skrhoton.com - Oracle and IT Blogging » Oracle

Making Oracle Difficult

Administrator — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 12:57:15 +0000

Hidden parameters are like a badge of honor in Oracle circles. Knowing more of them make you more knowledgeable, more likable, and have more hair. Of course, the ladies just love a man that know their hidden params.

My problem with it is that it’s dumb to have them, and they cause problems like this:

http://blogs.oracle.com/theshortenspot/2009/03/change_to_hidden_oracle_parame.html

The major issue here is that by having these hidden parameters, you effectively have turned every instance to a beta version, and worse, you reward the risk taker DBA by allowing them to do things that they really shouldn’t be doing. It’s just an unneeded hassle that has very little benefit in my mind.

Workflow: An Unexpected Tutorial

Administrator — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 22:27:47 +0000

Just a quick note to highly recommend this post. It’s principally about Order Event Management, but really does a nice job walking you through the 11i Workflow Editor.

Why no Eclipse love?

sprhoto — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 01:45:27 +0000

Eclipse is a wonderful IDE, which I was reminded of this weekend writing some fairly complex code for work. It wasn’t Java, rather Perl, which was being edited by EPIC (which at some point deserves its own rant on how awesome it is). The point being, I needed to get some code done, and picked up Eclipse and its ridiculous feature set, and got to work. I love going minimalist, but I truly think I write better code with an IDE, in less time. And Eclipse is great.

All of which makes me wonder about the piss poor Eclipse support from Oracle. I was only able to find this on the Oracle site. Now, OEP is nice and all, but there is sooo much more that could be, and should be, done with Eclipse and Oracle, especially compared to where IBM is in this same space.

On Load Testing

sprhoto — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 14:29:00 +0000

(ed. Yes, I suck. I’ll start doing this more. I promise)

One of the things I’ve been thinking about recently is load testing. It seems like the great white whale of Oracle testing, to validate the effects of load on a running system. I think the reason it proves elusive is:

1) It seems so easy. C’mon. You think, there has to be an easy way of doing this…
2) Simple hardware changes between systems make big differences. Getting a ‘perf’ installation to look JUST like production is expense and difficult to justify. No one cares about performance until it sucks.
3) Just what data am I load testing? Things like Swingbench aren’t very specific about what data they are using. And the devil is in the details here – if you aren’t testing transaction for transaction, like for like, you’re screwed.
4) Pseudo testing. ‘We don’t need to do real testing or transactional replay – we can simulate the load. We won’t be pushing transactions through the system.’ Doesn’t work, no matter who says it.

In the 9i days, I was a huge fan of using logminer to get the transactions then replaying it on a sister system. It gave completely accurate results – but it was still costly in terms of time and resources (human and otherwise).

In 11g, Database Replay (discussed here) does the job nicely. I still worry that this kind of functionality strains the redo management a little too much, warping the internals a bit. But, in testing, it tends to get within 5% of the actual results, which is impressive.

Its a slick tool, that may be the final word in load testing an Oracle database.