George Trujillo was presenting on MySQL for the Oracle DBA in the same room, so I stayed and learned a few things. Although I must have been really tired as I missed his comments on the Blackhole engine for database replication. George also shared some of his experiences from customer sites visits. All in all, I am glad I stayed.

Riyaj Shamsudeen had an interesting session on “De-bunking the Myths about redo-undo-rollback”. I enjoyed this presentation style of making an assertion and challenging us as to whether it was true or not. Naturally he had demonstrations to prove each case. The presentation was informative, yet easy to follow and understand.

I managed to sneak in for part of George Trujillo’s session on “Demystifying Middleware Technologies”. I am sorry that I had to miss the first part of it, as I had to run thru my demos for my presentation that followed.

I was lucky enough ( a little tongue in check there!!) to present the last session of the day on Oracle 11g DataPump. It was very fulfilling to present as most of the attendees had export / import experience and had not started using Data Pump yet.

Although I will not be partaking in the after-conference skiing, tonight I plan on joining several other Oracle Geeks for a dinner in the mountains. And when I say Oracle Geek, I mean that in the kindest, loving way. Hope to get lots of hugs ! ;-)

Daniel Liu did a good job of presenting 11g New Features for DBAs. It will be interesting to see how partitioning on virtual columns work. The new 11g data compression also sounds very interesting. It now works on a block level, rather than table level and dynamically re-compresses data as necessary. I wonder what new wait events are related to this new workload ?

I attended the “Building Dynamic Google Gadgets in Java” session. I was a little concerned that it would be heavy into Java and I might get lost. I was pleasantly surprised at how little Java there was and how simple the gadgets were to use and develop. Hopefully I will get a chance to play with this when I get back.

For the rest of the afternoon, I attended Graham Wood’s presentation on “The DB Time Performance Method”, followed by Michael Rosenblum’s presentation on “Autonomous Transactions”. I had used them a lot in a previous life for error logging and processing child records did not think I was going to get too much out of the presentations. I was very pleasantly surprised and thoroughly enjoyed some of the tricks used and interesting ways that Michael was using autonomous transactions.

I ended the day of presentations with Mogens Norgaard’s Tuning session. OK…perhaps it is not fair to say it was Mogens’s presentation as he did rely heavily on audience participation, especially from Daniel Fink, Jonathan Lewis and Graham Wood. I am not sure he even let them know that he would be calling on them to co-present. But he did bribe them handsomely with some very rare Danish Beer.

I am really looking forward to catching up with “my mates” in the Oracle community. I will send regular updates when I get to RMOUG. But, to be honest I am a little scared, no more like petrified, to face the cold weather again. This year in Ottawa has had quite a bit of snow and I am not that fond of shoveling it.

Even though the weather has been much wetter and colder in Sydney this year than in previous years, it has not stopped me from trying sailing, catching ferry rides, climbing the Sydney Harbour Bridge, going dancing, or hitting the beaches. I love all the greenery. There is nothing quite like walking down the street and getting hit with a whiff of Lemon Grass or fragrant Jasmine. It will be MONTHS before my garden is in bloom. I am glad I took lots of pictures while I have been here so I can remember this magical place while I am waiting for summer in Ottawa.

In a way, I should have known better. As a DBA, I have learned to confirm information and have contingency plans. For instance, when doing a database upgrade, you ensure that you have a backup and can revert back if any issues come up. Of course, in a work environment, you normally make plans, get them checked by co-workers and do one or more “dry runs” whenever possible.

When the sun finally came out and stayed out, I found myself in paradise. The weather is warm and when the wind blows it feels like a tropical breeze. When I meet and speak with Australians, I jokingly refer to “the island” — Australia being the only country that is also a continent and an island. At times I sit by the water and just watch the boats floating in their moorings and feel sad about having to leave here in the near future. Although Sydney is a large city, it has a relaxed pace, a friendly atmosphere, and I have completely fallen in love with her. I will be sad to leave.

There is just so much to see and do in Australia. With limited time, I spent most weekends doing the local Sydney attractions. I did not manage to make it to everything this city has to offer, let alone make side-trips. I can tell you my time here has been magical.

