blogging

I’m really pleased to see that Richard Foote has started a series on Index Organized Tables. You can see his introductory post on the topic here. As ever with Richard, he puts in lots of detail and explanation and I’ve been a fan of his blogging style for a long time.

I’ve got a few posts on the topic left to do myself, maybe this competition will spur me to get on and write them!

I don’t carry business cards around with me. I just never, ever think to get some done (either properly or with my trusty printer) and maybe this says something about my personal failings to sell myself. If anyone wants to contact me I tell them my email address and if they look confused I just say “ahh, Google me”. You see, having a very odd Surname means I am easy to find. {Reading this back I guess it could be interpreted as saying “I am so famous you will find me” but that is way, way, way from my meaning – I am going on the very unusual name that I have and nothing other than that!}

I think I’ve posted before about how deep a good DBA should dig into solving issues, as opposed to fixing them as soon as possible and moving on to the next urgent task.

Well, a friend of mine, Neil Chandler, has just posted on this topic, giving his reasons why you don’t run a 10046 trace on production. Neil raises some good points about how difficult it can be to get permission to do something as intrusive as a 10046 trace on a production system as well as the fact that most problems can be solved way before you get down to the level of tracing. Especially if it is not your job to go around solving the problems that have stumped the in-house team, which is the lot of many people who are recognised as being very good with Oracle.

Something I have been pondering for a while now is should I join in with the “happening crowd” and sign up to Twitter? I know, I’m two or three years behind the times on this, but more and more people who I like have signed up – even Doug Burns now uses twitter and he used to be negative about it in the same way as I. I’ve asked a few of these friends what they think.

I’ve recently looked back at some of my earlier blog postings and also some notes I made at the time I started. I had a few aims at the start, pretty much in this order:

• A place to put all those Oracle thoughts and ideas, for my own benefit
• Somewhere to record stuff that I keep forgetting
• I’d started commenting on other blogs and felt I was maybe too verbal on them
• To increase my profile within the Oracle community
• To share information, because I’m quite socialist in that respect
• To learn more

It very quickly morphed into something slightly different though.

Firstly, it is not really somewhere that I record thoughts and ideas or where I record stuff that I forget. When I am busy, I sometimes only get half way to the bottom of resolving an issue or understanding some feature of Oracle. I tend to create little documents about them but I can lose track of them. I initially intended to put these on my blog. The thing is though, I don’t feel I can blog about them because I might be wrong or I raise more questions than I answer. I don’t think a public blog about technology is a good place to have half-baked ideas and I certainly don’t want people:

1. reading and believing something that is wrong
2. thinking I do not know what I am talking about
3. seeing my rough notes as boy are they rough, often with naughty words in them and slang. Converting them to a familly-friendly format takes time. 

You see, there is the point about increasing my profile in the community. Part of me hates the conceit that you have to be seen as all-knowing or never wrong, as no one is all-knowing and never wrong. In fact, I think most of us find it hard to like people who put themselves as such.  But if I put out a blog saying “it works this way” and I am wrong or I simply say it in a clumsy way or I assume some vital prior knowledge, I could be making people’s lives harder not easier, so I spend a lot of effort testing and checking. It takes me a lot, lot longer to prepare a technical blog than I ever thought it would before I started. And yes, I accept I will still get it wrong sometimes.

Another consideration is that I make my living out of knowing a lot about Oracle. If I post a load of blogs saying something like “gosh I wish I understood how Oracle locks parts of the segment as it does an online table rebuild and handles the updates that happen during it”, then I obviously don’t know about that. Or I put out a post about how I currently think it works and I’m wrong. Tsch, I can’t be that good! How much should I have to think about how I am selling myself as a consultant? There is a difference between being liked and being perceived as good at what you do. If you want someone to design a VLDB for you, you probably don’t care if s/he is a nice person to spend an evening in the pub with - but you certainly care if they seem to be fundamentally wrong about oracle partitioning.

Balancing that, if you saw my recent post on Pickler Fetch you will see that I was wrong about a couple of things and there was some stuff I did not know yet. But I learnt about those wrong things and lack of knowledge, so I feel good about that. That was one of my original aims, to learn. Not only by having to check what I did but by people letting me know when I was wrong.

What about style? I can be quite flippant and, oh boy, can I go on and on. I know some people do not like this and, if you want a quick solution to an oracle problem, you probably do not want to wade through a load of side issues and little comments. You just want to see the commands, the syntax and how it works. Well, that is what the manuals are for and there a lot of very good web sites out there that are more like that. If you do not like my verbose style then, hey that’s absolutely fine.  But I like to write that way and so I shall.

