This is my first blog post that isn’t on a technical subject, but this one has been rolling around in my head the last couple days… Jessica Ridgeway’s home is not far from my own. My ex-husband owned a home just four blocks from hers and my dogs played at the dog park in the open space off of Simms St., two blocks over. I’m 99% sure that Jessica went to the same McDonalds that my youngest son goes to each week before heading over to Boy Scout’s on 100th and Wadsworth and I just shopped at that King Soopers…
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Yes, still catching up on Blog posts… 🙂 Monday is the official start of Oracle Open World. I planned to be onsite at the Enkitec booth from the time the exhibitors hall opened and I was a few minutes early. I hadn’t received an exhibitors ribbon, (one of the few missing from my extended display from my badge…) and so I waited patiently and chatted with a couple of folks who had attended one of my sessions the day before. Upon entering the exhibition hall, you realize why vendors flock to this conference in hopes of promoting their company. The…
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As many know, I’ve taken on the mantle of Training Days Director this year for RMOUG’s Training Days 2013. I don’t have much time in the month of August, but wanted to remind everyone that the submission for abstracts is open and can be found on the main RMOUG website page. We are also looking for volunteers for the 2013 event. Anyone who is interested, please see the website for details and the volunteer page. I’m very thrilled to say that I think this will be the best Training Days conference yet! I’ve attended a number of conferences this last…
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If you desire a subject that will invoke deep passion and often combined with disgust from a group of DBA’s, disaster recovery is the one. It is the subject that rarely we feel our butts are not out there hanging, no matter how much we’ve attempted to secure our environment. I’ve observed a consistent flow of articles, conversation and email discussions on the subject and it is apparent that rarely is the business as aware as the technical specialists, (aka the DBA) of just how vulnerable their environments are. Rarely are the budget dollars allotted to the task of insuring…
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A blog post by Simon Cooper sent up a reminder of a subject that has been at the forefront of my mind for the last couple weeks and is a follow up to my blog post The Superman Conundrum. I’d had lunch with a previous coworker from years ago about less than stellar management behavior directed towards him as an employee and also spoke last week to another previous co-worker about challenges in her current workplace. I’m pretty content with how I am treated at my company. Even though the company does not comprise of techies, they at least attempt to…
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I used to collect comic books when I was a kid, so superheroes are close and dear to my heart, but just not as crazy about the expectation that technical support experts be held to the expecation of infallible like Superman. I’ve both experienced and have discussed with other technical folks regarding this situation that, as of late and in all common sense, just doesn’t make any sense in the technical world. I’ve nicknamed this technical environment situation the “Superman Conundrum”. In my history I’ve *survived* three companies who’ve treated their technical environment in this manner. This is the kind of company where hardware, software, applications and processes fail on…
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As busy as I am these days, I am seeing a light at the end of the tunnel, (no, it’s not a train!) We have a new DBA training that is doing bang up job and I do believe there is some lull in the demands of our busy season. As a database administrator, I’m happiest when I have a number of demanding tasks, along with mysteries to challenge me that often, the business isn’t even aware of the level of importance it is to having resolved until I’ve implemented the resolution and they have reaped the benefits. I have two solid…
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This question seems to pop into my mind consistently over the years as a DBA. I’m a “build it right or don’t build it at all” kind of DBA, but due to my gift for finding problems and fixing them, I find myself more and more often performing the second build on processes/procedures/designs, which I often would like to avoid. I went through this repeatedly at a previous shop and it’s still fresh in my mind, even today… Don’t get me wrong- I think it’s a noble cause when you first come into a new shop and it’s either been neglected or didn’t…
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Do you ever get that feeling that something just isn’t right, but you have no experience to go on and you’re just too busy to check up on it? I thought it was a bit strange that there wasn’t more communication between the RMOUG management and speakers, but it’s my first time as a presenter, so I decided I was being too high maintenance and didn’t follow up, just checking the site periodically for anything that may pertain to persenters. so this morning I noticed that I hadn’t received an email from someone in my Yahoo account and decided maybe…
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I’ve found myself “whining” in the middle of an Oracle Freelist email conversations in regards to patching- or the actual need to patch. As a DBA, I have a love/hate relationship with patching. I love that if there is a bug in a version of Oracle, I can simply log into Metalink, (or My Oracle Support or MOS, what else are we calling it these days? :)) look up the error, verify with the documentation or with Oracle’s support and apply the patch- Yay me! Why am I hatin’ on the patch? My strong feelings are towards the CPU and PSU patching. …
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OK, Who else out there has a 3.8TB tablespace? Anyone, anyone? Bueller, Bueller?? I know, I know- Oracle can support terabytes and terabytes of data in one tablespace, so what is my complaint? Most developers, both database and application do not have the technology to access that data efficiently enough and DBA’s rarely have the disk read and write hardware that will support the kind of pressure that will result from large tablespaces. I am moving more and more of my hardest hit data to ram disk, but it’s expensive and all of us know the challenges at budget time…