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The last six years I was working as an Oracle & SQL Server DBA for the public administration of canton Lucerne in the heart of Switzerland. Besides the DBA role I was also maintaining a few database centric .NET applications. The public administration of canton Luzern committed to Microsoft products with an enterprise agreement. That means no more Oracle databases in the long term. I was offered to do Microsoft MOSS (Share Point) instead. But somehow I feel at home with Oracle products more than with Microsoft products. That’s why I decided not to take the chance and go for MOSS but started looking for a new job.

In my old job I was working with a wide range of products. Too wide to delve deeply into all of them. I want to narrow this range and focus on something. In the past I already put most of my learning efforts into Oracle technology. And I want to focus even more on Oracle. It’s what I like most and do best. Preferably my new job shouldn’t be in-house IT but at a managed services provider. The company I was looking for should not be a pure managed services provider but also do software development. Perhaps I could use my developer skills too at some point.

I didn’t have to look far. These days it’s easy to find a new job because there are lots of opportunities for database administrators. Starting on February 1st I will work as an Oracle DBA for Abraxas Informatik AG in Zurich. Abraxas’ activities is divided into three areas:

• Business Process Integration
• Software Development
• Managed Services

I count the days…

Static Data Dictionary Views and Dynamic Performance Views are the core of database administration. They are of crucial importance. Whoever wants to learn Oracle database administration has to get familiar with these views. I began to compile a list of most important Static Data Dictionary Views here. There are hundreds more but those in my list you will most likely use in your daily life as a DBA. Some content is still missing in my list. Perhaps I can add it over holidays.

Of course, GUI tools like Enterprise Manager or SQL Developer offer the same information in a more user friendly manner. But all those GUI tools rely on static dictionary views and dynamic performance views. As a DBA you will likely get into situations where there is no GUI tools available. At times you will be alone with your SQL*Plus skills. Your mastery of data dictionary views will make all the difference!

Finally, I can offload some of my UKOUG stuff. First the Budget-justification (management is reading - sometimes). Like every year, I can justify visiting UKOUG as a training cost. I have learned more in four days UKOUG then I would have on just about any (Oracle) course and have saved my employer some money [...]

This was my first time at the UKOUG conference. It has been a nice week. I think there was almost 3.000 delegates, so it is a pretty big event compared to the 600 that were at the ODTUG conference. Every room has an usher and a technical person to setup the audio/visual equipment which made [...]

On my Windows 2003 test server I install and remove a lot of Oracle and SQL Server software. I create and drop databases a lot. Usually I work in a rush on that server, so removing instances and software isn’t always so clean. Sometimes a windows services sticks and cannot be removed. It has to be cleaned up manually. The easiest way to remove windows services is deleting their entries in the registry. All windows services are listed under

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/CurrentControlSet/Services

Once you delete an entry its service is removed and will not show up in the services panel anymore after a system reboot.

The last day of the conference already… The day started with a presentation on Datamodelling using JDev. The presenter showed how JDev could replace Designer for modelling. Imho JDev doesn’t support logical modelling at all (he misused Java class models to represent a logical model), there is no repository and no relation between a logical and [...]

The (rather ambitious) schedule for today was : Lost in JDeveloper by Sten Vesterli : Sten guided the (Forms experienced) audience in creating an ADF Swing Client App ofcourse declaratively (next to AJAX this is the buzzword of the conference : everything should be declarative, you can be a programmer when you’ re able in controlling [...]

After yesterdays Blogger Meetup it was hard to start the day… The first session of the day was Sue Harper’s talk on SQL Developer Latest Features. She mainly focussed on the new / enhanced features of version 1.5, that will be production somewhere (early?) 2008. To name some new features : external authentication (OPS$ users), [...]

After a rough flight yesterday I arrived in Birmingham. The city has a complete Christmans atmosphere, as you might expect at this time of year. There even is a ‘real’ Frankfurter Christmas market with ‘Beer und Bratwurst‘ and hot wine - and lots and lots of other more or less Christmas related stuff. I made [...]

Last Saturday I posted some screen shots showing some interesting help text included in the Microsoft Cardspace client. ...

James McGovern asks : Have you visited: We Are Microsoft ? They are sponsoring a three day event that matches developers with charities to develop ...

There has been a lot of talk on the role of the Identity Oracle and the value or motivation for Identity Providers in a user-centric system. ...

Sorry I haven't mentioned this earlier. I'm doing a lot of blogging these days over at independentidentity.blogspot.com . ...

Today, I was honored to attend the Liberty Alliance 2007 Tokyo meeting hosted by the Liberty Alliance Japan SIG. [ more ]

David Dorf of the Oracle Retail Product Strategy Team, writes an excellent byline in SC Magazine, " Avoid the PCI hype, but use the standard as a ...

GovTech.com has an interesting article on how the US and US State governments are stuggling with disconnecting credentials from the concepts of ...

There has been a lot of discussion recently about Bob Blakley 's post on the Identity Oracle. Kim Cameron, in particular has made a couple of posts . ...

James Kobielus writes a blog post " rfi User-Centric Identity and SOA Mashup Governance ". It is about governance issues that arise around  ...