So after over 2 years of blogging, I seem to have settled into a style and my aims have changed.

• I try to be helpful and cover things in detail.
• I try to polish what I present a lot, lot more than I do for my own internal notes. Maybe too much.
• I’m going to write in a long-winded way that some people will not enjoy but it is my style.
• I’m going to try and worry less about looking perfect as I am not.

I suppose what I could do is start a second, private blog with my half-baked stuff on it. But I just don’t think I’ve got the time

I’m curious – is anyone visiting my blog seeing some form of advertising popping up?

I ask as there is a section on “links clicked” in the stats page and rather than the usual traffic of people clicking on the oaktable logo or people in my blogroll, the most common link is for ecopressed-dot-com. I’ve never heard of them. When I go in to my blog I don’t seen anything but then it knows it is “me” so maybe it would not.

I’m not too bothered about it, after all WordPress are hosting my blog for pretty much nothing {I pay them some outrageous sum of a few US dollars a year so I can alter my CSS file and thus make the layout wider}. I’m just curious.

I wonder if this is a result of increased traffic to my site? I’m still fairly small-fry compared to lots of other sites but as I’ve been putting out more stuff of late I think I’m going up the web rankings. Oddly enough, those pictures of bullets I put on last Friday’s philosophy have been very popular. I can’t help but feel that most people looking for information on bullets are going to find a blog about IT somewhat disappointing

Last week’s Friday Philosophy was a bit of a moan about how hard I find it to make nice graphics, how long it takes and no one seems to care that much about the results.

Well, after those two days effort on the pictures and the afore mentioned moan, irony of irony, someone has stolen one of my graphics!. So someone likes my efforts . It is the one that represents how you scan down the levels of an index and then link across to the table via the rowid.

Before I go any further I better make it clear that I am not really upset about it at all . In fact, since the scoundrel included a link back to my web page and they are considerably better known than I, my little blog has had a big up-swing in traffic as a result, which is nice. Mind you, as the person who borrowed my diagram is SQL Server expert Steve Jones, of SQLSeverCentral/Redgate fame, most of my new audience are probably pretty focused on the SQL Server RDBMS and not Oracle, so unlikely to make many return visits unless they are work across the RDBMS boundaries.

What also gives me a little smile is that I have stumbled over the fact that I myself, back in November 2009, was looking for such a diagram {of the way Oracle steps down the index to the leaf blocks, gets the rowid and then straight to the table row} to ‘borrow’ for a post of my own on BLevel and heights of indexes. I even confessed at the time to looking for and failing to find one to use…

Humour aside, it set me to thinking though. Borrowing content is a perennial and thorny issue.

Occasionally someone will start putting content out on their blog or web site and it turns out that much of that content is directly obtained from other peoples’ blogs and websites – copy&pasted straight in or with little changes. That is generally seen by the original author as unacceptable and once they find out they object. In such cases it sometimes seems the culprit is unaware of this being a transgression and, once it is explained that they have effectively stolen many hours or days of someone’s efforts, they remove the material. Others seem aware this is theft but do not care until caught. Occasionally the culprit sees no error in their ways at all, even when challenged, as the material had been put “out there” so they now consider it free to all. I certainly do not agree. Perhaps the worst thing you see though is people including parts of published books, or even putting the whole book out there for download. Such people should of course have their hands stapled to their backsides in punishment, that is simple theft. Writing blogs takes a long time and effort, writing technical books takes forever and monumental effort. I know from friends that the financial return for such efforts is pitiful enough as it is.

On the other side of the coin, many of us put our stuff out there on the web to be read and used and are very happy for it to spread, to be borrowed from and disseminated. Like nearly all DBAs and developers, over the years I have written lots of little SQL scripts to pull information out of the data dictionary or do little database management tasks. I happily give away copies of these to anyone who wants them (and you can get them off my web site if you like, but just pretend it is not my website, as it is truly awful). All I ever ask is that whoever takes them leaves my name in them.

I think that is core to the issue. I suspect many of us bloggers are happy for small parts of our output to be borrowed so long as credit is given. I certainly am {but please note, this is my personal opinion – other bloggers may object very strongly and any repercussions on you in respect of taking material from other blogs and web sites is your concern}. However, Volume is also part of it. The larger the chunk you borrow, the more acknowledgement I would need to be happy about it. Borrowing a single diagram or a paragraph out of a page of text is OK, given I am cited for it. Taking most of a post would probably not, unless you asked first, were really nice about it and about me. Nicking a set of course notes I wrote is certainly unacceptable, no matter how much you put “originally written by that wonderful Martin Widlake” on it.