I have had so many wonderful experiences that just make me feel like I am on top of the world! For the first time in my life I tried, and fell in love with, sailing. Tonight is my last night participating in the Twilight Races.

The Middle Harbour Yacht Club is the friendliest and most accommodating club I have ever been to. They have twilight races on every Thursday night for the summer season. They go out of their way to get visitors on a boat for the races. The first night I was there, there were so many people looking for a ride on a boat for the races that they went around several times asking the captains to take “just one more person if they could” so that everyone got on.

Being totally unexperienced and a non-member, I was worried I would not get on a boat. I was delighted when “Captain Brent” took me and three others on board “Crusher” for my first race. He was such a gracious host. The entire way out (where it was calm) he said, “this is a good time for a beer if anyone wants one,” and handed them out to guests. He was right. It was a good time.

Later in the race we had such strong winds and frequent tacking that I swear the boat was running on one edge only. I was slow to get to the other side for one tack and it was like climbing straight uphill to get to the top edge of the boat.

I hereby let it be known that I am now extremely experienced “ballast” if anyone is looking to go sailing in the Ottawa area this summer.

Basically, this feature allows you to decide how to handle importing data if a table already exists. The options are SKIP (defaut), APPEND, TRUNCATE, and REPLACE. Do these parameters look familiar? Possibly reminiscent of the SQL*Loader parameters (INTO TABLE x INSERT/REPLACE/TRUNCATE/APPEND)? They are very similar and they work the same way, with the exception of SKIP.

Here’s an explanation of each option.

• SKIP: The default value for TABLE_EXISTS_ACTION. If the table exists, then SKIP will cause the table (and any related data) to not be loaded. The table will be skipped.
• TRUNCATE: This will truncate the data in the table and load the data. If the table already exists, no metadata will be applied.
• APPEND: This will append the data to the end of the table. Again, if the table already exists, no metadata will be applied.
• REPLACE: This will drop the existing object, recreate the object with the information from the dumpfile, and then load the data.

Let’s create a simple test case to demonstrate.

drop table test1;

create table test1
  ( col1 number primary key,
    col2 number default 99,
    col3 number );

create index ix_test1_col2 on test1 ( col2);

create trigger trg_test1
before insert or update on test1
for each row
begin
   :new.col3 := :new.col1 + :new.col2;
end;
/

begin
   for i in 1 .. 1001 loop
      insert into test1 (col1) values (i);
   end loop;
end;
/

select col1, col2, col3 from test1 where rownum < 5;

      COL1       COL2       COL3
---------- ---------- ----------
         1         99        100
         2         99        101
         3         99        102
         4         99        103

In the first test, we will do a full export of the table, modify the data and drop the trigger, and then do a Data Pump import with the REPLACE option. After the Data Pump import, we can see that the data is the same and that the trigger has been recreated.

expdp babette/babette tables=test1 dumpfile=test.1.dmp

update test1 set col1 = col1 + 2000, col2 = 500;

drop trigger trg_test1;

select col1, col2, col3 from test1 where rownum < 5;

            COL1       COL2       COL3
      ---------- ---------- ----------
            2001        500       2501
            2002        500       2502
            2003        500       2503
            2004        500       2504

impdp babette/babette dumpfile=test1.dmp table_exists_action=replace

--
-- data is the same as before update ( was replace with data in dumpfile)
--
SQL> select count(*), col2 from test1 group by col2;

  COUNT(*)       COL2
---------- ----------
      1001        500

select col1, col2, col3 from test1 where rownum < 5;

      COL1       COL2       COL3
---------- ---------- ----------
         1         99        100
         2         99        101
         3         99        102
         4         99        103
--
-- trigger has been re-created
--
SQL> select trigger_name from user_triggers;

TRIGGER_NAME
------------------------------
TRG_TEST1

In this second test, we will update the data (so we don't get PK violations on importing data). We will reuse the export dumpfile previously created. After the Data Pump import, notice that the data has been added instead of replaced.

