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RE: New oracle myths?

From: Cary Millsap <cary.millsap_at_hotsos.com>
Date: Wed, 1 Sep 2004 11:20:22 -0500
Message-ID: <05f401c4903f$97e25b30$6701a8c0@CVMLAP02>


Exactly! What irritates me is the waste that goes into costly evaluations of things that the answer most certainly does NOT depend on.

Easy example: If a user task takes 3,600 seconds, and only 10 seconds of that time is I/O related, then the performance of (that is, time consumed by) the task does NOT depend upon cache performance.

On the other hand, if 3,590 seconds of that time had been I/O related, then the task's performance certainly depends upon almost nothing else! The important step is to acquire some reliable evidence before assuming.

I think our shared aggravation occurs when people insist upon spending time on a solution before doing an adequate job of calculating its relevance.

Cary Millsap
Hotsos Enterprises, Ltd.
http://www.hotsos.com
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-----Original Message-----
From: oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org [mailto:oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org] On Behalf Of Niall Litchfield
Sent: Wednesday, September 01, 2004 9:06 AM To: oracle-l_at_freelists.org
Subject: Re: New oracle myths?

On Tue, 31 Aug 2004 17:36:35 -0400, Goulet, Dick <dgoulet_at_vicr.com> wrote:
> I'd say "lightly referenced" as being more correct. Don has the smarts =
> not to call anyone out by name.

Sometimes it is appropriate to reference by name, sometimes it is inappropriate. I'm in 2 minds here. ISTM that a number of different authors were probably in Don's mind when he wrote the article. In this case I think that I am more confused by the lack of references than not. For example it is entirely possible in the Old Myths section that Don was referring to my Myths document. It is equally possible that he was referring elsewhere.

> But I will agree with his one =
> statement, and I quote:
>
> The standard answer to almost every Oracle question is, "It
Depends."

I'm beginning to hate this answer because it is nearly always only the first half of an answer that should read "It depends on .....". For example in another place someone asked "how do I perform a recovery from a cold backup in archive log mode" To which the answer is "It depends" but here it depends on what was lost, what you want to do and what you have available. What I don't like is "It depends" being used as a euphemism for lets try a variety of things and see what happens.

-- 
Niall Litchfield
Oracle DBA
http://www.niall.litchfield.dial.pipex.com
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Received on Wed Sep 01 2004 - 16:01:48 CDT

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