So, I think you need to cite the source as “payment” for using it. Perhaps the best way to do it is by simply linking to the material rather than putting it on your blog/website, but that does not work if you need the content within yours to make sense. In which case, I think Steve Jones’ approach of putting the content in his and including a link is reasonable. It might have been nice if there was a comment saying where the image came from but I can live without it. Despite my joking about it giving me more hits to my blog, it does not matter that his is a popular web site and gives me more hits. Even if a site gets no traffic, if someone has borrowed a small part of my output but cited me as the source, I’m cool with that.

The problem though is judging what is a “small” part to borrow and what is acceptable to the original author. We all perceive such things differently. So the safest thing is to ask the original author. If I want to use an idea that came from someone else in one of my blogs or a solution they came up with, I always ask and I ask if they want to be cited. This includes discussions in email or in the pub. I ask. If when preparing my blogs I learn a lot from someone else’s blog, I stick in a link and a comment, even though I will have written my own text. I hope that so far I have not upset anyone when I borrow a little.

Photos are a different issue though. I am not going to even attempt to cover that one!

Snowdon viewed from Yr Aran

My Blog has been unforgivably quiet of late. All I can say in my defence is “work”. I’ve blogged about this before, and mentioned it in presentations, but most of us are too tied up in the day job to test things properly, let alone blog or in other ways present on how things work. We fix the problem in front of us and move on to the next “critical, absolute priority 1A plus, must-be-fixed-today” issue. So like most of you, that has been my life for…ohh, months.
{I makes me even more thankful to those who continually find the time to test properly and blog about what they have found, on top of their “earning” work}

However, my working life is looking like it will return to a more reasonable balance soon.

So, this blog post is a statement of intent that I WILL be blogging again in the next week or so. OK, so this post is not of any use to anyone reading, but it means I now feel morally obliged to follow up on the statement (and that is actually the intent of this blog post).

I’m going to blog on two technical areas.

One is gathering Stats, which I am utterly sick of and tired of doing in my working life. So I figure if I tell anyone who will listen all I know about gathering system, fixed object, dictionary and object stats and give some hints as to what I have come to think of as methods and techniques for doing so, I might not have to think about it any more. I can tell people to read my blog and not hire me to do it for them. Maybe a career limiting move but I was never that bright

The second topic will be Index Organised Tables (IOTs). They are great. Ohhh, they have drawbacks and concerns, after all no tuning trick is For Free and I know one person (who I shall refer to only as Dave) who’s career was almost destroyed due to an Oracle 9 to 10 “feature” on IOTs involving corruption. But IOTs are {in my opinion} a vastly under-used feature of Oracle and could be useful to many Oracle sites. If anyone wants help with them, I’ll let you hire me for that and I will come and help gladly. So long as no bl00dy stats are involved

So, having drawn my own line in the sand to do some Technical Blogs (I actually have enough waffle-based Friday Philosophy topics to last 2 years but have promised myself to balance them with decent technical posts) I better go and write them.

Counting down. The details are finally organized — this year, we have not one, but TWO great prizes at the Oracle OpenWorld Bloggers Meetup.

1) T-shirt art contest on stylish Pythian designer t-shirts — one lucky blogger will receive an HP X310 Data Vault, generously sponsored again this year by HP.

2) For the best, most creative blog post about the meetup itself, Pythian is giving away an Apple TV. But, there are a few small rules:

1. the blog post must use as many names of people in attendance as possible.
2. the blog post must be readable. It needs to make sense to someone who wasn’t there. It must be a story and not a list.
3. the blog post must contain one other small tidbit of information about each individual that you’ll uncover during your “networking” as you weave your fascinating stories of the evening (like their blog name, a contact detail, favorite color, title, hobby, cat’s name, certification, what they were drinking, how much they had to drink…).
4. the entry must be posted by midnight on Sunday the 26th of September. Please reference this post in your blog and it should be automatically picked up by the blog engine and posted in the comment as a track-back (if it doesn’t appear in the comments for some reason — please do post the link in your comment!

Can you tell we’re trying to encourage a little more mingling? :)

And last but not least — all this couldn’t be happening without Vanessa Simmons who’s been orchestrating all of the fun this year. Thanks Vanessa!