Blog in Isolation

There is a radiant darkness upon us

Oracle

membership form for BAAG

I own up. It’s a fair cop. It is 27 years and 5 months since my last confession. Since then, I have sinned, Holy Father. In fact, I have committed an absolutely heinous crime. Please forgive me for I have submitted multiple random guesses.

May the high priests (and priestesses) of the BAAG movement, please have mercy on my wretched soul.

Recently, I have been guilty of supporting and even proposing a multitude of ‘any guesses’, all of which were proposed as possible solutions to solve a critical system problem on a production system:

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go faster stripes

This Bluehost powered blog is now FastCGI enabled. You may find the site faster but, then again, hyperlinks may return completely random articles. You will probably struggle to tell the difference.

Which reminds me of a funny story…

I am currently working in the North East on an ’escalation’. An ’escalation’ is characterised by frequent, lengthy conference calls with bi-hourly status updates, the phrases ‘high-profile’, ‘alternative technical solutions’, ‘severe degradation’, ‘impacting the bottom line’, ‘CIO visibility’, ‘options for the weekend’ and the perennial favourite: ‘any progress yet ?’

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ode to Tom

You never press ‘Publish’ any more
When I read your feed
There’s no articles like before
In your blog
You’re trying hard not to show it
But baby, baby I know it
You’ve lost that blogging feeling
Oh, that blogging feeling
You’ve lost that blogging feeling
Now it’s gone, gone, gone
Oh Tom

Now there’s no comments
In your blog when I read you
And Tom you’re forgetting to comment
Little things I do
It makes me just feel like crying baby
‘Cause Tom, something beautiful’s dying

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the most important decision of my life

…lies in your hands, dear reader.

Another baby when my wife is 57 years old ? - discuss.

My job title when I joined Siebel in April 2003 was ‘Junior Architecture Specialist’. Four years later, it transpires that I am now officially entitled to call myself ‘Principal Architecture Specialist’.

However, I have elected not to change my business cards and .signature as I am simply not worthy. Please remember that I have worked with some very talented individuals (past and present).

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attention all Oracle bloggers

Dust off that blogroll. Highlight your best technical posts. Update that photo in the ‘About’ tab. Polish the colours on your theme. Prime the hit counter and prepare for an invasion from the Web 2.0 ‘A’ listers.

Justin Kestelyn (Oracle Technical Network) sparked some an interesting and though provoking discussion when he puzzled over the relatively low profile of Oracle Corporation in the Web 2.0 community.

Robert Scoble picked up the thread (twice) and there are some interesting comments. Certainly, I’d love to see a Scoble podcast from Oracle Corporation.

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my plans for the future

The climax of the football season is currently dominating my life somewhat. However, I feel obliged to inform the world of my exciting plans for the next fortnight.

Following next week’s UK Bank Holiday, the scheduling goddess informs me me that I will be doing a ‘brown bag’. This means that next Tuesday will see me wandering aimlessly around the shopping precinct in Reading, spontaneously shouting at shoppers while clutching four cans of Special Brew in a brown bag.

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the sole responsibility of a production Oracle DBA

Many years ago, I managed a set of Oracle databases for various clients.

However, I was not an Oracle DBA. I was an Unix/C developer who happened to progress to Pro*C, PL/SQL and some ETL projects for data warehouses.

I was an mediocre development DBA because I was a mediocre developer and I had a keen interest in performance tuning i.e. I was (am remain) a ‘glory hunter’.

I was not a production DBA because I didn’t have the training, experience and discipline required for change controls and saying ‘No’.

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complete, utter, 100%, unmitigated failure

‘Holy Father. It is almost 31 years since City’s last trophy. Since then, I have:

  • Failed to install Oracle 10gR3 Grid Control to experiment with the Siebel Management Pack.
  • Failed to configure bridged networking on my Siebel 8.0/Oracle 10g/RedHat VMware environment. Consequently, I have just deleted the complete 20GB environment in a fit of pique.
  • Nearly exploded at the woeful response to a ticket with Bluehost asking why two functioning cron jobs were a) removed and b) failed to work when reinstated.
  • Failed to resolve a trivial but incredibly annoying problem with AVG mail filter.
  • To top it all, I don’t even know the difference between MB and Mbps.

