Collaborate and Clifford...

I've been working on my Collaborate University Session which is coming up in 2 weeks!! If you have any interest in 11g, it will be a good introduction to many of the new features in the product. I will be doing lecture and a lot of live demo's. I'm working on the live demo's for AWR right now.

If you have read one of my books you may have read about Clifford. Clifford is not a big red dog in this case, but an old (12+ years), cranky fur ball who I just love to death and somehow manage to get along with.

You see... my history with cats, and that of our family, is checkered. Not that I'm mean to them in any way, but I've never been a big cat fan to be honest. The truth though is that cat's never faired well in this family. There was Snowball who just died... then there was Fred who we lost somewhere between Oklahoma City and Seattle.

Then there was the day I got a call from my ex-wife.... she was crying, and I asked what happened. She said that she had gotten in the car and started the engine. All of a sudden, from under the hood of the car was this poof of fur and a ker-tump. It was cold, the cat wanted to be warm, and you can imagine the rest. Unhappy kids that day I can tell you.

Then there is Fonzie, who is our other cat. Fonzie has had her own close calls, including crawling up in the engine of the car of one of my kids friends. Fonzie got singed, burned and humbled but survived.

Then, there is Clifford. The old man of cats. Clifford sits on my feet, keeping them warm. He growls at Fonzie, making sure that Fonzie is clear on who is the senior animal in the house. Clifford stalks invisible prey (as does Fonzie). Cliffords nemesis is Denali, who is this harmless black lab/Shepard mix. Denali wants to make friends... Clifford doesn't trust Denali any farther than he can meow at her. Clifford will steathly stalk around Denali... watching carefully for some subliminal sign of impending attack. Of course, the only attacking Denali is likely to do is a lick Cliffords face off attack, but Clifford does not seem to understand this.

Hey, he keeps my feet warm! Here are some pictures of Clifford. This is one with him curled up under my desk, snoozing away. Lazy cat!!



Here he is under my wife's desk.... silly cat...

N7598U goes in for it's annual checkup!

So, my Cessna 150 (I own two airplanes, the other is a Mooney M20) is going through it's annual ...

Jared and I went to the airport last Saturday and with our A&P Roberto we opened up all the inspection panels, tore out the interior and so on. That took about two hours or so!

Today Roberto did the inspection of the fuselage which turned out great. I thought I'd share a few pictures with you...

Here is N7598U from her port side. Note the ladder holding up the back end. This was because my son Jared was in the back pulling out all the inspection plates and interior... He's heavy enough that when he's at the back of the airplane it would tip!!



This is from the interior of the airplane looking back towards the tail section. Perhaps not exciting... :-)



Here is where I am usually sitting.... seats and carpet removed for inspection ...



DIRTY CARPET!! Needs replaced badly so I'm going to see if I can't find some...



Roberto my trusty A&P mechanic doing the annual!!



Ok, so this isn't related to Oracle Database 11g but there you are, proof that my life is about more than Oracle!

Collaborate commith and Battlestar Galactica - I'm depressed!

Has it really been almost a month since I've done an update on this blog!?!?!? Wow. Well I've been busy getting over my foot killing me, then the flu and now my knee is killing me. I swear, I'm falling apart!!

I'm also busy preparing for Collaborate '08. I'm doing a University session on Oracle Database 11g New Features. If you have not signed up yet, now is the time!! In the session I will be talking about upgrading to 11g, and highlighting and demonstrating a number of the new features out there. The University sessions are not that expensive and this session will be a great way to get some exposure to 11g!

However, I must confess that I'm a bit depressed about it all too. One of my passions of late is Battlestar Galactica and it's music. I love the music that Bear McCreary does for the series (as poor Lisa can attest too). Bear does a concert every year, playing the music from the series live.. I wanted to goto this thing last year but could not. I just noticed that he has setup this years concert on April 13th... which is the day I'll be in Denver doing my University session. WHAAAAAHHHHH!!! Maybe I can go next year.

Bears music is a great combination of in your face raw music and lighter, sit down and relax music. If you get an opportunity to listen to the soundtrack of season 3 of Battlestar you will not be disappointed. Here is an example that is on YouTube right now... It's called Prelude to War and it's one of my favorites.






Finally, we are doing the annual on 7598U right now. I'm going to goto the airport and take some pictures of the bird now that she's all opened up. I'll post those shortly.

Writing effective book reviews

I was looking at Amazon.com today.... I admit, I like to see how my books are doing. I saw that April Well's book "Everyday Oracle DBA" was on the top 100 (which is a bit rare for that book) and I opened the books page to just take a gander. Let me be clear at the outset that I do not know April, I have no monitary interest in this book in any form whatever. In fact, I have not read her book, so I have no idea if it has any merit.

The book has one Amazon review with a single star. This is the sum of the review:

April J. Wells had done a good job for his earlier 11i DBA book but this book is not good for any level of DBA.

I have more than a few problems with this review.

1. This is a worthless review. What does it say? Nothing at all. Tell me why this book is no good. Give me some examples and some detail. Why waste your time and mine with a pointless review that has nothing to say but some very huge sweeping unsupported statement.

2. Don't embarrass yourself writing a review by saying stupid things. Now, we all say stupid things, I'm probably at the front of the line in that department. If you have something of substance to say, then I can forgive a spelling error, a grammar error or even a mistake. However, within the context of this totally worthless review are two huge errors that just make me cringe. First, APRIL is a Female. Note that the reviewer calls her a male (...his 11i DBA book...). Second, someone tell the reviewer that the product is called 11g NOT 11i.

I don't mind an objective and fair review, even one that is tough. I personally think it should be a requirement that every reviewer of any work be required to at least write a 10 page white paper on some related subject and have it scrutinized by a vast audience. Then, you are qualified to be a critic, in my mind.

I could go on. I've seen a number of examples of this kind but I don't have time right now to ferret them out.

Hidden nugget, if you made it through here.... Did you know that 11g RMAN now offers substitution variables? Now, for example, you can do something like this:

backup as compressed backupset database tag '&1' plus archivelog delete input;
exit;

And start rman like this:

rman target=/ @backup.cmd using 'GOLD_COPY'

and it will create a backup with tag = gold_copy

Thats your nibble of 11g for today!! :-)

What do you think?

Oracle Database 11g XML New Features

I thought I'd share with you some 11g news... that is a goodly number of the new XML related features in 11g simply don't work very well. Performance is the big problem. We had a major project that we were working on that needed to use some of the new 11g XML features and it just sucked wind. I am sad to report that it was *SO* bad that we ended up going with a different database vendor.

This was a huge loss Oracle, particularly after I stuck my neck out and said we needed to use Oracle. At the moment I can't go into details about the problems, but I just wanted to warn you early adopters to test carefully.