update test1 set col1 = col1 + 2000, col2 = col3 / 2;

impdp babette/babette dumpfile=test1.dmp table_exists_action=append

-- data is appended and trigger is effective

select count(*), grouping
  from (select case when col2 between 1 and 100 then 1
                    when col2 between 101 and 499 then 2
                    when col2 between 500 and 1000 then 3
                    when col2 between 1001 and 99999 then 4
               end grouping from test1) a
group by grouping

  COUNT(*)   GROUPING
---------- ----------
      1001          1
      1001          4

In this third test, we will restore the original data (using expdp REPLACE). Before the import, we will drop the trigger. After the Data Pump import, we can see that the data has been added. We also notice that the trigger on the table has not been re-created. This is because the table existed, so metadata was not applied.

impdp babette/babette dumpfile=test1.dmp table_exists_action=replace

drop trigger trg_test1;

update test1 set col1 = col1 + 2000, col2 = col3 / 2;

impdp babette/babette dumpfile=test1.dmp table_exists_action=append

-- notice that the append did NOT execute any DDL
-- due to the existence of the table ALL metdata is excluded.

SQL> select trigger_name from user_triggers;
no rows selected

So what if we want to apply the metadata from the export file even if the table already exists? Oracle has provided a way to do that too. We can use an INCLUDE statement to include the type of objects you want to include. However, in my testing I found this only worked when I selected CONTENT=METADATA_ONLY, and it did not work when I did CONTENT=ALL (data and metadata)

impdp babette/babette dumpfile=test1.dmp content=metadata_only include=trigger

How does this compare with the original import? It behaves very similarly: import does not apply any metadata if the object already exists. However, this behaviour can be overridden with IGNORE=Y parameter.

exp babette/babette tables=test1 file=test1.exp.dmp

update test1 set col1 = col1 + 2000, col2 = col3 / 2;

drop trigger trg_test1;

imp babette/babette file=test1.exp.dmp full=y ignore=Y

SQL> select count(*) from test1

  COUNT(*)
----------
      2002

SQL> select trigger_name from user_triggers;

TRIGGER_NAME
------------------------------
TRG_TEST1

Having looked at the parameter options and how it works, the next logical question is, how can this be useful?

There have been times where I have had full schema imports that failed part-way through. One option available was to figure out which tables had not yet been done, and try to dynamically create a TABLES= parameter to load those. But, if the tables were re-imported, the data would have been duplicated. Alternatively, I would clean up the schema and start again. With 11g, the TABLE_EXISTS_ACTION gives us more flexibility. We can simply re-run the import and Oracle will automatically skip all objects that already exist.

We can also use the REPLACE option to undo all object changes and restore to a baseline. For example, you have an export of test data that you use to refresh certain tables in a schema. Rather than having to manually locate and remove the old versions of the tables (which may have had DDL changes applied in a test environment), you simply run your Data Pump import with the REPLACE option.

Having unearthed this parameter for myself and put it to work, I am sure that others can think of lots of other uses for it. Please add your comments to show how you have used this parameter.

Going stir-crazy from sitting in with all the rain, I was looking for something to do. Paul (from the Pythian Group Australia office) suggested either shopping in Chatswood or going to Crows Nest. It cleared up a little and I managed to walk to Crows Nest from where I am staying. I wasn’t sure I would recognize it, but when I saw the Crows Nest Hotel right on the corner of Pacific Highway, I knew I was in the right place.

Crows Nest is a lovely area of town with lots and lots of shops and restaurants. They have a natural food store that serves organic coffee. Have I mentioned how big coffee is in Australia? You have to go to McDonald’s to get regular drip coffee like I am used to from Tim Horton’s. I have heard that Sydney has a very large Greek and Italian population and I suspect that contributes to the excellent coffee shops here. I am still learning how to order among terms such as “long”, “flat”, “short”, “cappuccino” (okay, that one I have seen before), and the list goes on.

