New notebook – MacBook?

It’s time to get a new notebook for working on it (not like others who would buy a notebook to play on it and then recognize that this was just an stupid idea!). And if you want a notebook where you really can work on it you have to buy a Mac of course! So at the moment I really think about it to buy me a new MacBook and search through the apple stores.

Just great!

God, I love this song! The melody the lyric, it is just fantastic and also the video is really nice…. and the babes in it!

WTF?! II

Seems that today is a WTF day. Just look at the network utilization. That’s how you’ve got to do it!

WTF?!

Isn’t that a nice error message:

Tue Jan 22 05:47:15 2008
Propagation Schedule for (AFC999DDA45.LAJK, AFC999DDA45_REMOTEDB) encountered following error:
ORA-00000: normal, successful completion

You can find  such error messages in your alert log followed by an ORA-600 (internal error).
And of course it helps you a lot! But fortunately the propagation name is also written out. So you have at least one evidence.

Global database administrator

I think I’ve to ask my manager for more money. It seems that I’m now the global DBA. Now also my colleagues from India annoying me with questions and their problems. Fortunately (for them) I want that things are running and employees aren’t stopped on their work. But one thing that’s flying around my head: Who is doing my work then?

When patches just introduce new bugs

You know that, or? You get a patch from support and you apply it. Great…. until you find out that it didn’t fix nothing. What it did is to introduce a new bug. I just applied a patch from BEA in Weblogic my application server and I find it really funny what I see now. The patch should just fix a debugging option. Well he didnt’! But what he did: The upper limit of my resource pool is now being ignored. The app server just creates new resources and doesn’t stop until the box is total blocked and out of memory. But the patch shouldn’t do anything related in that area. The only chance is to forcing the server to shutdown.

Thanks support for that “patch”

11g and the new SecureFILE LOB data type (simple quick test)

As I had to run some comparison test Oracle 10g and 11g I also did a little test with the new and fast (as Oracle promises) SecureFILE LOB data type. The test is really little as there wasn’t any time to test the feature totally out, but also this result is impressive. Of course all test occurred on the same box and the same settings:

First the 10g test:

The first step is to create a table with a CLOB data type:

SQL> create table test1 (created_tms date, data clob) tablespace data1 lob (data) store as (cache);
Table created.
SQL>

I used cache to get as much bytes as possible into the buffer cache. If you need performance on LOB anyone would activate this as first step. As next step I wrote a little PL/SQL program  which inserts 100.000 rows with a 4402 bytes (that’s 4.4GB all together!):

SQL> set serveroutput on;
SQL> declare
2    thedata CLOB := TO_CLOB (
3  ‘somedata somedata somedata somedata somedata somedata somedata somedata somedata somedata
4  somedata somedata somedata somedata somedata somedata somedata somedata somedata somedata
……
49  somedata somedata somedata somedata somedata somedata somedata somedata somedata somedata
50  somedata somedata somedata somedata somedata somedata somedata somedata somedata somedata ‘);
51  begin
52    dbms_output.put_line(‘Begin: ‘ || systimestamp);
53    for n in 1..100000 loop
54      insert into test1 values (sysdate,thedata);
55    end loop;
56    dbms_output.put_line(‘End: ‘ || systimestamp);
57  end;
58  /
Begin: 11-JAN-08 04.30.50.203325000 PM +01:00
End: 11-JAN-08 04.32.50.422759000 PM +01:00

PL/SQL procedure successfully completed.

Checking the time stamp you can see that with 10g the inserts took nearly exactly 2 minutes (the last time, I executed it several times). Also you can see that I inserted the actual sysdate in a column too. So now we can compute a average of inserts per second:

SQL> select count(*)/((max(created_tms)-min(created_tms))*24*60*60) from test1;

COUNT(*)/((MAX(CREATED_TMS)-MIN(CREATED_TMS))*24*60*60)
——————————————————-
833.333333

The last 4 runs made (average inserts/second):

840.336134
826.446281
800
833.333333

So, now we going to 11g. First step: We need a table with the new SecureFILE LOB type:

SQL>
SQL> create table test1 (created_tms date, data clob) tablespace data1 lob (data) store as securefile cache;

Table created.

Next, I executed exactly the same procedure:

SQL> set serveroutput on;
SQL> declare
2    thedata CLOB := TO_CLOB (
3  ‘somedata somedata somedata somedata somedata somedata somedata somedata somedata somedata
……
49  somedata somedata somedata somedata somedata somedata somedata somedata somedata somedata
50  somedata somedata somedata somedata somedata somedata somedata somedata somedata somedata ‘);
51  begin
52    dbms_output.put_line(‘Begin: ‘ || systimestamp);
53    for n in 1..100000 loop
54      insert into test1 values (sysdate,thedata);
55    end loop;
56    dbms_output.put_line(‘End: ‘ || systimestamp);
57  end;
58  /
Begin: 11-JAN-08 04.19.06.534822000 PM +01:00
End: 11-JAN-08 04.20.01.703784000 PM +01:00

PL/SQL procedure successfully completed.

Looking at the time stamps the run took less than a minute! Remember, 10g needed around 2 minutes. So lets look to the average inserts per second:

SQL> select count(*)/((max(created_tms)-min(created_tms))*24*60*60) from test1;

COUNT(*)/((MAX(CREATED_TMS)-MIN(CREATED_TMS))*24*60*60)
——————————————————-
1818.18182

We can see that the program made average 1818 inserts per second. Compared to 833 from 10g it’s more than 100% faster! And that’s not bad without any fine tuning I would say!

The last 4 runs made:

1960.78431
1818.18182
1754.38596
1818.18182

I hope I’ve some time left to provide a good test case, but also this quick one showed that the SecureFILE  data type really speeded-up compared to convention LOB, and that’s what Oracle promised!

Best backup advocate ever seen

Just found it in a Pythian Group Blog:

It’s the best advocate for backups I’ve ever seen! You nearly get a feeling of guilt if you continue without backup!

Just got a visit of an old friend

An old friend – Pumsti – who lives now in NYC just visited me as he is here in Austria till Sunday for vacation. It was really nice to see him again after 5 month ago. Unfortunately he hadn’t time to go for lunch with me and just left the office.

New year, new challenges

The new year started with new challenges for myself. Since the first of January I’m now also the DBA of some databases located in the US and all we’ve here in Austria. That means that I’ll work closer with my colleagues in US and it seems that I’ll also get more involved into project over there – and that’s great!