Life After Coffee

Humor me for a moment and read the following statements:

“If there are any competent Asians, I failed to meet them.”

Asian or Arab origin people are incompetent. My point is proved by the fact that they have always been slaves and will remain in such conditions. The west has always dominated the east.

I know what you’re thinking, there’s a lot of shit out there on the net, but would you believe that this racist garbage is tolerated on the forums of Oracle’s own website?

And if you think the statements above are bad (or you think I have somehow taken it out of context) you should read the whole thread. It’s amazing that (allegedly) educated professionals can be so ignorant.

More amazing to me is that Oracle doesn’t pursue and remove these posts. After all, for every person who will speak up against this racist crap there are ten who will just leave with a bad taste for the people who host the content.

oracle, racism, racist, prejudice

If you’re an Oracle DBA like me you are probably wondering how 11g, Oracle’s most recent release, will affect you. Don Burleson who points out some great new features of 11g:

The new Oracle data compression utility promises to save on disk storage up to three times over storing data in an uncompressed format, with relatively small overhead.
…
SPA [SQL Performance Analyzer] is one of the most exciting features. It’s a holistic tuning tool that allows you to define and replay a representative workload on your database.

And some appropriate warnings:

Oracle has created artificial intelligence to advise on self-healing operations, and these are often misunderstood and misapplied by people without the requisite background.

Check out the whole article, and if you have a chance be sure to catch Don’s 11g New Features presentation! I was lucky enough to see it before my presentation at the North Carolina Oracle User Group meeting a few weeks ago and learned a lot!

oracle, database, dba

I make no secret of the point that I love the webcomic xkcd and if I blogged every strip I like I would basically end up mirroring the entire comic here.

With that in mind, there is no way I could pass up posting this commic:

Next time someone asks you what a SQL injection is you can point them at this, then explain nicely.

sql, oracle, pl/sql, plsql, exploit, security, sql exploit, dba, database, database administration, comic, fun, funny, sql injection

For anyone in the area of Raleigh, North Carolina this week I will be presenting at the North Carolina Oracle User Group’s fall meeting. I will be giving a presentation on Oracle Shell Scripting which includes several tips and scripts from my book by the same title.

Don Burleson will also be presenting on Oracle 11g new features. The meeting runs from 12:30 to 4:30 this Friday, October 5th. More details are available on the NCOUG site.

oracle, dba, database, database administrator, 11g, unix, linux

I’m always amazed how much traffic some of my articles on the Oracle date datatype get, but dealing with dates in SQL can be as daunting for beginners as it is tedious for the experts.

Well, here’s another resource to help you sort out those pesky dates. This one focuses on the to_char function and how it can be used to get dates to output in the format you want.

This article from Don Burleson offers a couple handy examples of the to_char function, but more importantly has a table listing the options for output of the date format.

For more reading on the Oracle date format check out my other Oracle stories.

oracle, sql, pl/sql, dba, database, database administration