This is the text of the “whitepaper” I submitted to DOAG for my presentation on “Core Strategies for Troubleshooting”.

Introduction

In an ideal world, everyone who had to handle performance problems would have access to ASH and the AWR through a graphic interface – but even with these tools you still have to pick the right approach, recognise the correct targets, and acquire information at the boundary that tells you why you have a performance problem and the ways in which you should be addressing it.

Squarespace is a drag-and-drop website-builder for small organizations and creative professionals wanting a polished and functional web presence. Squarespace sites are quick to create and then “just work” without any worries over ongoing maintenance or version updates.

The Use Case

The web is replete with stale websites that are all but abandoned after the initial build. The common scenario I see is of a site developed in a rush of enthusiasm by someone having just enough technical knowledge to stand up a web presence on a platform like WordPress or GetSimple. Perhaps a volunteer burns the midnight oil for a few weeks. Such effort cannot be sustained. Updates bottleneck on the one person who can make them. In short order, the site goes stale. 

The last added function was the cmp function, which we needed to finish the overall goal, of the package: To create a "satisfies" function, that can verify if a specific version is satisfied within a range of versions.

The different ranges, that can be specified are X-ranges (Wildcard, i.e. 1.2.* or 2.*), Tilde-ranges (minimum requirements for minor versions, ~1.2.3, which will allow versions between 1.2.3 and up to 1.2.n, but not 1.3.0) and Caret-ranges and Hyphen ranges. For a full description and detailed example, you should read the following 2 articles:

Technical people tend not to enjoy Keynotes at conferences. We are allergic to content-light “there has never been a better time to invest in our products” fluffy, frou-frou, big picture talks. We want how-it-works meat on the bones of what is served up to us.

OK, it’s a very poor photo but the best I have of Dom presenting. Sorry Dom.