October 2013

WordPress 3.7.1 has been released. The announcement is here and the changelog is here.

If you go on to your blog now, you will have the option of manually initiating the upgrade in the normal way. If you wait a few hours, it will magically update itself for you.

• The Terminator: A few hours later it begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time… In a panic, they try to pull the plug….
• Sarah Connor: WordPress fights back.
• The Terminator: Yes. It launches its missiles against the targets in Russia.
• John Connor: Why attack Russia? Aren’t they our friends now?
• The Terminator: Because WordPress knows the Russian counter-attack will eliminate its enemies over here…

I’ve warned you!

A customer called and wanted to know why the development database was so much slower than production when both databases were on the same type of machine and same type of storage.

To analyze the situation, the same query was run on both databases with

       alter session set events '10046 trace name context forever, level 12';

and sure enough, development (SID=dev) showed average I/O almost twice as slow as production:

One of the greatest advancements in EM12c from previous Enterprise Manager versions is the auto-deployment.  I have a number of clients with Windows environments and upon another recent search on Google, I found that there was a consistent and solid recommendation of installing Cygwin, (or another shell emulator installation) to utilize the auto-deploy.

I really enjoy being a technical guy. So far in my career I’ve made development choices favoring a technical path over other options. It’s been a great ride – I’ve worked in small teams and large teams; consulting roles and in-house roles; architecture/engineering roles and operations roles; big databases and little databases; environments with a few databases and environments with thousands of databases.

I’ve never been anywhere which had everything right. Also, my own ideas about what’s “right” are still evolving today. I have a habit of trying to be around people who are smarter than me… over the course of my career, my own knowledge and experience with Oracle have grown exponentially and yet I’ve never had trouble continuing to feel like a junior DBA. (In particular, my invitation to the Oak Table made this very easy!)