Working Notes

DBMS_DATAPUMP exposes all the functionality available via the  impdp and expdp commands available from a command prompt. Most of the time, access is limited to these commands, because they are owned by the 'oracle' user. However, this functionality can be exposed, to users and external programs without forcing them into command-line tools. Use Case Developers are requesting schema refreshes from production all the time and complaining that they aren't fast enough. It's also a time sink, even for the most junior DBA. This is a case for automation, but how? Prerequistes Create a schema specific for containing objects necessary for these types of self-service operations. I like 'MYDBA' (Q: Can you do this? A:Why don't you ask MYDBA.) or can you give this schema a character name, like Orko .(exec ORKO.REFRESH_SCHEMA()) Additionally, a database link is created from the refresh target, to the source. Ideally, this will be a private database link. In my...

So, even if we have a goal plan, as a leader, how do you follow-up? It's all about the meetings. I have a weekly one-on-one meeting for 20 minutes with each direct report. I've told each of them, that the first meeting of the month will be devoted to Goals. They are to bring their plans, and be prepared to discuss what they are doing to meet them. Really, 12 follow-ups towards goals should be enough. It also allows time to adjust, refine, add or even subtract goals throughout the year. Quarterly, mid-year and annual review of goals become significantly easier as they are just an extension of the monthly status meetings. Then your schedule looks like this: Goal Planning and Review Schedule January Goal initialization February Goal follow-up March Q1 Review and refine April Goal follow-up May Goal follow-up June Q2 Review and refine July Goal follow-up August Goal follow-up September Q3 Review and refine October Goal follow-up November Goal follow-up Decem...

Last August, I accepted a new role as a people leader, in addition to my role as technologist. One of my new responsibilities is to lead the goal setting process, and then coach throughout the year to make sure these goals are tracked and met. In my 8+ years of time at my current organization, we have consistently done a poor job of career management and goal setting. So, my 2016 goal is to make it better.  To that end, I'm documenting my high level goals that I'm going to cascade to my direct reports and my plan to follow-up throughout the year.  High Level Organizational Goals Improve Cost Efficiency of team Deliver Critical Projects Career Goals Professional Development Goal Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Goal The high-level org goals are pretty generic and should encompass 90% of daily work, which is 'okay'. The Career Goals should be aligned with the individuals career aspirations. With these goals, I'm challenging them to take 10% of their wor...

As is with most things, the story BEFORE the story is the most interesting. But, I'm going to save that for another time. So, I was troubleshooting a performance issue on a new RAC database and I wanted to see that alert log. Rather than dig around in the file system, I found you can query an X$ table for the contents of the alert log; a blog post by Tanel Poder showed me the way. But this post was for 11g, and ROWNUM <= x  is so 11g. So I added my favorite 12c SQL feature: FETCH FIRST 10 ROWS ONLY; And, if it's not in the last 10 rows, maybe it's in the next 10 row. And if you really need some help digging into the alert log, you can use some analytics and text mining functions to do more of the work, if SED, AWK and GREP aren't your thing.

I presented at the Spring Twin Cities Oracle User Group on social media. I've embedded the slide deck.

When Pebble announced the latest version of thier watch, I was intrigued. I had watched from afar with the first version. I liked the look, I liked the functionality, I just couldn't justify paying for such a device, as I currently didn't even where a watch. Then, I watched the Apple Watch announcement and drooled with anticipation. And then was ultimately crushed when I saw the price tag. I looked at the Apple Watch the same way I look at a sports car, I wanted...badly, but could not justify the functionality for the cost. Then I got an opportunity to pick up a Pebble Time, via someone that ordered via Kickstarter and decided that Android Wear was the the way to go and decided to give it a go. Battery Life I place this at the top, as it still strikes me as counter intuitive to have to recharge my watch. I can realistically get 5 days of use without a recharge. I have a lot of notifications coming to my watch, which likely uses an ordinate amount of battery. Battery life...

I was thinking about The Cloud  and was struck by all of services that I currently rely upon that are in the cloud.  Here's a list of things I use which are important, but not generally things that one may think of as being cloud-based. Evernote I'm bad at taking notes, but I'm great at dumping what ever silly thing pops into my head in an Evernote document. If I ever need that idea, it's there and searchable. I don't use Notebooks or tags very effectively, but it's nice. Todoist Lots and LOTS of task managment apps. I've tried Outlook, and Remember The Milk, but Todoist provides me a best way to manage my task, while being able to focus on the task, and NOT email. Process looks like this: identify task from Email forward message to Todoist categorize, prioritize, and add reminders and due date lather, rinse, repeat every hour.  Spotify / Pandora / SomaFM What I listen to when I'm doing the above. What I don't listen to is iTunes Ra...