Productivity

I’m writing this (unusual) post as I am a long time Gmail user and recently I’ve seen plenty of people & articles complain about the Gmail’s new compose window (the one that shows up as a small hovering window in the bottom right of your screen):

The top google hits so far only return tips to disable the new editor completely, but I want to use the new one, just in a bigger window! There is a very easy workaround for that – and there’s no need to switch back to the old compose mode at all!

If you are using your mouse, then just:

I have fixed most of the bugs that showed up during the Snapper launch party session and uploaded the new version (v4.02) of Snapper here:

• http://blog.tanelpoder.com/files/scripts/snapper4.sql

I have also uploaded the launch party hacking session video to enkitec.tv:

• http://enkitec.tv/2013/02/18/snapper-v4-beta-launch-video/

I have not updated the snapper documentation yet, but here are the main improvements:

I am lazy, therefore if I can type less, I will type less.

Often people are surprised to see that Oracle supports the ANSI DATE and TIMESTAMP syntax in the SQL code, which allows me to shorten the lengthy TO_DATE( …. , ‘YYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI:SS’) syntax a bit. You can just type this if you want to compare some field to a date (day precision):

SQL> SELECT COUNT(*) FROM dba_objects WHERE created > DATE'2012-12-01';

  COUNT(*)
----------
         0

SQL> SELECT COUNT(*) FROM dba_objects WHERE created > DATE'2012-01-01';

  COUNT(*)
----------
       804

This way you can always use the standard date format regardless of any NLS settings that may say otherwise.

Ok, I’ve wanted to write this blog entry for a long time – and now it’s time!

Most of my blog readers (thank you!) are performance-minded computer enthusiasts, who care about efficiency and optimization. You’ve been tuning SQL execution plans, instance and OS configuration so that your sessions would achieve the same results with less work and also with less waiting!

You probably know to appreciate why asynchronous I/O must be enabled for busy modern databases, so that your database sessions can do I/O (talk to the storage) without actually having to wait for the I/O operations to complete! You can increase the processing throughput, by not submitting every single I/O separately and waiting for it to complete, before being able to process the results and submit the next one. Asynchronous I/O is a crucial thing for good performance.

First, a reminder – my Advanced Oracle Troubleshooting v2.0 online seminar starts next week already. Last chance to sign up, I can accept registrations until Sunday :-)

I won’t do another AOT seminar before Oct (or Nov) this year. More details and sign-up here:

• http://tech.e2sn.com/oracle-training-seminars

I have rescheduled my Advanced SQL Tuning and Partitioning & Parallel Execution for Performance seminars too. I will do them in September/October. Unfortunately I’m too busy right now to do them before the summer.

Public Appearances:

• I will be speaking at the UKOUG Exadata Special Event in London on 18th April
• I have submitted a few papers for Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco as well (end of Sep/beginning of Oct), all about Exadata. Let’s see how it goes, but I’ll be there anyway, which means that I’ll probably show up at the Oracle Closed World event too!

And that’s all the travel I will do this year…

Virtual Conferences:

I’ll soon announce the 2nd EsSN virtual conference too ;-)

Free online stuff:

Perhaps in a month or so I will do another hacking session (I’ll plan 2 hours this time, 1 hour isn’t nearly enough for going deep). The topic will probably be about low-level details of SQL plan execution internals… stay tuned!

People talk about the Oracle SQL Developer 3 being out, which is cool, but I have something even cooler for you today ;-)

I finally figured out how to convert my screen-recordings to uploadable videos, so that the text wouldn’t get unreadable and blurry.

So, here’s the first video, about a tool called MOATS, which we have built together with fellow OakTable Network member and a PL/SQL wizard Adrian Billington (of oracle-developer.net).

Here’s the video, it’s under 3 minutes long. Play the video in full screen for best results (and if it’s too slow loading, change it to lower resolution from HD mode):

Check it out and if you like MOATS, you can download it from Adrian’s website site (current version 1.05) and make sure you read the README.txt file in the zip!

• http://www.oracle-developer.net/utilities.php

Also thanks to Randolf Geist for finding and fixing some bugs in our alpha code… Note that MOATS is still kind of beta right now…

P.S. I will post my ORA-4031 and shared pool hacking video real soon now, too! :-)

P.P.S. Have you already figured out how it works?! ;-)

Update: Now you can suggest new features and improvement requests here:

• http://goo.gl/mod/0ANl

A lot of people have asked me whether there’s some sort of index or “table of contents” of my TPT scripts (there’s over 500 scripts in the tpt_public.zip file – http://tech.e2sn.com/oracle-scripts-and-tools )

I have planned to create such index for years, but never got to it. I probably never will :) So a good way to extract the descriptions of some scripts is this (run the command in the directory where you extracted my scripts to):

And this time we have audio !!! (Wow!)

