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I’ve just come back from OracleCode Singapore.  It was a great event – the venue was awesome and the attendees were engaged and interested in the content. But there was one thing that I found amusing (disturbing perhaps?) is the number of times I had people approach me on the topic of scaling.  Conversation would typically run along the lines of:

“What is your recommendation for scaling?”

which almost suggests that scaling is of itself, the end solution here.  Not “Here is function X, and I need it to scale”, or “My business requirement is X, and it needs to scale” but just “I need to scale”

Yesterday I was caught up in an interesting SNAFU at my local Supermarket.  All of the checkout registers shut down, thus making it impossible to pay for groceries.  Later on Twitter, the company apologized as we discovered it was actually a nationwide outage!

Some members of the Oracle community got well and truly into the April Fools Day spirit this year.

There were plenty of very earnest looking blog posts about a new 18c function – “TO_DOG_YEAR”.  You can read their posts here

We had the first AskTOM Office Hours Q&A for Database Administrators yesterday.  Thanks to everyone that showed up, and thanks for the questions.

If you missed it, you can catch a replay here

Take a quick look at this blog post by Jonathan Lewis

https://jonathanlewis.wordpress.com/2017/12/30/nvarchar2/

Anyone that has been working with Oracle for any length of time probably knows that Jonathan has a great depth of knowledge in the Oracle database, and is a regular blogger.  But this post is a good example to inspire anyone that is working with Oracle (or any technology for that matter) to start blogging and sharing their experiences with the community, no matter what their level of experience is.

If you read the post, you’ll see that Jonathan presented a well-crafted test case, and presented a hypothesis about NVARCHAR2 and potential side effects of adding columns of this data type to an existing table.

Here are the blog posts that you hit on most this year.  Thanks for supporting the blog, and always, there will be more content next year !

I was perusing some old content during a hard drive “spring clean” the other day, and I found an old gem from way back in 2001.  A time when the database community were trying to dispel the myth that all database performance issues could be tracked back to,  and solved via, the database buffer cache hit ratio.  Thankfully, much of that folklore has now passed into the realm of fiction, but I remember at the time, as a means of showing how silly some of the claims were, I published a routine that would generate any buffer cache hit ratio you desired.  It just simply ran a query to burn through logical I/O’s (and burn a whole in your CPU!) until the required number of operations bumped up the buffer cache hit ratio to whatever number you liked  

If you are not familiar with the term Village Idiot, then Wikipedia provides a sufficient definition from which I can base this blog post.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Village_idiot

“The village idiot … is a person known for ignorance or stupidity”

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been flying a bit.  First was OpenWorld and OracleCode in New Delhi in India, and from there, I was heading straight from there to Cleveland, Ohio for the GLOC users conference for the first time.  Being a fairly seasoned traveller, this should have been a relatively straightforward affair.

Well… things didn’t turn out that way. 

Colleague Jeff Smith published an interesting post the other day about his “rules and regulations” for blogging, but the overriding theme (Ed: – this is my opinion, I’m not speaking for Jeff)  was that the “what” he blogs about was – anything he’s passionate about, and the “when” was – whenever felt inspired to do so.

That got me thinking about blogging in general.  I think it is safe to say

• there are things in your working life that feel passionate about

(Because not to do so means you’re in the wrong career)