Happy Birthday Alan Turing

The father of modern Computer Science would be 94 today if he didn't commit suicide at 42.

My Favorite Metalink Articles

When you answer questions in public forums, you typically end up either the same question many times or pointing the poster to a particular slice of the documentation or a Metalink document. Some of the more frequently suggested documents and tools I use from Metalink:

Why is my index not used?
ORA-600/7445 Lookup Facility
Backup & Recovery FAQ
RMAN FAQ
Semaphors & Shared Memory Explained
Shared Memory
Kernal Parameters and how they relate to Oracle
Wait Event Description
How to deal with deadlocks (ORA-00060)
Connection Manager and Firewalls
Using truss
Locking and Latching FAQ
Critical Patches

Updated Links

With all the sheep moving to other pastures, I kinda let my links lapse over the last month or so. I think they're all updated to their current home. If your blog is on my blogroll and is out of date, please let me know and I'll update it.

Google Pagerank

OK, so I jumped on the bandwagon last week and added what I thought was the Google sponsered "Page Rank" on my blog. I checked today, and the icon didn't show up, but the link was still there. I clicked the link and "www.google-pagerank.net" now gets automatically forwarded to Google's main page.

So I searched for "google page rank" and there's a ton of sites that can display your Google Page rank. Perhaps the Google lawyers were working some overtime this weekend to get "www.google-pagerank.net" shutdown?

Shameless

As a devout follower of the Dizwell Principles, I gleefully added my google pagerank to the site after receving today's sermon.

Performancing

Ran across this blog editor while searching for flash-block.  Performancing is a browser based editor for posting to your blog.  The feature that I like is all your blogs are listed and you can choose which blog you post to without having to navigate blogger's menus.  I'll give it a try and see how it works day-to-day (Not that I've been posting that much lately...)

You believe this?

Look at this crap. 99% of my CPU resources are being sucked up by Firefox because of the stupid IBM ad on this web page. I go off that page, and poof, it's down to 8% or less. Thanks IBM.

Things I could live without knowing

Got directed to this from leahpeah.

Compatibilities of tar

Arrgh. More Linux/Solaris incompatibilities. Seems as though the -I flag (include files listed in a file) on Linux is not supported. In fact, it gives you a nice error message "Warning: the -I option is not supported; perhaps you meant -j or -T?". Looks like I'll be twiddling with my .profile in the next couple of days...

Update: My boss pointed out -T works with Solaris and Linux. Doh.

Are we too connected?

This has been a hectic few weeks.

Along with moving, I have two major projects at work that have absolute drop dead dates within a week of each other. During the move last weekend, I was without my cable modem for 43 hours, 21 minutes.

Of course, the two major projects at work still had to get worked on, so I succumbed to working over dialup. And not just any dialup, NetZero freebie dialup. Now I don't have anything against NetZero dialup; it's a great free service if you remember to click on the ads every 15 minutes or so. It's just when you're used to using a cable modem, dialup is quite painful.

Over the four days I was off, I made three calls, was paged twice, and responded to about 24 emails. As the weekend was winding down, I thought to myself, Are we too connected? You can call me at home. You can call me on my cell phone. You can page/text message me. You can email me at work. You can email me at home. If I'm not at home I can be at a hot-spot in 15 minutes to "dial in".

Is anything that urgent?

Hang in there

Been really busy with stuff at work that I can't blog about, so things have been pretty sparse lately. Also, my home office is in a shambles since moving day and I don't even have my computers hooked up yet. I've been jotting down ideas, so stay tuned...

Metalink Update - I'm In

OK, here's the key. Don't do what the emails say, but login with your OLD username and password and you will be prompted to change your userid to your email. You will then get an email with your new username/password at which point you can logout/login and you will be prompted to change the password.

Metalink Update

Oracle support sends me a message saying my TAR has been updated and to go to http://metalink.oracle.com to see the update. Sigh.

Learned from the analyst that their analysts and engineers don't use Metalink, but have a Client/Server GUI that they use...

Metalink Login

Oracle must have done a lot of testing of their Metalink conversion scheduled this past weekend, right? After all, I received no less than three emails outlining what was happening the weekend of May 19th. On Saturday, May 20th I decided to see if any work had been done on my TARs, so I decided to try and login. I tried several times and received a "page not found" every time so I decided they weren't done yet.

I went to metalink yesterday and the login page had changed, so I figured they were done, right? Tried logging in with my email and current password and received this lovely message:

Tried again, same thing. So I figured maybe I should change my password. I clicked on the "forgot password" link and in a couple minutes I had a new password. Tried that password and still no luck.

Now it's Monday morning and I've tried the old password, new password, and I even got another new password. Now I'm trying to login and my browser is just waiting for metalink.oracle.com.


Maybe they forgot to apply pre-requisite patch 1456677 to patch 18277266 which is specified as a prerequisite for 88277266. I supposed they've already tried logging a TAR, but I guess metalink was down.

Welcome to the customer's view of Oracle.

Update
Called Oracle Support, had to wait 33 minutes until I got to talk to a human. "Yes, we know metalink is down. There is no ETA at this point."

Thunderbird Address Book #2

This address book thing is killing me. I tried Beth's suggestion and it deleted the entry for that session, but when I started Thunderbird again, there it was. I also took Ian's suggestion and deleted all the duplicate contacts to no avail. Arrrrgh. Investigating alternative email/RSS readers now...

