The Oracle ACE program is one way that Oracle recognizes community members that make significant contributions to the Oracle community through blogging, forum participation, user group presentations, and other similar volunteering activities. As one of the Oracle ACE Directors, I have tried to promote the program by raising awareness of its existence and the importance [...]

I’m thinking of organizing a 2-tank (or more) scuba dive down in Monterrey, California, a little ways south of SF for the weekend prior to OOW 08. You can’t really scuba in San Francisco Bay–not much there, murky, ships, etc. In Monterrey, it’s a whole different story and there are many dive operators and charters [...]

I have been working on a customer project involving new installations of Oracle Database (a two-node failover cluster using Oracle Clusterware–good stuff) and two load-balanced BEA Oracle Weblogic servers for the middle tier. The middle tier environment runs on Windows Server 2003 Enterprise x64 Edition and is managed by an outsourced hosting facility.
I had worked [...]

This is a quick note about upcoming major events on my Oracle event calendar.

June 15-19, ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2008, New Orleans, LA
September 21-25, Oracle OpenWorld, San Francisco, CA
December 1-5, UKOUG Conference, Birmingham, UK
February, 2009 (TBD), RMOUG Training Days, Denver, CO
March 8-12, 2009, Hotsos Symposium, Dallas, TX
April 20-24, 2009, RSA Conference, San Francisco, CA
May 3-7, 2009, Collaborate [...]

I recently had an opportunity to do a deeper dive into a performance issue related to the performance of a PIPELINED function. The results weren’t quite what I had expected, so I thought they may be of general interest. As with many performance issues, the issues encountered here are likely data- and database-specific. This was [...]

For those that didn’t bother to install the OS, Oracle or other DST patches (to handle the adjusted DST change schedule) last year and elected to just change the time on your servers by hand twice a year, get ready to do that again this weekend. Personally, I’d rather burn two whole regular work days [...]

A neat thing happened today on Twitter. While I admit that I don’t necessarily “get it” as fast as some of my “web 2.0″ friends do, I haven’t seen this happen too much on Twitter since I’ve been following it in the past several months. I’m sure it probably happens all the time to cool [...]

Okay, not for a while, but for those that are presenters at the conference, the US winter is a time of solemn writing. Whitepaper deadlines are approaching for the IOUG program at the Collaborate 08 (April 14-18 in Denver) conference quickly. Soon after, the presentations for those sessions will be due. No rest for the [...]

I generally don’t spend a lot of time surfing around Metalink. Normally, I get in, find the bug or patch or whatever thing I need, and get out. However, my current project involves a database upgrade for a very performance-sensitive application (they have an SLA that they actually have to honor–or honour for my UK [...]

As I think back to last week, there are a few (okay, maybe more than a few) specific things that come to mind, but not in any particular order.

Larry’s laugh during his hour-long monologue on Sunday night
Meeting Jake from oracleappslab.com
Meeting Eddie Awad
Seeing Mark Rittman again
Meeting Michael Armstrong-Smith
Chance meeting of Morgens Norgaard and Anjo Kolk
Seeing Michael [...]