I was speaking at a small User Group meeting yesterday. A crowd of about 20 was sitting at tables in a “U” configuration. About 70% of the way through the presentation, I asked the fateful question. Me: “How many of you are DBAs?” To my surprise, the right side of
Author: Steve Karam
Steve Karam, the Oracle Alchemist, is an Oracle Certified Master with over 15 years of DBA and database architecture experience with multiple RDBMS and NoSQL platforms, server and storage systems, and development frameworks.
Log Buffer #26: a Carnival of the Vanities for DBAs
Welcome to the 26th edition of Log Buffer, a Carnival of the Vanities Blog for DBAs. In addition, welcome to a new year! 2007 is shaping up to be a very interesting year for the database world, and some of the recent posts in the blogosphere should help you see
Dangerous Toys
Hello all! It’s been quite a while due to the holidays, but I’m back online and doing fine. I hope all of you had a great holiday season. And after all this time, what do I have for you? The 10 most dangerous toys of all time, of course! It’s
The Life of DB Admins
I’ve gotten quite a few requests to do another parody song (probably thanks to Lisa for mentioning me in in the Oracle Newbie’s Blog!), so I went ahead and wrote one. This is is The Life of DB Admins, sung to the tune of Hotel California by the Eagles. Enjoy!
Backtrack: My trip to Jamaica
This is way overdue, but I figured I’d post here about my trip to Jamaica. I got to go here via some work with Burleson Consulting; I even took my family. Here’s a great picture of my kids chilling next to a beautiful waterfall at the hotel: And I can’t
Holy Disk Crash!
It’s funny, right after writing The Day the DB Died, the American Pie parody about a DBA that loses their database and their job due to not having backups…the disk dies on my non-backed-up dedicated server that houses this website. Oracle Alchemist was down for a while, but he wasn’t
The Day the DB Died
I have a habit of writing parody songs about things I like, and Oracle is one of those things. I’ve never seen a full on Oracle parody song, so I will make the claim that this is the first. If it’s not, I’m sure it’s the first of this magnitude!
GQLPlus – Command Line Goodness
I just found a link to a command line wrapper for SQL*Plus called GQLPlus. Supposedly this wrapper allows historical editing, table/column name completion, and more. Even better, it’s just a precompiled drop-in with SQL Plus. Download and run; nothing else is required. From the website: “gqlplus is a drop-in replacement
Make History with Streams
Oracle Streams is an outstanding way to get data from one server to another. It is NOTHING like the advanced replication of old, which is why I call it “outstanding” and not “horribly inefficient and error-prone, not to mention annoying.” Recently I was asked how to implement a custom INSERT
Internet Explorer Users Rejoice!
It looks like I got everything looking good on IE6 and 7 again. If you notice any pages that don’t look right, please leave me a note by clicking on the Contact link.