Thursday, December 11, 2008

Up and Down, Virtuality, Saving, ASM, The Wall, Flashback, FBI

Better Upgrades Through Downgrades

I always like to be able to back things out. Coskan's Approach to Oracle has a posting today on how to use a utility before doing an 11g upgrade that will allow you to downgrade the EM repository back to a lower level. 

Virtual Book

Eddie Awad links to an excellent Oracle tool today. It lets you create a virtual book on a particular Oracle topic (no, you can't use it to make virtual detective novels, unless they are database forensics mysteries). Here' the link. 

Saving the Green

Everyone is trying to save a buck. The Fusion ECM blog has some good links on ROI and related topics, and how to leverage Web 2.0 into saving money (yes, I know leverage is probably not the best word to use at this point, since that always seems to be what gets us in trouble, leverage, followed by overextension, followed by bubble-popping). Anyway,  the link is here. One of the points it makes is: Like travelling? Well don't! Virtualize meetings. I think there is no doubt about it, the trend is toward more and more virtual meetings. Concalls are useful, but you lose a lot of interpersonal contact without being in a person's presence, so virtual meetings, with ever more accurate representations of the people participating in the meeting, are definitely somewhere in the future, and decreasing travel budgets may actually help push the technology forward.

ASM Striping

Ardent Performance Computing has a good brief posting on clarifying what is entailed in by ASM size here. 

The Wall

Life After Coffee has an interesting find in this post, the Oracle web page I am the Node. I admit that the visual effect made my eyes hurt. I admit that the data it returned was seemingly semirandom, a huge collection of various and sundry items, old and new. But I also enjoyed zapping into things at random to see what popped up. After a bit you learn to stop it spinning around wildly so you can actually read something. This is good, since if you keep looking at the wall in motion for too long you end up looking like the little pod creature orbiting the wall. And no, we don't offer dramamine before visiting the site, though perhaps we should.

Flashback

An article focusing on a couple of really nifty 11g flashback features at OTN. Flashback is a feature that chews up a lot of storage, but is definitely the best thing since sliced bread. The ability to move whole DBs, or parts thereof, back and forth in time gives the DBA pretentions of godlike power. If you buy your DBA enough storage to implement flashback and then find them pacing the hall muttering: "It's alive!" please medicate them and contact support.

FBI

Nah, not the Feds, the function based index. Have you always thought those are tricky? Well, actually, yes, they can be. Richard Foote's blog has an excellent posting on some of the hidden problems that can be encountered with these very handy indexes and statistics.

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