My father’s response to this was to look at us and say “These toys are mine; I bought those toys with money I worked for. What’s yours is what you make with your bodies.” While the sentiment is arguably harsh, crude and bordering on vulgar, I cannot argue that he had a certain point.

If you do not truly own something, you will be left squabbling like a child when your perceived ownership is threatened. When you assumed you owned something and the truth comes to light, you will be massively insecure and have a sense of injustice.

A few points from OSCon are haunting me and getting me to think about what FLOSS means to me, and what I want from it.

— Open source is important even if you never read one line of source code or make one modification. The fact that anyone can read and write the source code is critical even if nobody besides the original engineer(s) ever does.

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I’ve got this link while browsing the search results for RAC Attack. I guess should ask my granddad to pass my best wishes to Mr. George H.W. Bush.

Last night, I left my presentation in a good state and verified the first batch of demos — all worked fine. This morning turned into a disaster as I found out that the rest of my demos stopped working — my 11g RAC cluster on Ubuntu (I have the reason for such unusual setup) got issues with network connectivity. I should probably blame VMware Fusion 2.0 beta combined with Ubuntu but the net result was failing network connections with weird TNS errors and hanging connection requests. Obviously, I couldn’t demonstrate advanced connection management without *simple* connections working.

Well, I didn’t have any other choice but to add new slides with some demo results. Since I did it in a rush, there were some overlaps and I ended up with way too many slides. Good news that the first demo generated sufficiently enough interest about services automation and connection load balancing so we spent significant time there. Well, nothing comes for free so the rest of the presentation had to be covered too quickly but I did manage to go through the failover scenarios and failover technologies available. Run-time load balancing and load balancing advisory wasn’t left aside either so I did make it till the very last slide!

All in all, today’s session wasn’t as good as yesterday but I managed to avoid a complete failure with the demos so I guess I shouldn’t complain.

This morning I checked how the labs went on the 24th floor and I should say that labs agenda looked very impressive and it seems that lab part was probably the best feature of the event. The amount of material Jeremy Schneider prepared was huge and there would be enough labs for 2 full days, not just one. The attendees could choose the areas they are interested in most and work on different threads with their own pace. Great job Jeremy!

Back to the reality and the airport… The flight Chicago-Ottawa is 3+ hours late and they moved us to another gate. Oh… Do I hate Chicago airport! In the meantime I managed to transfer this text from my MacBook to the Blackberry and publishing it from there. The Blackberry syncronisation utility for Mac is a big shame. Can’t wait for iPhone…

To finish on a good note — I’m very glad I came to RAC Attack! What a pleasure to see old friends and make new ones. I just hope I can actually *leave* this place…

For array inserts, the buffer parameter essentially specifies the size of this array. We know, however, that if a table has lob columns, the import parameter buffer is not honored, and the import utility will use single-row inserts for those tables. But tables with date columns, so the claim goes, also must suffer single-row inserts. In this blog, I will probe this further and validate that claim.

Let’s create a table and populate it with 300K rows.

 create table t1 (n1 number, v1 varchar2 (512), d1 date);

 insert into t1
 select n1, lpad(n1, 500, 'x'), sysdate
 from (select level n1 from dual connect by level <=300003);
 commit;

 REM Creating an  export file..
 host exp userid=cbqt/cbqt file=exp_t1.dmp log=exp_t1.log tables=t1

The above code fragment created a table, inserted 300,000 rows, and exported that table to an export dump file. This dump file is ready to be imported. But, we need to trace the import to measure the effect of the buffer parameter. The problem, though, is how to trace the import session alone without generating every session in the database. This can be achieved by creating a logon trigger as below. Only sessions from a test user will have trace enabled from this trigger (the username is CBQT).

REM I could use "on schema clause too, but this is part of generic code that I use.
REM Riyaj Shamsudeen - To trace a session through logon trigger
create or replace trigger
set_system_event
after logon  on database
declare
v_user dba_users.username%TYPE:=user;
sql_stmt1 varchar2(256) :='alter session set events '||chr(39)||'10046 trace name context forever, level 12'||chr(39);
begin
  if (v_user = 'CBQT') THEN
      execute immediate sql_stmt1;
  end if;
end;
/

Let’s drop the table, then import with a default buffer size of 64K. Through the logon trigger, a new SQL trace file will be generated. That trace file will be analyzed with the tkprof utility as shown in the code fragment below:

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Well, one simple solution is to use the sed tool to modify the file. Sed actually stands for “stream editor”. The vi editor would be considered a static editor in that it loads all of the file into memory at once. If you run out of memory, you are out of luck. With sed there is a very limited amount of data in memory at any time because it streams the data “through”, manipulating it as it goes. So sed can work with files that are huge, and only use a minimal amount of memory for processing.

