Connor McDonald) can be Stephen Boothhttps://plus.google.com/107526053475064059763noreply@blogger.com1

A question just appeared on the Oracle-L mailing list about whether there are any issues with using histograms. I've seen a number of presentations over the last couple of years that have warned about issues where you have histograms on highly skewed data and use bind variable (or have cursor_sharing=force, which synthesises bind variable from literals in queries), so I responded:On 19/11/06, A Stephen Boothhttps://plus.google.com/107526053475064059763noreply@blogger.com0

Today was the first day of the United Kingdom Oracle User Group 2006 conference. The day itself was pretty good, lots of good talks (more on that later), but I ran into a couple of issues in the evening. The first issue was when I went into the Handmake Hamburger just accross the canal from the ICC, I was alone and the waitress/Maitre d' said they didn't have any free tables suitable for one Stephen Boothhttps://plus.google.com/107526053475064059763noreply@blogger.com0

I've just gotten the verbal OK from my line manager to attend the Management and Infrastructure SIG meeting on 4th October. Most of the opresentations look like they will be both interesting and useful. My employer is looking to introduce ITIL so the "Can it help me? What are the pitfalls?" presentation could be useful, similarly the DBA/Database ratio presentation is highly relevant to my Stephen Boothhttps://plus.google.com/107526053475064059763noreply@blogger.com0

These are the sessions I'm planning on attending at this year's UKOUG conference:08:00 - 17:45 Registration Open09:15 - 09:30 Introduction by Ronan Miles, UKOUG Chairman 09:30 - 10:30 Opening Technical Keynote: "What's Coming Next?" by Tom Kyte, Oracle10:30 - 11:00 Coffee Break11:00 - 12:00 Accountability for System Performance (introducing Six Sigma quality in Oracle software Stephen Boothhttps://plus.google.com/107526053475064059763noreply@blogger.com0