A few other things I have noticed since arriving here:

• Stores have “trading hours” instead of “hours of operation”
• The automatic doors all open sideways.This makes a lot of sense. In Canada they tend to open towards or away from you and you have to move out of the way if you are right in front of them.
• Toilets have a choice of two settings, half-flush or full-flush. I find it interesting concept. I was always deciding which to use when I got here, but now it is simpler to just always go with half-flush.
• “Plastic Money” — what would normally be a paper bill in Canada, has some sort of plastic coating or is made of plastic. The money has a little translucent window that you can see through. I am sure the material lasts much longer than Canadian Bills do, but, it is really hard to fold flat and stick in your pocket.
• Coins, coins, coins! There are no pennies here. Or at least none that I have seen. The prices are rounded to the nearest five cents. So you are charged $1.70, regardless if your price is $1.68 or $1.72. The coins are a strange combination of sizes. The smallest coin is the five-cent piece and the largest is the fifty-cent piece. The $2 is smaller than the $1, but the twenty-cents is bigger than the ten-cent piece. I do whatever I can to avoid the fifty-cent pieces as they are huge and weigh so much.
• Pedestrian crossings at intersections almost always have an associated sound to indicate when it is time to cross. In Ottawa, there are a few that do this, but most pedestrian crossing lights are just lights without any sounds involved.
• Taking trains. In most places I have been, you validate your ticket on the way in or on to the train or bus. In Sydney, you validate your ticket on the way out. You must purchase your ticket before you ride and then use the ticket to exit the train station (on the larger train stations, on some stations there are no validation machines). So, what if you decide that you changed your mind and want to keep going or go some place else? You would have to get off the train, purchase an extension ticket, then get back on the train, so you would be able to exit at your final destination. I supposed it is because the prices vary and you pay based on where you start from and are going to. It is a different price for everything.

I have been in Sydney for a few days now. I was staying at Robert Menzies College (right across the street from MacQuarrie University or “Uni”). During the summer, the college offers short-term accommodation for $60 / day. Not too bad, as long as you are willing to stay in student residences and share a bathroom with 15 other women. Actually, considering that the price includes your meals at the cafeteria, it is a pretty decent price ( especially if you manage to be there at mealtimes).

I was staying there because I needed to be at MacQuarrie yesterday morning for my LSAT exam. No matter how much you prepare for the LSAT, it is a tough exam. I had the worst time with the logic games. I can always solve them, but they take me 20 minutes and you have about 8.5 minutes per game. Hopefully I got some marks for all the questions I had to guess at !!

It was very interesting doing the LSAT. You show Photo ID at the door and they take a thumbprint image on the admittance form. We had to be there by 8:30 and by the time we completed all the administration it was 9:15. We had one ten minute break and were not done until at least 1:15pm. Grueling!!! We had about one minute between ending one session and then starting on the next section, six sections in total. I used the Kaplan material for preparing and they recommend that you read each section, critically, and then when you move to the next section, just forget it. To me, the LSAT is like that, just do it, then move on.

So after the LSAT, I spent the afternoon looking for accommodations. Very interesting experience getting around the city. It is always fun to travel by bus and train to areas of town, you know nothing about, to find a place to live

I was quite lucky. The first person. Gillian, met me at the Milsons Point train station and drove me around Kirribilli. It is a lovely area just south of North Sydney and reminds me of the Glebe or Westboro. Lots of lovely little shops and restaurants along the street. But it was also small. It felt like a little town within a city. Gillian had a friend who also had a place available, so after seeing Gillian’s place, Eoin picked me up. Eoin also gave me a little tour. Hearing that I was new to the area and had not yet been across the Sydney Bridge, Eoin took me across so I could experience the bridge. He was great, after seeing his place, Eoin, drove me to the third place and offered to swing by later to give me a ride back to MacQuarrie.

So my day consisted of writing a tough exam and then being escorted around town by two complete strangers. It reminds me of the famous quote (from the movie “A Streetcar Named Desire”, which I have never seen, but remember the quote) “. . . I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.” Well that certainly was my case yesterday!!

During the lunch break, I went to the ASG Booth in the exhibitor hall and had my tarot cards done. I am a number 6 for numerology. Naturally she told me all kinds of wonderful things, including that my children are doing fine and I will have no major problems with them and they are both very intelligent kids (she has that right). The rest I will wait and see if it happens, before I discuss it.

