Technical Archive

As some of you may know, I’ve been working on a deployment of BEA Weblogic these past couple of weeks. We were doing some testing today and found an interesting side effect that was positively unexpected. Let me first say that the issues we encountered were with IIS configuration, not specifically with Weblogic. However, the [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

This tip isn’t really new, but it is one of those things that I used to know, forgot, remembered, and am now blogging so that it will be easier to find (for me) when I finally forget it again. Besides, I was hanging out with Bex Huff earlier tonight and he told me I need [...]

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 [...]

59% Geek
And, importantly, much less geeky than Billy Cripe too.

PortableApps.com

One of my peers introduced me to the website www.portableapps.com a week or two ago. This site takes popular applications, modifies them to avoid requiring a typical installation so that you don’t need to have administrative privileges on the system to run them. This allows those of us (especially consultants) that work on others’ systems [...]

We recently ran into an issue in a customer configuration where rewriting URLs using pass-through didn’t function as expected with OC4J-deployed applications. As it turned out, there’s a bug in the OC4J container and a relatively easy workaround for some.
The situation was this (names changed to protect the innocent):

An existing Java application deployment existed using [...]