What’s a good way to learn some Oracle internals every day?

October 26, 2009 By 13 Comments

Sometimes when an attendee describes me some totally weird problem during a seminar, I am immediately able to answer something like “Hey this looks like a bug related to this Oracle configuration and can be influenced by xyz”.

And then people ask me “How the hell do you know all this stuff?”

Well, I haven’t been bitten by all of these bugs myself, but I have been doing something for many years, almost every day… reading my email!

Oh, and additionally I have configured Metalink to send me daily updates about new/updated notes, forum articles and… bug descriptions!

The last part is very important. Bug descriptions tell you something about new bugs found (and old bugs rediscovered) and sometimes their details tell you an interesting piece or two about Oracle internals related to them.

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Filed Under: Cool stuff, Oracle, Productivity Tagged With: , , ,

New year and some news…

January 5, 2009 By 8 Comments

First, Happy New Year to you all!

This year I promise to organize my blog a little better, to have some index of my articles, scripts etc :)

Here are the news…

I’ve moved my blog…

In December, when visiting Shanghai, I noticed that my blog was not accessible from there. Apparently the state firewall blocks all access to wordpress.com IPs.

So I have moved my blog to a virtual private server, off wordpress.com – my blog should be accessible from China now as well.

My Advanced Oracle Troubleshooting Seminars in year 2009

If you like the contents of my blog or conference presentations, you’ll sure like my 2-day seminar!

 

Here are the dates and links for more info:

3-4. February – NYOUG @ New York City – http://www.nyoug.org/etc/training/htm/NYOUG_Training_Session.htm

NB! As this is my first public seminar in US, you’ll be able to attend it for a very very good price! And the early bird registration (which gives you even better price) is open until end of today! More seminars in other US cities are planned for 2nd half of 2009.

2-3. April – Miracle @ Netherlands – http://www.miraclebv.nl/

Probably happens in Utrecht, I’ll keep you updated if it changes.

13-14. April – Oracle @ Singapore – http://www.oracle.com/education/apac/sg_tanel_poder.html

16-17. April – Oracle @ Sydney – http://www.oracle.com/education/apac/au_tanel_poder.html

20-21. April – Oracle @ Melbourne – http://www.oracle.com/education/apac/au_tanel_poder.html

23-24. April Oracle @ Auckland – http://www.oracle.com/education/apac/nz_tanel_poder.html

27-28. April – PiSec Ltd @ Edinburgh – http://www.pisec.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=6&Itemid=12

11-12. May – Oracle @ Spain – http://education.oracle.com/pls/web_prod-plq-dad/show_desc.redirect?dc=D70365_1060245&p_org_id=51&lang=E&source_call=

18-19. May – Miracle @ Denmark – http://www.miracleas.dk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=100:advanced-oracle-troubleshooting&catid=19:info&Itemid=71

 

Note that the Advanced Oracle Troubleshooting seminar is meant mainly for experienced DBAs and performance engineers as I go very deep in Oracle internals and OS/hardware details.

See more details about my seminar here

Conferences in 2009

11-12. February – RMOUG Conference @ Denver, Colorado

I will be delivering two presentations about advanced Oracle troubleshooting, tuning and internals:

8-12. March – Hotsos Symposium @ Dallas, Texas

I will be delivering two presentations:

As the second title says, I don’t use any slides at that presentation, I will just demo some of the scripts and tools I use every day plus few case studies. It will be fun!

Also, I look forward attending the Training Day by Jonathan Lewis on Oracle troubleshooting, on last day of the Symposium.

Filed Under: Oracle, Productivity Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Updated links

November 3, 2008 By 3 Comments

If you haven’t seen Dan Morgan’s Oracle library yet at http://www.psoug.org/library.html then now it’s time to do so!

I think what he’s done is awesome and I use his library almost every day when I don’t remember some syntax off the top of my head. I normally just google for keywords like “create hash cluster psoug” so I get the wanted page first in search results.

I’ve added the link into my blogroll.

Filed Under: Blogroll, Cool stuff, Oracle, Productivity Tagged With: ,

A non-Oracle post: productivity and online note keeping with n.otepad.com

August 27, 2008 By 37 Comments

I haven’t written a non-Oracle post into my blog yet, so here’s one for you :)

I recently developed a little web service with a friend. Shortly, check out http://n.otepad.com and any feedback is appreciated (especially about the parts which suck, so we could improve those :)

The longer story is that for years I used to have a notes.txt file on my Windows desktop (or Linux desktop, whatever I happened to use at that time) for writing down my notes, addresses, code snippets, URLs etc etc. I created a keyboard shortcut CTRL+ALT+N for my notes file, so I could easily open up the file without needing to navigate around with mouse or switching between applications. I could open the file and search its contents in matter of 2-3 seconds.

Then this notes file got too big, Windows XP’s notepad.exe started getting slow when I had more than 10000 lines of text in the file. So I split my notes up to notes.txt, oracle.txt, unix.txt, etc. Each had a different keyboard shortcut, like CTRL+ALT+O for Oracle stuff (damn, I just realized this post is loosely related to Oracle :)

Anyway, the obvious problem which came from that split was that often I didn’t remember into which note file I had put a particular note (e.g. some Unix script for Oracle could have been in Unix file or Oracle file). So I ended up looking through multiple files, getting frustrated and sometimes giving up.

Oh, did I mention that I also used to send emails with notes to myself, just to keep them (or maybe deal with them later). And then I went to client’s office and realized I couldn’t access any webmail through their proxies, so had to rewrite couple of scripts from scratch.

I guess you get the picture. Finding my old notes got ineffective, time consuming (and lame!). I wanted to find my notes in matter of couple seconds, not give up after minutes.

So we decided to write a solution for ourselves with a friend.

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Filed Under: Cool stuff, Productivity Tagged With:
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