In the afternoon I went to Ramesh Naidu’s presentation on Cluster-wide monitoring for RAC. It covered all the components in a RAC Cluster that need monitoring and the importance of doing so, including Cluster services, ASM, network and database. There was also a good overview and explanation of inter-relationship of the basic RAC components.

Alex had been sharing his internet with me, but he flies out tomorrow morning, so I am not sure when I will have connectivity again. Might not be a few days…but will do my best to post ASAP.

We stopped off and got a map of Melbourne and made our way to Bourke Street for lunch. It is an area of town like Sparks Street in Ottawa that is closed off from regular traffic, open only to pedestrians and “the tram”. After lunch we caught the tram ( only one stop ) just for the sake of catching it. We walked through Confederaton square, which was interesting only for the unusual buildings and then took the alley to the canal and finally to the park.

Next we headed to the large cathedral. It was HUGE and glorious and open to the public. It was breath-taking in it’s beauty and architecture. While there, both Alex and myself, made a contribution to the candle fund and lit a candle. After having “no joy” ( no luck) finding the other churches in the area ( both were small and closed), we got on the tram system and headed to the botanical gardens.

The gardens were absolutely gorgeous. It was smaller than the map let on and we managed to do the entire park. At first, I thought we would have to skip parts of it…but we managed to see the entire park. On the last side path we did, I somehow lost my footing and tripped and scraped my other knee. So if ‘Australia does not kill me, it is certainly going to get me in really good shape. We left the hotel by noon and did not get back until nearly 6:30. Even with the few stops for lunch and coffee and tram rides, I musta walked for hours and hours !!!

We went to China town for dinner last night, where Alex had real ( and real hot ) chinese food. A combination pot of some sort. He did not look too healthy while eating it. I admire his tenacity for managing to eat it all. It was far too hot and spicy for me.

Today was day one of AUSOUG in Melbourne. The first session I attended was Penny Cookson’s session on Oracle 11g. It is the same one she gave in Perth and I enjoyed it so much that I decided to go again. After I went to Chris Muir session on load testing APEX and JDeveloper. It was very interesting and he demonstrated the tools for capturing and replaying sets of data. The whole process is much simpler than I thought it would be.

In the afternoon, I attended Penny Cookson’s sesson on APEX, followed by Tony Jambu’s session on Histograms. I presented in the 4pm timeslot today, but having my luggage this time, I was much better prepared. I brought the famous “easy button” and used it to make the presentation on LDAP and Oracle Application Server easy. Hopefully by the end of it all, the participants could say “that was easy” !!

After a quick detour, we headed to Cotteslow beach. It is one of the nicest of the “Western Beaches”. We got changed in the public change rooms and then went swimming in absolutely gorgeous aquamarine water, with lots of waves. Today I learned that if the wave is about to break, you go underwater and INTO the wave. The bigger the wave, the lower you go! If you stay at the top you will get picked up and tossed around. Yup….that happened to me!!

Afterwards, we sat on the beach and chatted for a while soaking up sun. It was sur-real. It felt like I was at a tropical paradise on some warm tropical island. It was hard to believe we were there sitting on the sand, just a few hours away from my having to fly away. I don’t think I had ever before actually done an activity on the same say I fly out…I am always busy rushing and buzzing about. It was amazing. I could definitely live like this !!!

We swung by Connor’s place after where Gillian made me an awesome avacado, ham, cheese and tomato sandwich on fresh home-made bread. Totally scrumptious. The famous Max McDonald decided he would like to see me off at the airport and he came for the drive. Max LOVES construction equipment and pointed out every crane on the way. Max also really enjoyed the tunnel and was practically squealing in delight.

The Perth Airport, is kinda like the old Ottawa airport used to be…only smaller. It was warm and muggy ( 37C in Perth ) and the air conditioning was not working. Would not have been so bad if the plane had not been three hours late. There was a fluid spill in our original plane and we had to have a replacement plane provided.