The format of the search and replace also is similar to vi's search and replace. For example:

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The alarms went off as soon as we tried to get out of the restaurant. Below is a year old example but it sounded exactly like that + it was much darker — like if the skies fell on us:

We had to turn back and were stuck in the pub for another hour or so sipping Guinness while the mother-nature had some fun around us. Funny, looks like it decided to come back now — skies are falling again with heavy rain, clouds and lightnings everywhere. The thunder is very loud and sirens went off again — can’t even sleep. But I digress so let’s get back to the overview of the day…

I love small classes! I mean small rooms with all chairs taken when people are close to me as I present and close to each other. The audience today was exact fit for the room — 20 people could fit on the chairs around the desks and few more (organizers and presenters) next to the back wall. What I like about small classes is the intimate atmosphere in the room. I also like live speech where my voice delivered natively without electronic distortion keeping all the beauty of the Russian accent (some people *still* noticed bits of German influence there).

The only small problem was the location of the stand where a speaker hosts the laptop — it was in the middle of the room. That felt somewhat odd and I kept running between the middle of the room and the stage (well, or the place where it’s supposed to be). I used to the fact that I have another view on my laptop screen — speaker’s view with next slide/motion and my reminders. I also had to do several demo’s on my RAC cluster and I obviously needed the keyboard badly for that. I should apologize that 8 people had to observe my back instead of my face for some time and I also couldn’t see how they were taking the material but I tried to look back from time to time and as soon I did that — I could see confirming nods so thanks for that!
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I’m pleased to announce that there will be the formal launch of Pythian Europe at the premises of the Canadian Embassy in Prague on Wednesday the 6th of August from 17:00 to 18:30. This historic event will be announced by Mrs. Sameena Qureshi, Trade Counsellor, Embassy of Canada; and Paul Vallée, President and Founder, The Pythian Group. Present will be various members from the press (IT and Business), as well as representatives from Oracle and Sun Microsystems, the Canadian Chamber of Commerce in Prague, and many more. We will prepare some unusual and very tasty snacks and refreshments.

We would love for readers of this blog to join us, so please consider this your special, personal invitation from me. Please come if you’re in Prague on Wednesday. If you plan to attend, please contact Dan at elbl@pythian.com.

I’ll be presenting on both days. The beginner’s presentation will be “Under the Hood of Oracle Clusterware” and the more advanced session is called “Connections! Connections! Connections!”. Now, I’m terribly busy preparing for it — working on the slides (yes, I started earlier than some might expect…) and setting up the live demo.

RAC Attack is organized by IOUG and RAC SIG and, as far as I know, the attendance will pretty good but there are still few places left so you have a chance to register.

What’s for me? Great opportunity to catch up with few old friends and, hopefully, meet some new ones. In addition, I have never been to Chicago so it’s something I really keen to experience while I have a chance.

I’m especially interested in meeting:

• DBAs, Applications Administrators and Systems Administrators,
• Potential customers (IT Directors, DBA Managers, Supply Managers for IT), and
• Potential partners (IT product of service companies that could partner with Pythian to delight our mutual customers)

Here is my itinerary:

• Sunday, August: Frankfurt,
• Monday, August 4: Stuttgart,
• Tuesday, August 5: Munich, and
• Wednesday, August 6 through Saturday, August 9: Prague, Czech Republic.

Please reach out to me using vallee@pythian.com if you would like to meet!

With almost no ado at all, let’s begin with the bad news–from StatisticsIO and Jason Massie: The Death of the DBA. And who is the perpetrator of this crime? The Cloud! It sounds like something from a John Carpenter movie, doesn’t it?

Let’s see what Jason is thinking. “I’d like to retire a SQL Server DBA with 40 years experience but I don’t think that will happen. The cloud is coming and it is bad news administrators, database or otherwise.  . . . Let’s make some assumptions. The features get there. The availability gets there. The platform basically matures . . . Now put yourself in the IT decision maker’s shoes. No upfront capital expenses, no managing backups, and no patch management.  . . . If they can remove their focus from managing and deploying IT, they sell and service more widgets.”

Scary stuff, right? Well, the commenters don’t entirely agree. I think it will be at least a factor, but I wonder how many managers will look at “The Cloud” and feel uncomfortable about privacy, data retention, and the like. (For myself, I couldn’t even endorse the idea of putting this blog’s comments into “The Cloud”.) What do you think?

Elsewhere on StatisticsIO, Jason has a note about MSDN’s SQL Heroes contest, whose aim is to, “. . . create a community project in CodePlex based on SQL Server 2008.” Jason also links to a list of CodePlex’s active SQL Server projects.

Turning to matters technical, Jeff’s SQL Server Blog offers a lesson on converting input explicitly at your client: don’t rely on the database to “figure it out”. Jeff takes the example of formatting dates, and show both the right and the wrong way, writing, “I’ve said it over and over and I’ll say it again: The concept of formatting dates should never be something that your database code should ever worry about.”

On the Less Than Dot blog, SQLDenis observes that converting columns to date from datetime does not result in a scan in SQL Server 2008. What you get instead is a seek, as he demonstrates.

Indexing Foreign Keys - should SQL Server do that automatically? So asks Greg Low on the The Bit Bucket. “By adding indexes on the foreign keys on three tables,” he writes, “we saw a reduction of 87% in total I/O load.  . . . it really struck me that having SQL Server do this by default would avoid a lot of apparent performance problems.  . . .  Should SQL Server simply do this by default when you declare a foreign key reference?”

Kent Tegels of Enjoy Another Sandwich — riddle me this, riddle me that! “When is a bug not a bug?” I give up, Kent. When is a bug not a bug? (more…)