Quiz - Whose Answer is it Anyway?

August 8, 2010 (Modified August 8, 2010, August 10, 2010) I am not much of a supporter of True or False type questions, nor do I much care for multiple choice type questions.  It seems that essay questions are usually the only appropriate type of questions on exams.  Take, for example the following question that [...]

August 4, 2010 I started reading the ”Expert Oracle Database Architecture: Oracle Database 9i, 10g, and 11g Programming Techniques and Solutions“ book cover-to-cover.  Very interesting book so far, and it appears that a lot of time was spent reworking the previous release of the book so that it targets Oracle Database 11g R2, while not losing the book’s [...]

June 24, 2010 I am in the process of reading the June 2010 printing (fourth printing) of the “Oracle Performance Firefighting” book.  To say that I have stumbled upon one or two gems in the book is probably an understatement.  The book is filled with interesting statements – this time I found a couple of interesting paragraphs [...]

June 21, 2010 I located another interesting section of a paragraph in the June 2010 printing of the “Oracle Performance Firefighting” book.  From page 231: “By default, Oracle tries to assign only one active transaction per undo segment. If each undo segment has an active transaction and if there is space available in the undo tablespace, Oracle [...]

June 18, 2010 While reading the June 2010 printing of the “Oracle Performance Firefighting” book I keep stumbling across interesting sections of the book.  Here is an interesting section – I hope that I did not exclude too much of the surrounding section of the book, causing the paragraph to lose contextual meaning (I am trying [...]

June 17, 2010 Warning: this article is certain to bring tears of pain to your eyes while you attempt to determine what is right and what is wrong. While reading the June 2010 printing of the “Oracle Performance Firefighting” book I found a couple of interesting lines about the buffer cache and the effects, or lack [...]

June 16, 2010 While reading the June 2010 printing of the “Oracle Performance Firefighting” book I found an interesting paragraph that left me wondering if something more, or perhaps something else should be stated.  This quote is from page 104 (this is a long quote, required to not lose the context of the discussion topic - please excuse any typos): [...]

June 16, 2010 While reading the June 2010 printing of the “Oracle Performance Firefighting” book I found an interesting paragraph that left me wondering if something is missing.  This quote is from page 61 (this is a long quote, required to not lose the context of the discussion topic - please excuse any typos): “As another example, suppose [...]

June 14, 2010 I found another interesting couple of lines in the June 2010 printing of the “Oracle Performance Firefighting” book.  This quote is from page 116: “While it may seem strange, the run queue reported by the operating system includes processes waiting to be serviced by a CPU as well as processes currently being serviced by [...]

June 13, 2010 (Modified June 14, 2010) I found an interesting couple of lines in the June 2010 printing of the “Oracle Performance Firefighting” book.  This quote is from page 43 – I added the text in the square brackets [ ] to provide context for the quote: Digging a little deeper [into the results of the [...]