‘My dear son. You are indeed a worthless sinner. May the Lord may mercy on your soul. To seek forgiveness and redemption, please say three Hail Marys, one Our Father and request a transfer to pre-sales.’

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don't believe the truth

I am currently trying to assist with a couple of long standing Service Requests. This type of work is interesting because the issue is normally pretty deep rooted and complicated. These escalations are also very challenging because lots of very intelligent people have already spent a lot of man-hours investigating the problem.

Anyway, one of the first steps is to review associated Service Requests and try to determine whether they are indeed related to the issue under investigation.

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Top Of The (Oracle) Blogs

Oracle blogs I read by Technorati ranking. Cue Led Zeppelin’s ‘Whole Lotta Love’.

  1. Life After Coffee - Jon Emmons - Rank: 18,499 (405 links from 190 blogs)
  2. The Tom Kyte Blog - Tom Kyte - Rank: 24,521 (345 links from 145 blogs)
  3. Oracle BI and DW - Mark Rittman - Rank: 31,939 (458 links from 112 blogs)
  4. Oracle Scratchpad - Jonathan Lewis - Rank: 44,328 (242 links from 83 blogs)
  5. Eddie Awad’s Blog - Eddie Awad - Rank: 60,122 (175 links from 62 blogs)
  6. Doug’s Oracle Blog - Doug Burns - Rank: 83,319 (216 links from 46 blogs)
  7. Kevin Closson’s Oracle Blog - Kevin Closson - Rank: 87,506 (100 links from 44 blogs)
  8. The Oracle Sponge - David Aldridge - Rank: 102,376 (72 links from 38 blogs)
  9. The Oracle-Base Blog - Tim Hall - Rank: 112,139 (57 links from 35 blogs) 10 So What Co-Operative - Jeff Hunter - Rank: 154,372 (62 links from 26 blogs)
  10. Pete-s Random Notes - Peter Scott - Rank: 161,008 (92 links from 25 blogs)
  11. Radio Free Tooting - Andrew Clarke - Rank: 168,201 (70 links from 24 blogs)
  12. Oracle 10g Blog - Chris Foot - Rank: 168,201 (51 links from 24 blogs)
  13. Oracle WTF - William Robertson - Rank: 194,372 (70 links from 21 blogs)
  14. Dizwell Informatics - Howard Rogers - Rank: 194,372 (61 links from 21 blogs)
  15. OracleBlog - Robert Vollman - Rank: 194,372 (44 links from 21 blogs)
  16. Oracle Stuff I should have known - Andy Campbell - Rank TBD (55 links from X blogs)
  17. We Do Not Use Blogs - Mogens Norgaard - Rank: 259,194 (26 links from 16 blogs)
  18. Laurent Schneider OCM - Laurent Schneider - Rank: 322,022 (176 links from 13 blogs)
  19. Oracle Newbies Blog - Lisa Dobson - Rank: 322,022 (29 links from 13 blogs)
  20. OraMoss Oracle - Jeff Moss - Rank: 347,530 (150 links from 12 blogs)
  21. Confessions of a database geek - Beth - Rank: 347,530 (32 links from 12 blogs)
  22. Oracle Alchemist - Steve Karam - Rank: 413,015 (13 links from 10 blogs)
  23. The Eric S. Emrick Blog - Eric Emrick - Rank: 413,015 (12 links from 10 blogs)
  24. Oracleoid Blog - Alex Gorbachev - Rank: 656,741 (27 links from 6 blogs)
  25. BobaBlog - Robert Baillie - Rank: 656,741 (7 links from 6 blogs)
  26. Igor’s Oracle Lab - Gary Myers - Rank: 766,996 (6 links from 5 blogs)
  27. DBA’s R US - Nuno Souto - Rank: 1,220,048 (11 links from 3 blogs)
  28. Optimal DBA - Daniel Fink - Rank: 1,220,048 (11 links from 3 blogs)
  29. Oracle on Windows - Edward Whalen - Rank: 1,724,033 (3 links from 2 blogs)
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