Wednesday, February 21, 2007

Three cheers...

Three cheers for Frances Allen, the winner of the Turing Award for 2007!

Thursday, February 15, 2007

Dead Air

Sorry for the dead air recently. When I'm on a database project, I'll post regularly on things I find or other tidbits of information I encounter during the project. Even when I'm working on a MySQL project, I'll usually have something to say about what's going on or what I'm learning.

But lately, I've been on an Oracle Applications project. There's two reasons I don't like to talk about Oracle Applications projects. First, it's strategic to the company and I don't really want to blog about company specific things. Second, I hate dealing with it. The patches are unbelievable, the processes on Metalink rarely work out of the box, and the product is so overly complex that it's extremely difficult to administer. It's just a very laborious process that I dread every time I start something new. And there's really nothing exciting about it. Except the day after I upgraded to 11.5.9, 11.5.10 came out.

So stick with me. Next up is some MySQL stuff and hopefully some 10g findings.

Tuesday, February 06, 2007

10195 event, epilogue

You may recall my recent issues with Oracle and predicate generation, here, here, here, and here.

We set the 10195 event for the entire instance in once case to see if it would fix our general problem without breaking everything else. Alas, the 10195 event stopped generating predicates, but changed execution plans on other queries as well. We confirmed this by turning the 10195 event off at the session level and re-executing (and reparsing) the query. As a general observation, the 10195 had a tendency to favor hash joins over everything else. Now we get to decide what is more important; performance or data integrity.

Monday, February 05, 2007

Upgrading to 10.2.0.3

Be advised that if you're upgrading to 64-bit 10.2.0.3 from a database that was ever a 32-bit db, you should read Metalink Note 412271.1. Otherwise, you'll be hit with:

ORA-00600: internal error code, arguments: [22635], [], [], [], [], [], [], []
ORA-06512: at "SYS.UPGRADE_SYSTEM_TYPES_FROM_920", line1

And yes, OracleDoc, this was in test.