Tanel Poder has started what looks to be an excellent series of posts on his blog on the subject of Oracle diagnostic events (eg 10046 traces) at this location.

I ranted previously about cyclists. Tonight, coming home from work, I saw the biggest moron on two wheels yet.So there we were at a junction. I was at the head of the queue on a dual carriageway. There was traffic crossing from our left and a cyclist arrived up the inside of a large van and cycled to the head of the queue and pulled in front of the van!

Last night Alison found the first frog of the year in our driveway. The snow that has been around for a couple of weeks now had vanished as the temperature raised itself to a heady 6 degrees C and out she came, (the frog, not Alison!) heading for the big pond. Last year, on March the 9th (Alison’s birthday), I counted over one hundred froggy heads in our pond by the front door.

For many years, various big guns - and a lot of smaller ones - in the Oracle world have been advocating, nay demanding, that we [almost] always use bind variables in our SQL code. The reason is simple, it’s shareable, efficient, reduces parsing and allows the application to scale up to more and more users. Over the years I have spent fixing and tuning Oracle databases, I have noticed a trend of developers moving away from hard coding everything to using binds more and more in their code.

In a previous posting here on the subject of Lazy Developer Syndrome, I showed a small fragment of code where I SELECTed the ROWID in addition to all the other data I wanted, then UPDATEd the same row using the ROWID I had stored rather then using the Primary Key index that I used to SELECT the row in the first place. Why did I do this? Selecting the ROWID is always a good idea if you intend to UPDATE or indeed, DELETE, it afterwards.

To those who don’t know me, I’m an Oracle DBA and I also can develop as well. I detest having to work on applications which have the following construct in the code: 1 2 3 4 SELECT <stuff> FROM TABLE WHERE <something> FOR UPDATE; In most cases, the above is a sign of developer laziness. They cannot be bothered to write correct code to handle a situation where a row that the user has been working on (unlocked) has been amended by another user in the meantime.

I suspect not. http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20026873.100-how-kangaroo-burgers-could-save-the-planet.html The gist of the above article is this, worldwide, livestock creates more greenhouse gasses than all forms of transport combined. Eating meat is bad for the planet - can you hear all those veggies crowing now? :-) Never mind, Kangaroos taste good and can help save the planet. Check out the link above for the full story. Cheers.

I hate cyclists. They are so full of themselves! They sit there, two or three abreast on narrow roads, dawdling along having a nice chat, completely oblivious to the queue of traffic behind them. Give them a happy toot (ie, not a nasty long drawn out blast) on the horn to let them know you are there and you get a load of abuse. Nice & friendly! I was once run over by a cyclist.

Welcome to my blog. Don’t expect me to be sensible or politically correct here, it’s my space and I’ll say what I like! So there! :-) Of course, anything I do say will be able to be commented on by you, my faithful reader (singular!), assuming that you care of course. Ok, seriously, I’ll be ranting and raving about all sorts of stuff here. I’ll try to categorise them so you can sift the interesting from the less interesting.