Re: Total oracle newbie

In article <pan.2003.02.12.16.30.40.158859_at_yahoo.com.au>, "Howard J. Rogers" <howardjr2000_at_yahoo.com.au> wrote:

>There's always that danger, of becoming 'classroom-bound'. In Oz,
>certainly, there is precious little scope for instructors to 'take time
>off' and go spend, say 3 months every 18 months, in (say) consultancy.

If I were "king" at OU, this would definitely be a requirement.

>Well, mistakes will always happen. But I can't think of too many complete
>and utter howlers. I do my fair share of 'well, that's not right', but
>it's arguable that on many occasions they are getting a 'gist' of the
>truth across and not wanting to get bogged down in sticky details.

True. The mistakes *usually* aren't "howlers." But they're bad enough that, I believe, some (many?) "Oracle myths" are perpetuated by the training.

Some of the older TBC's were pretty rife with problems/errors, but I believe they have significantly improved in recent years.

>Well, that's not entirely a fair criticism. I'm sure that if every
>training centre was configured identically, and all configured the same as
>the writers' setups, many of those glitches would disappear.

Some, but definitely not all. I've seen practice exercises that were flat-out undoable, regardless of the setup. Moreover, the lack of consistency/standardization in training setups is not an excuse--it's an indictment.

>Remember, too, that many of the examples etc are based on beta software,
>because the course material has to be available shortly after the release
>to market of the production code. I remember, for example, a classic slide

This gets to the point of there seemingly being little or no review process to correct and update course materials. When the course has been taught for a year or more, most of these problems should be long gone. Within 3 months after the first scheduled classes, courses (curriculum and materials) should be reviewed and updated for problems like this.

>explained. Remember, finally, that the writers are working when the
>software is extremely new: sometimes they can only go on what the
>developers tell them it ought to/will do when the thing hits the market!

This only underscores the need for a stronger, more timely review process. Perhaps also, training development should be delayed until the curriculum's accuracy can be better determined.

>I'm not making excuses, by the way. And I'm not saying things couldn't be
>better. But there *are* review processes, and course material, like
>software, still manages a few 'bugs'.

So when does the course get "patched"?

>Absolutely not. But how should they go about it? There are two principle
>schools of thought on tuning. The Ratio Tuners do it one way, and the
>Wait-Staters do it another. The RTers have history on their side; the
>WSers have inifintely more thoughtful, accurate and effective theory on
>theirs. Oracle's running with the history crowd at the moment. It's safer
>that way. And it's not actually "wrong", just not terribly insightful.

If you are going to call yourself teaching "performance tuning," it must come down to answering the question of which school is right or expanding the curriculum (even if that means going to a two-part course) to include both. What you definitely do not want is students going home and appying the learned techniques only to find that they don't improve performance much at all.

>What we've got is a common denominator course -which is OK as far as it
>goes.

I'll take your word for that. It's just that the amount of criticism of this particular area is disturbing, to say the least; but, perhaps, as you infer, that is inevitable?

>I've no knowledge of that happening.

Actually, a very recent post here said as much, and I vaguely recall hearing a similar statement from an instructor in one or two Oracle classes that I attended.  

>As it is, it's 3.30am
>in Sydney right now, and once these posts are out of the way, it's back to
>some testing... ie, instructors who want to understand what they teach in
>anything like a profound-ish way have to do their own research when they
>can. There's no provision for instructors not to be instructing, in short.

Good lord, man, get some sleep! Wouldn't want to be a-nodding during class! ;-) Received on Thu Feb 13 2003 - 13:46:16 CST