Random and occasional thoughts on

I have been neglecting my blogging as of late. I apologize, but will not give excuses, even though I have plenty. Suffice it to say that there are more important things in life than blogging. Since we are half-way through the year, I thought a quick review would be a good idea to see what I have done this year that make me a better Dad, husband, employee, etc. Personal Photography has always been something I enjoy, but late last year, I decided to try and start making some money at it . While it has been fun, I have not had crazy financial success. I have however done a lot of learning and am continuing the quest. I will probably not become a full-time professional any time soon (so my boss can rest easy if he is reading this) but I will continue to work on improving my skills, both in photography as well as the supporting tasks like web development, accounting and marketing. Fitness Last year at this time, I had finished my first Ironman and was still "recovering". I h...

Though I have been an Oracle DBA for about a decade, I have only recently started taking on responsibility for some of the other tiers that are part of Oracle Applications, Portal, Enterprise Manager and Oracle Management Server. I am a part of a small team that has not had much training other than on the job experience in these areas. We are managing pretty well, but are still trying to find easier and better ways to manage things. The latest issue was discovered by one of our team as they were doing some preventative system checks. They noticed some largish log files and added them to the archive and clean script. These new files bring to 4 the number in this particular system and as we were discussing it, we wondered several things. The current list $ORACLE_HOME/mid/webcache/logs/access_log $ORACLE_HOME/mid/j2ee/OC4J_Portal/log/OC4J_Portal_default_island_1/default-web-access.log $ORACLE_HOME/infra/j2ee/OC4J_SECURITY/log/OC4J_SECURITY_default_island_1/default-web-access.log $ORA...

Well, I voted this morning, so that was a good start to the day. I went to a Microsoft Road Show. Those of you that know me might be surprised, but my job also requires that I support SQL*Server in addition to Oracle so I went to try and learn a bit about upcoming versions. I learned that there are some new features that will make things easier to manage, but usually only if you use the more expensive "Enterprise Edition". Took care of some stuff at the office and then hit the gym with DS#1. It was our first night on the weight machines. We gave the legs a good workout. The gym was busy, but not over-crowded. Watched election returns and heading off to bed to dream about buying some new guns before they are banned.

Warning, the following is a technical post that may make your eyes glaze over ... OK, if you are still here, this is a short one about something I recently saw in an Oracle database. First of all, a bit about partitioning. In some databases, you can partition a table in a variety of ways depending on why you want to partition your data. For example, you may want to partition it based on date ranges if you will be deleting older data or if you will generally be accessing data from the same time periods. This way, the database "knows" that it can safely ignore the other partitions outside of the date range you are looking for. This can result in the remaining data being searched much faster than if the whole table needed to be examined. Another way you can partition a table in Oracle is called hash partitioning. In this type of partitioning, the field in question is "hashed" or calculated into a new value that may not uniquely identify that value. For example, a...