Typical Greenwich

It was raining on my way to work this morning. Not a driving rain, but heavy enough that the wipers were on. I was stopped at a red light and directly across the intersection from me was a new black Bently.

To my right was an old couple waiting to cross the street. It would be a coin flip whether they were around for the first world war or not. He was in his London Fog jacket and a hat complete with old time galoshes. She looked like she just got off a fishing boat with a yellow slicker and buckle up rubber boots. Both used canes to shuffle along, and he held out his arm for her to hold as they stood waiting. The crossing signal turned to "WALK" and they started their journey across the street.

On this particular corner, the crossing signal counts down to indicate how many seconds you have left. When the signal read 10, they were just in front of my car.

"They're never going to make it", I thought to myself.

Time expired and they just cleared my lane.

My light turned green and I since I was turning left, I had to wait for the Bently to come through anyway. The Bently starts coming through the intersection and stops short when he sees the old couple crossing the street. Then he throws his hands up in disgust and BLOWS THE HORN at them.

The couple stops for a short second, the old man shoots the Bently driver a cold look, and they continue on their way. The Bently driver's mother must be proud.

Thunderbird Address Book

I'm getting a little ticked off at Thunderbird 1.5.0.2 lately. Don't get me wrong, I think it's a great email client and RSS reader. However, I've been running into a particularly annoying issue that has me on the brink of scrapping it.

You see, I just can't delete an entry from my "Personal Address Book". I know, I know, that's a pretty minor detail to be tossing a great email client. I'm a big fan of letting Thunderbird search your local address books for the person you want to address the message to. That's well and good when each person only sends you email from one address, but in the real world people have multiple email addresses.

My problem is my boss sent me an email from his home account a couple weeks ago. I replied no problem and everything was cool. The next time I sent him a message, Thunderbird automatically picked up his home email address and sent it there.

"OK", I thought to myself, "I'll just delete his home email and Tbird won't pick it up anymore."

So I deleted all occurrances from my address books, re-checked that it wasn't in there anymore, sent a test email, and he got it no problem. Shutdown Thunderbird and went home.

The next day I sent him an email again. Thunderbird picked his home email again. WTF? I know I deleted it, but sure enough, his home email was back. I tried deleting again, exiting Tbird and it showed up again. This was driving me crazy. After twiddling with it on and off for about 2 hours, I gave up and unchecked Tools>Options>Addressing>Address Autocompletion>Local Address Books.

Now when I address a message, I either have to know the person's email address or choose it from the address book. Maybe I'm just being impatient and this is one of those "doh" moments...

Cost-Based Oracle Fundamentals

Been busy the last couple of weeks on the new house.

Even so, managed to get through my first pass of Cost-Based Oracle Fundamentals by Jonathan Lewis. I concentrated more on the concepts the author was trying to get across and less on the math of each operation. On the second go-round, I plan on doing the examples one by one and experimenting with some real-world data.

I didn't count, but I found myself saying "Ah-ha" several hundred times. Histograms, Ah-ha. Cardinality, Ah-ha.

There's a lot of hot air on the internet about Clustering Factor, but there is a whole chapter that sets you straight on the concept; both positives and negatives. The section on how reverse key indexes negatively can affect the Clustering Factor is really eye opening.

I personally got a lot out of Chapter 11, Nested Loops. Nested Loop joins are one of the more common access paths chosen and I thought I had a decent understanding of them. This chapter really filled in the gaps that were missing.

And a whole chapter on the 10053 event? Whoa. I'm sure there's a lot more to it, but now at least I have an idea of what's going on with the optimizer when I look at the trace file.

Lets just say the differences Jonathan points out between 9i and 10g scare me. Big time. A lot of differences are pointed out throughout the book, but there's going to be a ton of testing when 10g comes to town.

Cost-Based Oracle Fundamentals is definitely a recommended read.

What's up with Metalink?

REAL SLOW today. Maybe they upgraded to Oracle Linux?

Year Six

Disclaimer:
I have the unfortunate luck of being hired on the same date that Tom Kyte started his blog. Honestly, I've been working on this a couple days so I'm posting it anyway, even if you think I am a copycat.

Six years ago today I started with my current company. This is the longest I've ever had the same title, although my responsibilities have changed over the years. It's also the most time I've spent at the same place.

It was the tail end of the dotCom boom and I had over 40 interviews with companies in the Tri-State area. Most of them didn't pan out, but when it came time to choose, I had three offers to consider. When I accepted this job, I took a chance because I liked the people but didn't think they had enough for me to do. I was the sole DBA for one production database that ran on an Ultra 2 (2 CPUs, 54G of disk, 512M). The telecom company I came from had three E5500's (six CPUs, 2G RAM, 600G disk). In fact, they had more than enough for me to do.

My first project at the new company was to move approximately half of the schemas in the production db to a new server. By the end of the first year, I was managing four db servers. Today, my team of three manages about a dozen db servers and almost two dozen instances. We've gone from a little six-pack of disks to a 3+TB SAN.

My second project was to setup a backup & recovery plan. Good thing, too, because about 6 months later we did a full recovery of one of our major production systems. Fortunately, we only had 3 un-planned recoveries until the blackout in August 2003. Recovered 12 databases that night.

Now MySQL and Linux are at the forefront of of my knowlege adventure. Maybe six years from now our MySQL databases will outnumber the Oracle ones...