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OK, Now that I’ve started the post with a nice click-bait heading, let’s get down to the business of being wrong.

I did a lot of conference presentations last year, and the great thing about that for me was that I got to meet a lot of new people in the Oracle community in the Developer and DBA space. One of the questions that came up over and over again was about putting one’s knowledge “out there” in the community and how to deal with the repercussions of that.  In particular, “What if you publish something that is proven wrong?”

Here’s the thing about being wrong …. there’s two likely outcomes:

How do you determine if the Oracle SQL optimizer has created a sub-optimal execution plan? re-run statistics and see what happens? wait for Oracle to fin other execution plans? What if neither method is helping? Do you read the execution plan? What do you look at? Differences in actual vs estimated? How successful is that? Look for full table scans?  Do you look at the 10053 trace? How much time and effort does that take?  What do you look at in the 10053 trace. Do you have a systematic methodology  that works in almost all cases?

Well there is a method that is reliable and systematic. It’s laid out inDan Tow’s book SQL Tuning.

When your car gets a flat tyre, it’s always handy to have a spare.  We do the same with the database

Looking for that catchy title for your next presentation ?

I took the first word from the title of 1000 Oracle OpenWorld presentations, and looked for patterns .  I omitted some obvious terms that are either products or definite/indefinite articles:

• Oracle
• Peoplesoft 
• The
• How 
• OAUG
• General
• MySQL

And here is what we end up with:

Some people use the session catalog to grab just the presentations that they either attended, or could not attend.

Other people want a download of every available presentation so they can peruse the entire catalog offline at a later date.

I am one of the latter people.

So using some node, javascript, awk, sed, grep I managed to data-mine the catalog page to come up with a list of uploaded presentations in the form:

wget --no-check-certificate -O "SessionTitle".extension "https://static.rainfocus.com/full_path_to_presentation.extension"

which of course can then be run as a batch file to grab them all. Woo hoo !!!

My father-in-law died a couple of weeks ago, aged 95. This is the story that he wrote for his children and grandchildren a few years ago describing his experiences as a Naval engineer on the aircraft carrier HMS Indefatigable during the second world war.

OK, time for some controversy

My ODC appreciation post is about support.oracle.com

Now I’m sure there will people in the community just itching to lose their proverbial about how they lost years of their lives waiting on the support response or similar complaint, and since I work for Oracle, they will be just as keen to jump on the bandwagon and claim that I’m just shilling for the company I work for.

But I’m not denying that our support resource could be better.  Any company’s support resources can be better. 

Bridge Run on Saturday

Swim in the bay on Monday

http://www.oaktable.net/blog/oak-table-world-2017-oracle-open-world

The Oak Table members will be discussing their latest technical obsessions and research on Monday and Tuesday, (Oct. 2nd and 3rd, 2017).  The truth is, folks-  The Oak Table experts are an AWESOME group, (if I don’t say so myself! :)) as we could have easily done another day of incredible sessions, but alas, two days is all we have available for this year’s event.

(With apologies to any Simon & Garfunkel fans out there)

Hello jetlag my old friend,
You’ve come to mess with me again.
The bedside clock is stuck on 10 to 4
And my eyes are just so bloody sore.

The decision to get on that frickin’ plane.
Was just insane.

Suffering …. my jetlag in silence

A few gin and tonics tonight and I might even put it to music