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probably the best feature in Oracle 10g

Regularly refreshing Oracle statistics on all tables, indexes and column histograms flushes the shared pool and can occasionally lead to some unexpected and unpleasant surprises.

Thankfully, Oracle 10g automatically maintains 31 days of statistics history which means it is trivial to revert to a previous set in order to restore service to the production environment while you investigate further.

A perfectly valid strategy for statistics gathering is to gather, test, validate, save and leave well alone.

new homework excuse

‘Sorry Sir but I haven’t done my homework because I have really bad stomach ache.’

playing mind games with Mourinho

How the big clubs approach the problem…

Manchester United - Alex Ferguson chooses to invite Jose Mourinho to the boardroom to share a bottle of expensive Portuguese wine. Pointedly applaud United fans who chant ‘Your coat’s from Matalan’ on the way to the tunnel. Then shut up and assemble a team that actually looks capable of challenging Chelsea.

Liverpool - Appeal to the House of Lords, the Citizen’s Advice Bureau and the European Court of Human Rights after Mourinho has the audacity and bare faced cheek to put his finger to his mouth after a Chelsea goal in the Carling Cup Final. Hold a annual 5 minute silence at Anfield for all those fans suffering post traumatic stress disorder as a consequence.

power dressing in reverse

In the 1980’s, some ladies chose to wear dark trouser suits and blouses in an effort to match their male counterparts in the workplace. This fad was known as ‘power dressing’.

One of my least favourite films is ‘What Women Want’ starring Mel Gibson. I also thought Kurt Cobain looked pretty cool in a dress and Dave Grohl managed to carry off wearing a bra (and a baseball cap) without looking ridiculous.

things that go bump in the night

Tuesday - An empty black hold-all crashes to the floor from its precarious position on top of the wardrobe alongside miscellaneous Christmas packages.

Wednesday - A full length mirror falls and rotates through 180’ from being propped up against the fireplace and sandwiched against a box of files. I tried to reproduce the path the mirror must have taken but there simply isn’t enough room for the mirror to have fallen the way it did.

Scottish women rejoice

‘Oh aye Janice, listen. When my Dougie gave up smoking, the transformation was miraculous. He seemed like a new man. It was absolutely fantastic. His breath was fresh and clean. His teeth were gleaming white and he just seemed to have much more energy. Why, one day, he even smiled. And, Janice, let me tell you, my Dougie became a tiger in the bedroom, if you know what I mean.’

UK tabloid Daily Express files for bankruptcy

Finally, after nine years, we now learn that Princess Diana (Queen Of Our Hearts ©) was actually killed by a drunk driver who was driving too fast, in an effort to avoid paparazzi, through a narrow tunnel in Paris.

There was no MI5 conspiracy so the Daily Express no longer has anything to write about.

in praise of CBO

Jonathan Lewis poses a very interesting question:

Have you ever wondered how hard the optimizer has to work to produce a plan ?

Well actually Jonathan, curiously enough I have. Many times, in fact.

Siebel 7.7 (released in 2004) was the first version of Siebel to support the Oracle cost based optimizer (CBO) and pleased a lot of demanding Oracle DBA’s who looked contemptuously on the 10 year old rule based optimizer (RBO) technology and had long petitioned Siebel to finally add support for CBO to improve performance, support table partitioning, parallel query, bitmap indexes and lots of other features they wanted to use (i.e learn about).

reverse engineering

I was convinced I had my address book quadruple-mirrored (Thunderbird, Palm, Gmail and ScheduleWorld) secured on resilient disk storage using RAID-5 with offsite backups.

However, when I came to start writing my Christmas cards, this assumption proved be to false. I think something must have gone awry during my disaster recovery testing in the summer.

Anyway, if you can remember aunties name, street name and town, you can obtain the correct postcode from the Royal Mail.

BBC Sports Personality Of The Year

…has been cancelled due to lack of interest and sporting personalities.

Even UK students couldn’t be bothered to mount their annual, oh so amusing, campaign for Beth Tweddle.