Martin Widlake's Yet Another Oracle Blog

There is life in the old dog yet… March 14, 2011

My Blog has been unforgivably quiet of late. All I can say in my defence is “work”. I’ve blogged about this before, and mentioned it in presentations, but most of us are too tied up in the day job to test things properly, let alone blog or in other ways present on how things work. We fix the problem in front of us and move on to the next “critical, absolute priority 1A plus, must-be-fixed-today” issue. So like most of you, that has been my life for…ohh, months.
{I makes me even more thankful to those who continually find the time to test properly and blog about what they have found, on top of their “earning” work}

However, my working life is looking like it will return to a more reasonable balance soon.

So, this blog post is a statement of intent that I WILL be blogging again in the next week or so. OK, so this post is not of any use to anyone reading, but it means I now feel morally obliged to follow up on the statement (and that is actually the intent of this blog post).

I’m going to blog on two technical areas.

One is gathering Stats, which I am utterly sick of and tired of doing in my working life. So I figure if I tell anyone who will listen all I know about gathering system, fixed object, dictionary and object stats and give some hints as to what I have come to think of as methods and techniques for doing so, I might not have to think about it any more. I can tell people to read my blog and not hire me to do it for them. Maybe a career limiting move but I was never that bright 🙂

The second topic will be Index Organised Tables (IOTs). They are great. Ohhh, they have drawbacks and concerns, after all no tuning trick is For Free and I know one person (who I shall refer to only as Dave) who’s career was almost destroyed due to an Oracle 9 to 10 “feature” on IOTs involving corruption. But IOTs are {in my opinion} a vastly under-used feature of Oracle and could be useful to many Oracle sites. If anyone wants help with them, I’ll let you hire me for that and I will come and help gladly. So long as no bl00dy stats are involved 🙂

So, having drawn my own line in the sand to do some Technical Blogs (I actually have enough waffle-based Friday Philosophy topics to last 2 years but have promised myself to balance them with decent technical posts) I better go and write them.