Re: Oracle 911 Article

From: Richard Foote <richard.foote_at_bigpond.com>
Date: Sat, 6 Mar 2004 11:53:54 +1000
Message-ID: <0cc301c4031d$e1afb460$0100000a@FOOTE>

Hi Don,

Nice to hear from you. Would you mind answering a few questions regarding your article ?

• All the reasons you've listed why clients contact you involve there not being a suitable DBA on-site. Hence all the scenarios you've listed are ones easily fixed if there was a DBA on site. Would you agree that's a valid general assessment ? Would you agree with Nuno's assessment that the real silver bullet is to actually get someone competent on site ?
• How common is it for "entire factories with thousands of workers" , "hospitals", "large financial" companies to not have a suitably qualified DBA available ? Do you think this is a serious enough issue to require government intervention as the ramifications as you describe could be horrendous ?
• Is you're article therefore aimed specifically at those sites that don't have a DBA but may want a clue as to what to do when something elementary goes wrong ?
• Are you planning to write a follow-up article that might be more aimed at full time, less holidaying, more experienced DBAs that have more difficult tuning issues to resolve ?
• What is your methodology in determining quickly and *accurately* an appropriate solution when a less trivial issue arises (eg. some platform specific issue, obscure bugs, redo logs refuse to switch for some bizarre reason, execution plans suddenly go ballistic when nothing appears to have changed for a fortnight, block corruption causes a redo segment to behave unexpectedly with no obvious sign of the cause, PGA memory balloons causing paging galore for no obvious reasons, etc. etc. etc.) ?
• Are all the outputs for your scripts and statspack reports made up ? If not, why are they inconsistent, similar to each other despite being different databases, etc. etc.
• Do you have someone that proof reads your material before you publish it or do you believe in living documents that get fixed and improved as time goes on ? What measures do you take to ensure that your articles are as error free as possible ?
• If you feel so strongly about silver bullets, why did you rename your silver bullet o_i_c_a article and remove the word silver bullet from the article ? Have you given anyone public credit for highlighting all the errors in that article that gave rise for you to rewrite the thing ?
• And finally while I have your attention, why have almost all your postings that you made on the comp.databases.oracle.server newsgroup disappeared from the google archives ? All that beautiful history of all those wonderful postings you made are now no longer, except when repeated in postings by others ? Does this cause you some concern ?

Once again, great hearing from you, love to hear your views on the above.

Regards

Richard

• Original Message ----- From: "Don Burleson" <don_at_burleson.cc> To: <oracle-l_at_freelists.org> Sent: Saturday, March 06, 2004 4:47 AM Subject: Re: Oracle 911 Article

> Hi David,Regarding http://www.dbazine.com/burleson20.shtmlDavid wrote:
"But
> do you really think that Oracle Support has ever told anyone to call HIM
to
> solve their performance problems (his article makes this claim)?"
> Hm, what I wrote was this: "- We called MetaLink Support and we don’t
> understand their instructions. They said that we could call you."
>
>
>
> Yes, I get referral calls from Oracle Support and MetaLink, always when a
> customer has no DBA or they have a vendor package running Oracle, and no
> in-house technical knowledge to send the required trace and dump files to
> Oracle support.
>
>
>
> David wrote: "(You) managed to insult some of my favorite Oracle authors".
>
>
>
> Um, my article refers to the "pontifications of theoreticians and
> ivory-tower academics", and I’m not aware of any Oracle authors who match
> that criteria.
>
>
>
> Which of your favorite Oracle authors are you referring to? ;-)
>
>
>
>
> You also claim that I insult the Rednecks of Alabama.
>
>
>
> I’ve been studying Redneck Theology for many years, and I’m making great
> progress. Check it out:
>
>
>
> http://www.dba-oracle.com/redneck.htm#progress
>
>
>
>
> Anyway, lighten up! I think we all take Oracle way-too seriously
sometimes.
> . . .
>
>
>
> Sorry to ramble, but I’m still in-shock after reading something nice
coming
> from Nuno Souto. . . .
>
>
>
> Take care, Y’all . . . .
>
>
> Regards,Donald K. Burlesonwww.dba-oracle.comwww.remote-dba.net
>
>
>
>
>
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Received on Sat Mar 06 2004 - 00:43:44 CST