Amardeep Sidhu's Oracle blog

It has been almost an year since i posted something (useful) here. The last post was also a crappy one . Well, it all boils down to sheer laziness . Now, i think the time has come to be regular again. Here i am getting a good start talking about Sangam10, i attended last week. It was a great opportunity to meet so many fellow Oracle professionals and most awesomely to meet & see Jonathan Lewis talk about Performance & Tuning. As expected the whole experience was amazing. It was a 2 day event where Jonathan was delivering 2 half day seminars on SQL Tuning and there were other break out sessions as well. We had planned to go a day in advance so me, Aman, Ankit & Neeraj reached Hyderabad on 2nd Sep.

Jonathan’s presentations were simply amazing. His knowledge about how things work (and why they work this way not that) is simply awesome.  He is an inspiration for newbies like us and there was so much to learn from him. Few of the quick tips that i picked up from him:

1. Don’t believe what you read or hear. Make small test cases to test and confirm how things work & how they don’t. He said that he has around 2000 test cases on his laptop. Some of them ready to be fired on Oracle database 12g .
2. Always document your findings. At a later date you only won’t be able to remember that something that you already faced and solved something you are stuck in. If you document things properly, you would always remember a bit of it and you can search it in a minute.

Also i got to meet & attend presentation of good friend Francisco Munoz Alvarez. I have been in touch with him since more than 2 years but this was for the first time i was meeting him in person. Also his presentation on how to become a good DBA was really awesome. Enjoyed every bit of it.

Two of my colleagues Vivek Sharma and Rahul Dutta were also presenting, so got a chance to see their presentations too. Vivek talked about developing scalable applications and Rahul’s presentation was about developing a EBS reporting solution using Oracle streams.

I attended some part of Mark Rittman‘s session also. I am not much into data warehousing but Mark is such a respected name so wanted to be present in his session .

I also met and attended one of the presentation of Iggy Fernandez. He talked about 52 weeks in the life of a database. I couldn’t attend his other presentation on reading execution plans as Vivek was presnting in the same time slot.

Overall, it was an amazing experience and i am already looking forward to attending Sangam (or whatever it would be called ) 11 !

Read Aman’s post about Sangam 10.

On the wall just outside my office. Who says there is recession ?

Since long time i have been struggling to learn CSS and make my website look great. The efforts did succeed but not in a way i wanted. After playing with CSS for few months i finally switched to Joomla and yes, in a week my website looks pretty cool. CSS automated . Joomla installation is pretty next-next job. Then play around a bit and you are done. Next game is to choose a nice looking template according to your taste and addition of few extensions to make yours tasks easier. (WordPress & Joomla rock because of these free extensions). So after long time i feel satisfied with the way my website looks. Here are the screenshots of the old and present new look for archives

Joomla rocks !!!

Okay, so kids have stopped crying as they got some milk from their mommy: forums are better now (than when came back after an upgrade). There are reasons that it takes time for the things to be smooth. Fine. But what drives me mad is the way Oracle handled this and now ? The font size and those bloody bullets on left side which tell you if you have read the post before ? Please let me know if someone can interpret what those bullets tell and can read the forum without doing Ctrl + in Mozilla/Chrome and suffering from reading everything in large font size in IE 6 ?

Is Oracle a bunch of duffers ? Can’t they see these two simple things ? And i don’t think that these simple changes call for editing some code written in assembly language ?

Grrrrrrrrrrrrr………..

Last week i had a chance to conduct my life’s first interview. The guy was a DBA with 2 years of experience and it was supposed to be a telephonic call. I checked out his CV and wrote down around 8 questions on a paper, just to make sure that i myself don’t get confused during the interview  . So i called him in the evening and started with introduction and his present job profile. Then i started with the questions from the projects he had done. He was confident about the stuff he was handling and replied all the questions honestly, saying NO at points where he didn’t know or was not involved in something. One of such thing was testing the backups. He said there is no testing done as such.

In his CV he had written about Data Guard also. So i asked few data guard questions like what is the difference in working of physical and logical standby ? He was not aware about some of the data types not being supported in logical standby.

Overall he answered the questions pretty confidently and honestly. So at the end, i recommended his induction into the company

Happy Ending !

BTW from the first experience i can say that it feels good to be on the other side of table (or phone).