Idaho...

I'm in Idaho this weekend for a family reunion. It's 109 out here... 109??? Who's idea was it to have a family reunion, at a campground, in the middle of the SUMMER!?!?!?!?

Idaho is pretty, I'll give it that. From our Hotel room it actually looks a bit like Oklahoma, where I am from. It's a bit hilly (not all of Oklahoma it flat) and the grass is in it's summer hue, Yellow. It might sound ugly, but I actually find it quite pretty.

The 11g New Features book is moving along. I am about 90% done with Chapter 5 which includes Database Replay and the SQL Performance Analyzer. The good news is that Database Replay works great in the Beta. I was able to capture a workload from one database, move the related workload files to another database and replay them. Simply an amazing process. Oracle provides the ability to control things like think time and so on, so you can adjust the replay "volume" if you will. Database replay will make testing new upgrades or hardware so much easier.

SQL Performance Analyzer is another story. While it's documented in the Performance Tuning Beta documents, the Oracle supplied PL/SQL procedure is not in Beta 4, which is what I'm currently running. Beta 5 is out, but I was going to install it after I got done with Chapter 5, maybe I need to install it now though.

I'm running three different Oracle databases for this book, moving between the different ones as it suits me. I'm running on the Win platform, and also I'm running a Linux single node version on top of VMWare. Finally I've got a VMWare RAC cluster running too. All in all, a fun experience.

Well, off to the Saturday version of "How sunburned can you get?" - More later!!