Blog Aggregator - Amardeep Sidhu

When something is slow, why do we always point to the database? A computer system is so much more than “the application” and “the database”. It’s networks, routers, disks, memory, array controllers, middle-tiers, JDBC Drivers, Operating Systems, and client versions (which, usually comes round to “It’s Oracle/MySQL, fix it”). Come to think of it, it’s pretty amazing that we get decent performance at all.

Everybody is guilty of it from the novice to the experience person who knows better. Heck, I am sometimes guilty of it myself.

I’ll get a call, “Application XYZ is slow, is the database OK?”

“Let me check.”

A couple minutes later I indicate everything is fine on my end. I hear three days later that “XYZ was slow because of the database”. Argh. Next time that person needs help tuning a query he’ll get pointed to the documentation for EXPLAIN PLAN.

Why do we always point to the database first? Is it because the database is usually the guilty party? Or do we point fingers at what we don’t understand?

I have had the chance to test Oracle 11g database (beta 5 at the moment).
I want to start a series of 10 posts here which give overviews over the (to my mind best) top new features in Oracle database 11g:

 I will first describe the new Features in CHANGE MANAGEMENT because I think that these are really revolutionary:
 1.  SQL […]

or at least what passes for it in my life…

Been an interesting few weeks. I’ve been doing the rounds of the Oracle bloging world and quite frankly: either the Usenet kranks have joined in force or the level of intelligence in the community has dropped markedly!

What passes for “Oracle blogging” nowadays is nothing short of blatant company-sponsored, ill-disguised, outright marketing. The

Got a spike in hits on the blog in the last couple of days. I dug through the hits and found that a lot of people were coming from SearchOracle.com. I followed the most frequent URL and discovered that my post on Multiple Listeners had been linked to an article by Bill Cullen.

Yesterday I was in Luzern at the Verkehrshaus where the celebration party for the 20th. aniversary of the foundation of the Swiss Oracle Usergroup SOUG.
A number of interesting speakers were scheduled for laudatio speeches such as Nenad Rozic, Sr. Director EMEA Server Technologies & Global DBA support. I had a very interesting chat with […]

Today I received this below mesage from Oracle University Switzerland
and I am happy to post it here just slightly adjusted:
Oracle University is pleased to bring you
Oracle Database 11g New Features with Lutz Hartmann - Oracle ACE
Oracle Database 11g: New Features Overview Seminar (1 day)

Date
Location
Price
Enrolment

27 August 2007
Baden
SFR 850
Enrol Now

29 August 2007
Digicomp Bern
SFR […]

On the last day of the Oracle 11g New Features pilot in San Francisco we all took a tour round the City in a very fancy car
I had always wanted to ride in a Stretch Limo 
   and it was lots of fun!
We went to the Golden Gate Bridge …to the Coit tower  from where you […]

Yesterday The Hackers’ Choice organization published a paper that shows how to break into an Oracle 10g database very easily.
And there is not only the paper, but “…THC further releases practical tools to sniff and crack the password of an oracle database within seconds…” all you need to know is how to use them.
[…]

 Again it is a greate course with Jean-Francois Verrier teaching. It must be very difficult to teach a course which has never been taught before by anybody at all.
In the pilot class for Oracle database 11g New Features for administrators in San Francisco there are instructors from all around the world who want to deliver the […]

I was asked recently in one of my seminars if it is possible to adjust the threshold value for optimizer statistics to be considered being stale in Oracle database 10g. 
 As you all know there is an auto task job which is automatically created with every Oracle 10g database called gather_stats_job which automatically collects statistics every […]