Posts by André Araújo
Every employee at Pythian can use one workday per year to spend on activities to help the community. We call it a Pythian Volunteer Day. It’s up to the employee to decide what to use if for and when. This year I used my volunteer day to donate blood and this post is a short story about my experience.
Movember is getting to and end… and what a ball we had at Pythian this month! The laughs, pictures and performances will stay in our memories for a long time, and on Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, etc…
One of the readers of my previous post about Oracle’s Flashback Database, posted a comment noting that the Oracle documentation doesn’t make any reference to the ability of the FLASHBACK DATABASE command to roll the database forward. I knew from experience that the database can be rolled back and forth using the FLASHBACK DATABASE command and decided to have a closer look.
The traditional NoCOUG SQL challenge has been launched this year with a twist: in the wake of the “BigData” trend/buzz, it’s now been upgraded to a “SQL and/vs. NoSQL” challenge. I took on the challenge, treading through my SQL comfort zone, thinking of ways I could bend relational algebra to solve the wicked puzzle suggested this year.
We’ve got a few clients already using Enterprise Manager 12c Cloud Control. The interface and navigation have improved a lot from the 11g version in my opinion but, as with any new release of anything, there are still quite a few bugs to be fixed. Last week, after working with Oracle on some of these bugs, they asked us to apply the Bundle Patch 1 (BP1) to one of our clients’ installation. The first thing that I noticed when I started looking for information about BP1 was the amount of warnings from different people I found in MOS and around the internet.
As heralded by Iggy Fernandez and Gwen Shapira, NoCOUG has launched its Third International SQL vs. NoSQL Challenge. Pythian is sponsoring the challenge so I decided not to take part in the contest. However, I’m still having a crack at the problem just for fun. So, here is my first take on it.
Backup jobs can be scheduled in many different ways (crontab, Grid Control, Scheduled Tasks, etc) and finding the log file may be tricky if you don’t know the environment well. Furthermore, log files may also have already been overwritten by the next backup or simply just deleted. An alternative way of accessing that information, thus, may come handy. Fortunately, RMAN keeps the backup metadata around for some time and it can be accessed through the database’s V$ views. Obviously, if you need this information because your database just crashed and needs to be restored, the method described here is useless.
Pythian`s Paul Vallee and Andrew Waitman, Pythian’s owner and CEO, respectively, have an exclusive lunch with Larry Ellison at the Oracle head-quarters in San Francisco, CA. As you have already guessed, Mr. Ellison has personally invited Paul and Andrew as a recognition to an unparalleled heroic efforts by Pythian to motivate and support 42 (forty-two) of its most talented DBAs to receive recognition as Oracle ACEs and ACE Directors, due to their wide contribution to the Oracle and MySQL communities around the world.
A few days ago I learned about this year’s NoCOUG SQL Challenge and decided to to put the gray matter between my ears to work. I’ve been teaching a MySQL course this week and my first impulse was to use my MySQL VM to test my solution attempts. However, I eventually decided to use Recursive Subquery Factoring to solve the proposed problem and had to switch to an Oracle 11gR2, since it’s the only database that implements this feature that I know how to use (are there any others?). I was happy with my solution, but frustrated that I couldn’t run it on MySQL. So I decided to try to make it somehow work on MySQL.
Once again the great Wizards of Northern California have reached out to the community, pleading for help in the deciphering of one more challenging riddle. The second edition of the NoCOUG SQL Challenge has been published and is open for submissions! This time Iggy and his ensemble came up not only with a SQL challenge but also with a brain-bender riddle that must be resolved before you can start coding your solution. Very nice!
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