Few days back, I had to give Oracle DBA training to a group of about 20-25 semi-technical people (Semi-technical, because most of them were not really DBA kinda folks doing all the techie stuff with Oracle, but in-fact having learned some bits & bytes of Oracle sometime back and these days looking into application functionality from technical perspective). I, having just about 10 months of experience with DBA profile, had to cover, everything about Oracle starting from creating database and up to performance tuning 🙂 Its really an interesting job if the audience is good. But not an easy game. You have to know everything and have to be ready to answer people’s queries (some stupid & dumb questions also 🙂 I had to cover a total of about 350 slides in a day or less. So at times, really went fast and skipping some of things. It was a nice experience as a whole 🙂

& in the end when I finished it, was dead tired 🙁

Hats off to the trainers, who stand for the full day and that too for many days continuously 🙂

Sidhu

The day when Oracle 11g was made available for download on OTN, there was sort of, flood of posts in the Oracle blogsphere. Here is a quick recap of few of the posts (Whatsoever I could find through OraNA and my Netvibes)

Eddie Awad about 11g, I think he was the first one to post

Then Doug Burns here

Howard on installing 11g

Another interesting article from Howard

Tim Hall about 11g

Tim Hall on installing 11g

Then Laurent

An article on ADR by Virag Sharma on his blog

Jaffar about Active Standby database

A 11g PL/SQL article on AMIS blog

Well, if you don’t want to get into any hassles and just want to download Oracle 11g, you can get it here. (As of now its available for Linux x86 only).

Sidhu

The very first question that may come to your mind is: what the heck this “OC” is ? Well if PC stands for Personal Computer then OC stands for Office Computer 😉 The story behind all this is:

One of my friend (He is working in a non-IT company) called me and asked how to burn a PC so that it no more works 🙂 Why ? because the PC they are given is too slow & old and thats the only way they can get a new one. I thought for a while and 1 or 2 ideas came to my mind. But to dig into little more details I called my friend Vaibhav ( The guy I call to “discuss” and “know more about” all the techie things) He gave some really nice ideas. Combining all the thoughts, here is the summary of all the methods that you can use 😉

1. Water the motherboard: Add a bit of salt to water, fill a syringe and use it to spread water on the motherboard before booting. It will blow the motherboard.
2. Stop processor’s fan: One more thing put something in the processer’s fan to stop it so that processor gets heated and it stops 🙂 but here chances are more that the system will shutdown or restart.
3. Break pin(s) of processor: Another interesting and simple thing that you can do is, break one or more pins of processor and put it back in the slot.
4. Remove one or more ICs: Another thing that you can do is remove one or more ICs from the board. As the board is already so clumsy, nobody can see that anything has been removed from there.
5. Use Pencil: Use a carbon pencil and rub it on the golden plating of RAM slots, any ICs near CPU or BIOS. Its gonna spoil that 😉
6. Cut some wire: A very simple method you can use is that cut some wires or data cables in such a way that nobody can see it 😉

One update from comments posted by Vaibhav: Most of u might not know abt the voltage selector switch at the back of the SMPS in the CPU tower. It is there to select between 110V(american) and 230V(indian). The trick is to just switch it to 110V 🙂 The SMPS has no protection of over voltage at this high level and will burn instantly.

Advantages:
-No need to open PC
-No Smoke or sparks
-Nothing can be found on u if checked(like syringe, screw driver or wire cutter)
-Instant
-One Second Job
-Can be done again and again if system repaired

Disadvantages:
-Replacing SMPS makes the system operational

Well, few things you can try if you too have an old computer in the office. Best of OC Burning 😛

Sidhu

Well, a really old post on Google groups (uesnet:comp.databases.oracle.server). Someone posted a thread about Tom Kyte and then people responded with their thoughts (perfectly as expected). Read it here.

Sidhu