Kerry Osborne's Oracle Blog

Well our new Exadata showed up this week. We had a pretty nice lab environment already. A bunch of Dell’s, some IBM’s, several Sun’s. We have a couple of EMC Sans as well (we actually threw away a whole EMC rack to make room for the Exadata). And of course we have every version of Oracle from 8i to 11gR2. It’s a good learning environment. It also let’s us try things when clients have a specific set of versions that we want to mimic. So now we have an Exadata V2 as well. We’ve had the delivery date on the calendar for several weeks. For some reason it reminded of the Weird Al Yankovik song Weasel Stomping Day.

It’s probably a sad reflection on how geeky we are that everyone is running around all excited like it’s Christmas or something.

Here’s a few pictures:

It’s a really fast machine by the way. In fact, we had trouble keeping up with it from the moment we got it off the truck.

Really fast, and slippery. Well in a couple of days we can actually turn it on (we’re supposed to let it acclimate to our environment). On Friday afternoon we’re going to have a happy hour to celebrate our newest edition. Wade calls it a sip and see. We’ll probably take a few pictures of ourselves with the little bundle of joy and sing a chorus of a festive Weird Al song, or maybe two. Come on by if you’re in the neighborhood!

I went to the Dallas 100 awards banquet last night at the Morton Meyerson Symphony Center. The Dallas 100 is an annual award for the fastest growing privately held companies that are based in the Dallas / Fort Worth area. Enkitec was number 81 this year – not that great, but still not too bad considering the state of the economy over the last couple of years (we were 42nd last year by the way).

Sam Wyly was the guest speaker at the presentation. He didn’t actually give a speech, but rather gave an interview which was interesting. He’s best known as the founder of Michael’s Stores which sold for around $4,000,000,000 a few years back.

As usual, there was a dinner after the presentation. And as usual it was some kind of meat with asparagus. I guess asparagus must be one of those things that can be cooked a little bit ahead of time or kept warm without too much trouble because it seems to be standard fare at these types of events. Anyway, it’s always nice to have a dinner with asparagus because you get reminded of it the next morning. I won’t go into the details here but if you’re interested I highly recommend this article on the Discovery web site. Whew!

I am constantly amazed by how people, myself included, occasionally over exaggerate. It’s pretty common in normal speech but it seems to be almost required in marketing material. Words like Greatest, Biggest, Most Effective, Fastest, Fluffiest, Zestiest, etc… I sometimes wonder how people come up with this stuff. For example, I ran across this video on utube:

Best Guitar Improvisation Ever

Entertaining no doubt, but “Best Guitar Improvisation Ever”???

Who voted on that? Were professionals allowed to compete, like say Mark Knopfler, Eric Clapton, Slash, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Carlos Santana, Buckethead, Jeff Beck, Peter Frampton, Eddie Van Halen, Jimi Hendrix, Roy Clark, Django Reinhardt, Chet Atkins, B.B. King, Jimmy Page, Andres Segovia,  …  ? (sorry if I left off you’re favorite, but you get the idea)

Some of it is shameless self promotion, but I blame most of this stuff on marketing guys. I don’t hold it against them, they have to make a living too. But they do a couple of things that amuse me.

1. They make the previously mentioned exaggerated claims.
2. They make up official sounding statistics to support their exaggerated claims.
3. They write their own quotes (and attribute them to people that they wish had said them).
4. They are obsessed with “look and feel” stuff (“It’s more important to look good, than to feel good”).

Let’s begin with bullet number one (exaggerated claims):

Here’s a couple of outrageous claims I ran across (names altered or withheld to protect the guilty).

• “Joe and Bill are recognized as the two best-selling Oracle Authors in the world.  With combined authorship of over 25 books, Joe & Bill are the two most respected Oracle authorities on the planet.  For the first time ever, Joe & Bill combine their talents in this exceptional handbook.”

• Did you know that there’s a way to burn 3 to 15 pounds of fat PERMANENTLY and SAFELY . . . WHILE YOU SLEEP?! 100% Guaranteed!

• “Because you haven’t just found people who know a little bit about what you’re going through – you’ve found the undisputed heavyweight Oracle experts.”

That last one was bad enough without emphasizing the outrageous claim by using a bold font. And just to show I’m not playing favorites, that one is from the web site of the company I work for!

