Stephen's Oracle Blog

A few days ago I brought up some problems I've found with IT application training and trainers in my entry " (Almost) All Users Are Idiots ". Following a comment from Doug Burns I read an entry in his blog entitled " In Praise of Good Trainers ". Doug (an excellent trainer himself, in my opinion based on having attended two courses taught by him) has layed out a pretty much definitive description of what makes a good Oracle DBA trainer, although I'm sure the same principles could be applied to any subject area. A section of the entry that particularly resonates is near the end where Doug describes three particular aspects of trainers who aren't so good, and who's work he does not respect: Won't divert from the course materials; Tends not to know the answers to questions and may make up answers to hide this; Tends to demean or belittle students. I've had a few trainers that hit one, two or all three of those. I'd perhaps edit the firs...

Project Raptor has escaped (software isn't released, it just sometimes escapes). I downloaded it at work and had a quick play. Overall I liked it a lot. People used to products like TOAD won't see much new. The biggest advantage I've seen is that you don't seem to need any extra Oracle software installed. Just copy the software on to the machine, enter the IP address, the port and the SID/Service Name and you've got a connection. Of course, the other big advantage is that it's free. There's been some interesting discussion of Raptor over on Tom Kyte's blog . I agree that it's probably not for the hardcore DBA, not as a primary tool anyway. Where I can see me probably using it is as something I can give to the non-DBAs who happen to do some DB management (we have a lot of them where I work). I'll have to investigate it further to make sure that it's reasonably safe to let them use it though. I haven't had a chance to read much of the...

The organisation I work for has a large number of sites (literaly hundreds) all connected via a WAN. Whilst for some applications everyone who uses that app are in the same office (or two or three offices) for others the users are widely disperesed, so making maintenence when a database changes name or moves to a different machine very difficult and time consuming. In one case we have a thick client application (i.e. there's a connection directly from the desktop to the database, not going through an application server) where the database is due to move in the near future, this application is used by hundreds of users accross almost as many sites. I was asked to come up with a list of options for providing a centrally administered naming service. One key piece of information is that in this organisation most applications (and their databases) are managed by a departmental support team, hence there is currently no central repository of database names. Oracle Names Server Pros Or...

I just thought I'd mention that I've added a bunch more Oracle related blogs to the list down the right hand side of the page. I recommend that you give them a read. If you know of any others I should be reading (if only I had the time to read more) then feel free to comment here.

No, I haven't turned into BOFH . A common comment I've heard in every IT department I've worked in has been about the idiocy of users, or how one particular user has done something really stupid, because they don't understand IT. But why should they? They're users, they do a job which isn't IT based but just happens to use IT. They're finance people, or HR people or social services people, or planning people, or something else people. They have knowledge and skills (we hope) in other areas, areas that we as IT people almost certainly don't have. Why should they know how the network works? Why should they know how the application they're using works under the hood? Why should they know how the database, the application they use connects to, works? There are a couple of groups I do have a problem with the idiocy (although idiocy might be too strong a word) of, IT (especially application) trainers and IT administrators. An example of why can be s...

On my way home this evening I popped into Waterstone's and bought Tom Kyte's book " Expert Oracle: Signature Edition ". Unusually the off-the-shelf price (47.99ukp) was the same as that listed by Amazon. Obviously I haven't had a chance to read it yet, just flicked through and read a few passages. What I have read looks really good, the chapter on materialized views looks particularly interesting. I do have one criticism though, I suspect it's more a criticism of Apress (the publisher) than of Tom. There is very little white space on the pages, the space around the text to the edge of the page is perhaps one centimetre wide all round. Psychologists will tell you that whitespace is important in textbooks to reduce confusion by the reader. I have a more prosaic arguement, I like to make notes. Plenty of white space, especially between the outer edge of the page and the text, is great for making 'notes in the margin' (and the gutter for that matt...

With a final presentation from Connor McDonald (on running Oracle at home), apparently the latest he has ever stayed on the last day of conference, the UKOUG 2005 conference and exhibition drew to a close yesterday. I found this year's conference very useful, lots of excellent presentations. I learned a lot, from the comments I was hearing, I wasn't the only one. One thing I've noticed over the 4 years I've been is that the exhibition part has been getting les and less useful to me as it has become more and more dominated by Applications companies. With the recent aquisitions by Oracle I cannot see it getting any better, the technologies (database &c) seem to be taking a back seat.