Following the huge success of my last hacking session, planned while drinking beer at Graham Woods OOW pre-party and delivered from Miracle’s massive Oracle Closed World event in Thirsty Bear (between drinking beers), I’m announcing another hacking session:

What: Using Session Snapper for flexible Oracle Performance Troubleshooting

When: Wednesday 27th Oct 9:00-10:00 AM PDT (US West coast / California time). Check what’s this in your time zone here

Where: Internet! -> Sign up here: http://tech.e2sn.com/secret

You’ll need to register fast and be “there” on time as my current GotoWebinar account only allow 100 attendees to log on… last time over 100 people signed up, but “luckily” less actually showed up, so nobody got left outside!

BTW, I have figured out what went wrong with audio last time and caused my voice in the end of presentation disappear). A program, which I accidentally launched via a keyboard shortcut, grabbed my Mic input to itself, so gotowebinar’s app couldn’t access it anymore.

• People who will attend my Advanced Oracle Troubleshooting online class or the Virtual Conference I’m organizing with Jonathan, Cary and Kerry – you can also log on to make sure that the (gotomeeting) technology works out OK for you.

See you soon!

I’ve been tracking my business travel with Tripit.com‘s awesome service for about 2 years now.

After getting back from my Tallinn->Helsinki->New York->Detroit->New York->San Francisco->New York->Helsinki->Tallinn trip yesterday, Tripit reported that I have flown 1 007 509 km during my business trips (American readers, that’s about 42 miles ;)

Check yourself below :)

Tripit says I’ve visited 71 different cities in 27 countries within the last two years.

Here’s the map of places where I’ve visited my clients, done training or spoken at conferences:

Actually there’s probably couple of more cities where I’ve been in the last two years, for some reason Tripit doesn’t recognize my trip to Melbourne (but it does show the visit to Sydney which I did during the same trip).

Anyway, the conclusion here is that I think I’ve done enough flying for now. Now I plan to stay at home for a loooong time (I mean at least 3-4, maybe even 5 weeks in a row!!! ;)

But seriously, what I’ve decided is that:

1. I won’t do any more public on-site seminars (with only few exceptions).
2. I will move all my public seminar offering to web-based online seminars (using Citrix gotomeeting.com’s service), which I’ll deliver in person.
3. I will still do private corporate training on-site occasionally, which offers flexibility of customizing the content and focus areas of the seminar to match the customer’s needs
4. I will also offer private corporate online training, which gives much greater flexibility for choosing the seminar duration and times etc (it’s possible to spread a seminar to 1-day sections, each day delivered on a separate week, to reduce the impact of people being away from their work)
5. I will still do consulting & advanced troubleshooting where I usually solve even the most complex problems in matter of couple of days (like explained here for example)

Ok, enough of self-promotion and advertising, back to work ;-)

P.S. I will publish my online seminar schedule “very soon now”!!!

P.P.S. I’m not affiliated with Tripit.com by any means business-wise, but if you travel frequently, then I recommend you to check out their awesome service (and iPhone app). The basic version is free, but I just decided to upgrade to Pro after couple of years of using it!

At Hotsos Symposium Training Day I used rlwrap with sqlplus – which gives nice command line editing and history capabilities for tools like sqlplus. Additionally I pre-generated commonly used Oracle keywords, data dictionary view and package names into rlwrap wordfile, so I got nice tab-completion too. Sqlplus sucks much less with rlwrap ;-)

It’s relatively easy to install rlwrap on Unix (there are rlwrap RPMs out there, Solaris freeware packages and I installed it on Mac via macports.org). Just google around…

You can have rlwrap on Windows too – As rlwrap has been coded for Unix flavors, then on Windows you need to run it on a Unix library environment emulator – like Cygwin.

Dave Herring and Michael Paddock have both written an article about how to get rlwrap & sqlplus running on Windows, check out the articles here. It’s worth reading both as they have different additions…

So, if you want command line history, search and tab completion for sqlplus on Unix flavors or Windows, check these articles out!

http://daveherringsdbablog.blogspot.com/2010/03/sqlplus-command-history-with-cygwin.html

http://blog.enkitec.com/2010/04/29/using-sqlplus-with-rlwrap-on-ms-windows/