Continue reading ‘Worlds Greatest Guitarist’ »

I read in the Fort Worth Star Telegram this morning that the Texas legislature had passed a law (Texas House Bill 171) which requires school administrators to use common sense. I guess there has been a problem with this in the past (actually the bill explicitly states that there has been a problem – “School administrators are allowed to consider mitigating factors but sometimes choose not to exercise common sense.”). At issue was strict “no tolerance” policies in some school districts whereby kids were getting sent to alternative schools for infractions as absurd as leaving a baseball bat in the car, leaving fishing tackle (including a knife) in the car, forgetting to take a pocket knife out of a pocket, getting beat up (that’s right – both participants in a fight get the same punishment).

Oddly enough, no one voted against this bill. How could you vote against “common sense”. Can’t you just see the negative political ad next election …

You know the unflattering black and white images, with the voice over saying something like:  “My illustrious opponent voted against Common Sense. Surely you don’t want to elect someone who doesn’t even believe in Common Sense!” …

During dinner, my daughter asked me what I was going to do at work tomorrow. I told her I was going to try to use common sense, even though it wasn’t required by law in my profession. At least it doesn’t yet… But imagine if we could just get a few more organizations in a few more states to start taking this idea seriously. Just imagine what could happen. Reminds me of that bit from Arlo Guthrie’s song – Alice’s Restaurant:

“… And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day,I said fifty people a day walking in singin a bar of Alice’s Restaurant and walking out. And friends they may think it’s a movement. …”

(by the way, if you’ve never heard “Alice’s Restaurant” you should go buy it from iTunes right now – I mean right now – don’t even finish reading this – do it now!)

Anyway, this common sense thing sounds like a great idea that could really catch on. I can think of a few organizations where common sense could really be valuable (a lot of them are in Washington). Although I’m not sure how they would enforce it… But that’s a job for another day.

Recently I’ve been thinking about how often we DON’T fix problems. I mean, we usually make the situation better and often in very short order. But a lot of the time we don’t really fix “the problem”. We just do something to cover it up, or make it less painful. I call it putting Band-Aids on the problem.

The Band-Aid metaphor works on several levels.

1. Band-Aids don’t actually fix the problem, they just cover it up.
2. They aren’t meant to be permanent.
3. And they don’t keep you from stabbing yourself again in another spot.
4. But they do make it less painful.
5. And they keep out germs so they keep some problems from getting worse.
6. And they are cheap (all those boxes in the picture cost less than $20 combined).

There are all kinds of special purpose Band-Aids for special applications. Like the ones that have antibiotics, butterfly bandages for closing big cuts, etc… When it comes to Oracle, my personal favorite Band-Aid is memory. Additional memory covers up a lot of sins. One of the primary design goals of the original Oracle database was to eliminate disk access. This remains a key objective today. You can think of the database as a very sophisticated disk cache. The goal for a lot of systems is to never do real time disk access (with the exception of commit processing). So it stands to reason that memory is a key component (maybe “the” key component) of most Oracle systems. And it’s relatively cheap. There is often a surplus of memory already installed that is just not being used as effectively as it could be. But even if it’s necessary to add an additional memory module to a server, this option is generally very inexpensive when compared to other potential “hardware upgrades”.

Don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of valid reasons for using Band-Aids with Oracle. I know some people that seem adamantly against applying short term fixes instead of addressing the underlying problem. But it seems to me that in certain circumstances (which seem to occur fairly often actually) Oracle Band-Aids are an appropriate response. A few of my favorites reasons for applying them are:

1. Buying time to figure out what’s really going on and how to fix it
2. Buying time until the system is decommissioned or a new version is rolled out
3. Buying time until the developers can get the real fix through change control (and as we all know, sometimes this takes a while)
4. Just decreasing the pain because it’s a packaged app that we can’t change

I do think we should be vigilant about not overdoing it though. Otherwise our databases end up like the guy in the picture below. Pretty messy and sometimes hard to even figure out what the original intent was.

Along the same lines, keep in mind that Band-Aids often leave a lot of left over trash:

Anyway, that’s my rambling for today.  Just for fun, here are a few more pictures of some unusual Band-Aids.

Feel free to let me know what you think about applying Band-Aids to Oracle systems. And what your favorite (or least favorite) Oracle Band-Aids are.