Blog Aggregator - Amardeep Sidhu

I’ll provide you with a quick preview of the last few remaining blogs on this topic. I’ll be taking a one-week vacation and I’ll see you back here in two weeks!

Ever look at a screen’s output and get that puckered feeling in the pit of your stomach? If you have been working in this profession for any amount of time, you know the feeling I’m talking about. The feeling that makes you think you would rather be living in Montana making woodcarvings at a roadside stand than being a DBA. I’ll be taking a somewhat lighthearted look at the perils of our profession and discuss ways to reduce problem occurrences.

If you’re still using any of the default Oracle username/passwords on any of your databases, go change it now.

I could blog about this for 1-2 pages, but for two reasons:
1. I think it is an obvious (but oft-neglected) thing to do, and
2. You can use the time you would have spent reading my persuasive arguments to actually go change your passwords.

So go do it now.

What is a number? The definition is one of the longest I’ve seen, but generally it refers to a quantity (or sum, total, count) of units. Quantities can be subjected to all sorts of calculations, such as addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.

Sometimes numbers are used for ordering, as well. So it makes sense to compare one number to another, not only as being greater or lesser

The next few blogs in this series provide readers with miscellaneous hints and tips to enhance their skill sets and improve their ability to provide quality support to their customers. In my next blog, we’ll look at “Paranoid DBA” best practices.

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

These are the sessions I’m planning on attending at this year’s UKOUG conference:
08:00 - 17:45 Registration Open
09:15 - 09:30 Introduction by Ronan Miles, UKOUG Chairman
09:30 - 10:30 Opening Technical Keynote: “What’s Coming Next?” by Tom Kyte, Oracle
10:30 - 11:00 Coffee Break
11:00 - 12:00 Accountability for System Performance (introducing Six Sigma quality in Oracle

Ever fumble around at 2 AM looking for that SQL statement you wrote a while back? You know, that one special script that will give you just the information you need to solve the problem and go back to bed? I must admit, I have done my fair share of moonlight script hunting. This blog will provide you with a few recommendations on naming convention best practices.

There are two broad categories of reasons why PL/SQL programmers wouldn’t want others to read their code:

Reason #1 Protection
The programmers wish to protect their code from theft, misuse or alteration (among other things).

Reason #2 Malicious Reasons
The code is meant to do harm, or may have some potentially dangerous errors they wish to cover up.

I don’t believe in hidden code, because open