WordPress and Google Sites

My oldest has been working on an assignment for her Computer class. She has to do it on Google Sites. I’ve discovered that while Google Sites is great in that you can insert your Google docs, it is very very clunky compared to WordPress (though the WordPress editor is very slow when typing). Overall, I’m happy I used WordPress.

CenturyLink customer service

Wow, I’ve heard of bad support, but this seems like an intentional ploy by CenturyLink to get more money out of its customers rather than give them a simple solution.

Follow this link for the story – CenturyLink’s idea of customer service

ASM Rebalance Power 11 (Spinal Tap)

Recently I had the chance to use ASM Rebalance to move to new storage without downtime. It was 10g so we had to bring it down to do the voting disk, but what was really much cooler than how well it all worked, was the fact that we could turn the rebalance power level up to 11, and that is one more than 10. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuzpsO4ErOQ&feature=related

Quicky on the commands

select * from v$asm_diskgroup;
alter diskgroup DATA add disk ‘/dev/asmdata1’,’/dev/asmdata2’ rebalance power 11;
alter diskgroup DATA drop DG_001, DG_002 rebalance power 11;
alter diskgroup DATA rebalance power 11;
select * from v$asm_operation;

Windows 7

Windows 7 has actually been pretty good, except they made the UI harder to use than previous versions. Two annoyances – no window menu on upper-left, I’m so used to doubling clicking it to close a window which while two clicks is easier cause you don’t worry about clicking the button next to it when using the right side buttons. Second, the file browser if far less easy to use than the old one, really I find it terribly annoying.

Great, but obvious, ORA- message

Oracle error messages can sometimes be quite annoying and sometimes seem to have nothing to do with the problem. The other day in fact, my Data Guard standby wouldn’t come up complaining about the system data file not being restored from an old enough backup (when it was an active duplication to standby) – the problem was actually an invalid hostname in the tnsnames.ora (yes, really).

Well, Oracle deserves kudos for this one (thanks to Kevin D. for showing me this):

[oracle@server ~] oerr ora 2430
02430, 00000, "cannot enable constraint (%s) - no such constraint"
// *Cause: the named constraint does not exist for this table.
// *Action: Obvious

Performance implications of the placement of an aggregate function in SQL

Just happened across this last week in some old documentation I’d kept. I ran into this years ago and it is a good example of the care you should take in using aggregate functions. I believe this was in an Oracle 10g database. I also believe when it was in PostgreSQL this didn’t cause an issue.

Performance implications of the placement an aggregrate function

What is the correct way to trace a session in Oracle

I was wondering this recently. Well,  here is what I figured

Is RMAN the devil?

RMAN is a great tool, but is it the Devil in disguise?

A fellow DBA borrowed my “Oracle Database 10g RMAN Backup & Recovery” book.  He noticed the last page is 666. 😉

Oracle Data Pump export a schema minus the data for one table

Got this request last week. Can you send us an export of the schema, only without any data for the log_events table (because it is big and they don’t really need it for what they’re doing.)

Here’s the simple way I did it

Storage of NUMBER datatype in Oracle

This seems to come up at work every few years, and it is interesting and worth noting if you develop or administer Oracle databases. The precision of a number datatype in Oracle is only there to limit the precision, not to limit how much space a number can take up. Oracle stores numbers not as a string as you might initially think when you look at a definition, say NUMBER(10). Oracle stores numbers in scientific notation – “Each value is stored in scientific notation, with 1 byte used to store the exponent.” See the manual for more details.

Due to storing a number this way, it is possible for a number that is larger numerically than another number to actually take up  less storage. See this example I prepared at the work the other day:

SQL> create table jed (col1 number(5), col2 number(20));
Table created.
SQL> insert into jed values (34258,100000000000);
1 row created.
SQL> select col1, vsize(col1), col2, vsize(col2) from jed;
      COL1 VSIZE(COL1)                COL2 VSIZE(COL2)
---------- ----------- ------------------- -----------
     34258           4        100000000000           2