8 Useful Technical Posts ...

That number in the title is not a joke or an attempt to drag out the pain. However, OraNA has been flooded with '8' posts this week, so I thought it worthwhile to post a quick list of some really nice technical posts I've noticed over the last couple of weeks. I was just waiting for a weekend opportunity to clean out my pockets, so to speak.

First of all, I liked both the technical content of Tanel Poder's blog on Systematic application troubleshooting in Unix and also the rants, despite the fact he tried not to spend too much time on the latter I hope he produces a few more blog posts where he illustrates the V$SESSION_WAIT approach, too. Although I know he's covered this in the past, more examples as he comes across them would be useful. What I liked about this approach is that Tanel makes no attempt to dazzle you with science (although, believe me, he's more than capable of that if you want!).

Next, Greg Rahn showed an example of Oracle 11g: Real-Time SQL Monitoring Using DBMS_SQLTUNE.REPORT_SQL_MONITOR. Very nice, indeed, although I suppose it requires the Tuning Pack. I'll definitely be including that in the up-coming course, though!

A man who knows about these things compares the HP DL580 and DL585.

Probably of more interest to me than anyone else, but I noticed a comment from Jonathan Lewis about the use of the term DFO when discussing Parallel queries. We'd had a brief discussion about this before because I wasn't sure about how this was used in one of the Openworld presentations, but it looks like I've learnt something new after Jonathan followed it up with Greg Rahn.

I keep hearing about people running into performance problems after upgrading from 9i to 10g and I suspect that many of them could be something to do with a change in the default behaviour of DBMS_STATS, as explained by Richard Foote.

Tim Hall drew attention to the 11g Data Recovery Advisor. I'm sure that's going to be useful at more sites than you might imagine. I think DBA skill levels are falling because they're supporting multiple DBMS and hundreds of databases, leaving less time to become recovery experts. (Which isn't to say that I think that's a good thing!)

Oh, and lest anyone forget, it's CPU time again.

Possibly my favourite of the bunch, though, was Glenn Fawcett's Organizational stove-pipes complicate database storage configurations. Glenn illustrates a better example of what I was trying to get at in this post (and the following comments, including the one from Mike Scott in particular). It's not the technology itself that's necessarily at fault but the type of misconfiguration Glenn describes in his blog. I'm equally pleased that he highlights why organisational structure invites these problems.

Hopefully there'll be something in there you haven't seen already. Enjoy.