Category Archives: Blog
Our (not so) personal rumblings about technology that we work with.
Data Quality Institute
Last week I joined a small team of my colleagues at work to attend a one day seminar held by a small (non-profit) start up company called “Data Quality Institute (DQI)”, more precisely by Dejan Sarka and Uroš Godnov. The topic was an introduction to “Data Quality” from organizational and practical (technical) point of the view.
I think I first met Dejan Sarka at his course covering MS SQL Server 6.5 Administration in 1996 (or perhaps 1997?). And since then I always thought `what a pity that he took a MS SQL Server career path instead of Oracle´ :-). Of course, he’s best known as a top MS SQL Server expert, but nowadays I think his main obsession is development and application of different mathematical algorithms to achieve better quality of data stored in our relational database management systems. All demos he showed us were more or less pure SQL statements (with some helper functions written in C#) executed on MS SQL Server and the data mining methods where demonstrated with MS Analysis Services, thought it’s quite possible to recode everything for Oracle RDBMS. At present DQI doesn’t have a prepackaged product with a shiny user interface to demonstrate the power of their methodology, but this is really not their main objective at present (I think!?).
Anyway, it was a mind-boggling day for IT part of our team, that clearly showed us how weak our knowledge about Data Quality really is. Hopefully, with researches and companies like DQI things on this (often neglected) field can only get better and at the same time for the right price as well – a bad news for those overpriced software package vendors out there, I’m afraid. If you care about data quality then make sure you put DQI on your radar. We certainly did.
“Optimizing For Performance” with Jože Senegačnik
Last week I attended a four day seminar held by Jože Senegačnik. The first three days covered theoretical part and if you plan to attend the course be prepared for a hefty amount of information (720+ slides). Considering the amount of material and in-depth knowledge of Jože about Oracle performance tuning and internals, I’m positive you’ll learn something new, no matter how experienced you’re (or you might think you’re;-).
The fourth day was reserved for practical workshop. Jože prepared a test Oracle XE database instance for each participant with sample database and PL/SQL package that we needed to tune during the day. Test scenario resembled TPC-C benchmark.
Since the elapsed time could vary from PC to PC due to the different HW configuration, he told us that we should concentrate on logical I/O (LIO), so we all started with approx. 1,1 million LIO per execution of PL/SQL package, with the goal to lower the LIO under 300K (which we did at the end of the day). And here comes a shameless advert for a profiler from my side. Instead of using tkprof for a trace file analysis we used profiler.
Jože is developing and enhancing his proprietary trace file analyzer called profiler since 2002. This is a command line tool written in C that runs on Windows (I’m not sure about Unix/Linux ports) that can be used instead of tkprof. Output is a html file with correct sql hierarchy and all the necessary statistics and timings. Profiler can be purchased by course attendees for 600€ (a fair offer if you ask me, considering the amount of work put in the development of this tool by Jože). Hopefully, I’ll publish some screenshots as soon as I get my copy of the profiler.
Anyway, if you have a chance to attend this course I’m sure you’ll not regret.
SQL Developer Data Modeling
During my regular RSS feed browsing I noticed Sue Harper announcement of Early Adopter Release of Oracle SQL Developer Data Modelling tool. This is really a good news.
We used to be a vivid Designer/Developer shop in the past but we left this Oracle technology track in 6i time frame. Rightly so, considering that only Oracle (“a damage control section of it”;-) itself believes in long Developer/Designer prospect – let’s face it, both product lines are dead, we should not pretend to believe otherwise (and yes, I read Oracle white paper – State of direction and I still think the same).
What I miss the most are perhaps Designer ER modeling and Reverse Engineering capabilities. Not so long ago we tried Quest Toad Data Modeler which is not a bad tool. It’s cheap, relatively light (thought it can become a memory & CPU hog), easy to learn and use, supports all major RDBMS vendors and can do reverse engineering, but the competition never hurts.
I just downloaded Early Adopter Release and tried a few things. What to say? I do like look and feel of OSDM, but it’s too early to do a fair justice to the product. What I do know is that the price is right ;-).
Sample screenshot:
Cloud Computing
In the last WServerNews[tm] Electronic Newsletter I read interesting quote by Larry Ellison:
Quote of the Week from Oracle CEO Larry Ellison
“The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we’ve redefined cloud
computing to include everything that we already do. I can’t think of anything
that isn’t cloud computing with all of these announcements. The computer
industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women’s
fashion. Maybe I’m an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking
about. What is it? It’s complete gibberish. It’s insane. When is this idiocy
going to stop? We’ll make cloud computing announcements, I’m not going to
fight this thing. But I don’t understand what we would do differently in
the light of cloud computing other than change the wording of some of our
ads.” — CEO Larry Ellison at Oracle’s annual financial analysts meeting.
Bravo Larry! I think and feel the same. It’s amazing how much rubbish “IT Press Community & IT Marketing departments” are producing on the daily basis about “cloud computing”, Web 2.0, etc. Finally, one CEO who has courage to openly address this BS. Thank you Larry!
[Update on September 25th, 2009: Watch this video on Youtube.]
Three Great Ways to Get OOW 2008 content – LOL :)
Apparently someone at Oracle thinks, it’s the perfect time (at the doom of worldwide economy recession) to squeeze some extra money from customer pockets and charge for OOW presentation material. I found their offer one of the most ridiculous (stupid) one that I encountered in the last 10 years. Let’s see what they offer:
- if you’re lucky that you could attend OOW 2008, then you can access pdf’s for free. Big deal, because they’re really not free, considering overpriced registration fee.
- if you attended OOW 2008, but want to get multimedia content (or whatever “On Demand” means), you’ll have to shell out 400$
- of course, you can also get DVD Kit for a mere 200$. (Imho, that’s close to the robbery.)
- anyone who was not a full conference attendee must shell out 700$ to get “On Demand” access. (Yeah right, suckers who missed — or could not afford — OOW will rush and order On Demand access.[grin])
I have a strange filling that Oracle is digging it’s own hole in which it’ll end. If I can hold up with Oracle greedy attempt to charge for multimedia content access, I think it’s unfair to charge 400$ to those who already paid full OOW registration fee. For the first time, OOW pdf’s are not going to be available for free to Oracle community at large. Personally, I think this is not a big deal for us after all, because I’m sure all big names will publish their presentations on blogs. On the other hand it’s certainly a headache for Oracle public affairs department – with such cheap moves they’re casually gambling with their reputation. Nothing new in the West.
Regards,
AlesK
p.s. Next week I’ll attend Microsoft event related to Windows SQL Server 2008 and I certainly don’t expect to be ripped off by them.
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