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Friday Philosophy – The Abuse of Favours March 30, 2012

Posted by mwidlake in Friday Philosophy, humour, Perceptions, rant.
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You probably all recognise this situation:

Dave needs something doing that he can’t do himself – let’s say it is creating an API for the file management package. It isn’t your job to do but it is something you can do. Dave is blocked until the API is created.

So, being a nice person, you tell Dave you will see what you can do for him over the next couple of days.

So why is it that what Dave hears is “Dave, I love you more than life itself, I am dedicated to this task and I WILL complete it before the end of tomorrow. My other tasks, emergency production issues and the untimely demise of my cat are all secondary to this endeavour.”.

You see, 24 hours later, Dave is at your desk “When will this be done?! I’m blocked until I get this!!!”. If he’s the guy I had recently his next step is to slap his fist into his palm as he utters, almost shouts “I NEED this!”.

No. No you don’t need it. What you need is for that slap to be in your face, followed by “wake up! You don’t go shouting at the guy digging you out the hole!”.

I find this particularly unacceptable when the favour is to be fixing some mess that Dave created, or doing something Dave told his boss he had finished last week. Of course, those are the exactly situations where Dave is most likely to get upset, as he is in real trouble and most likely to commit that ultimate Favour sin:-

Dave to Boss “I Didn’t get my task done as Martin promised to create the API and he hasn’t. I’d be there now if I only did it myself”.

If you are thinking “Hmmm, I think I might have been ‘Dave’ recently” then Shame On You and go beg forgiveness. Of course, if you were ‘Dave’ you may well be the sort of sod who will twist the situation around in your head so it was not your fault anyway. Grrr, bad Dave.

For a while I gave up doing work favours as I got sick of the situation above playing out. Then I started doing favours again but being a bore about saying repeatedly, up front, that this was a favour, it was only if I had time, not to rely on me and, if it is that important, go ask someone else. Yeah, sounds really grumpy doesn’t it? That gave me a reputation for not being a Team Player (which is code for “mug”).

Now I have a rule system. As soon as someone starts getting demanding about the favour, I immediately challenge it. If they get shouty they lose their favour rights. No more favours for you until the requisite number of beers have been bought. It’s three.

Of course, you see this scene played out on help forums all the time. Initial message is nearly always in upper case text speak “PLS HLP ME, IS URGNT! CN U TELL ME HOW 2 DO MY JOB – THNX!!!” and soon degrades into helfull person asking for details of the exact person and Mr Shouty demanding more and more help. I don’t help. After all, this guy is never going to buy me a beer.

OUGN 2012 Third Day March 26, 2012

Posted by mwidlake in Meeting notes, Private Life.
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The last day of the three (and second on the ferry and of the conference proper) had a lot of talks I wanted to see, especially Dan Morgan talking about “Insanely large Databases”. It was a good talk, with an interesting interlude when a very loud announcement let us know we had docked at Kiel. Dan handled it with aplomb. Dan was talking about one specific experience he had suffered recently and he covered quite a few things I did and some I planned to but never got that far – but he had more technical details about the issues he had encountered, so all in all probably of more immediate use to the audience than my talk. It was a very good session. I have to confess, there were times I laughed out loud as memories flooded in, prompted by his wise words – I fear others may have interpreted differently but, honestly, I was laughing tears of shared pain.

I was also looking forward to seeing Uwe Hesse talk about Dataguard. I’d had the pleasure of spending a lot of time and a few beers chatting with Uwe over the last few days. His presentation was very well done (as it should be, he’s a professional trainer! He exceeded my expectations, though). And I loved the last bit, where he demonstrated how, under 11G R2 (R1 as well???), if you have a physical standby, a block corruption can be fixed “on the fly” and invisibly to the end user. I just love that feature and, though I knew about it already, seeing it demonstrated and the errors appearing in the alert log – though the user query runs fine – was sweet.

The rest of the sessions I saw were also good {Maria Colgan on preventing sub-optimal plans which was, mostly, about avoiding implicit data conversions, which I think all developers and designers should have drummed into their heads with rubber hammers; Doug Burns on those OEM performance graphs which continue to get better and better} – but I had to given in and go for a sleep. These anti-seasickness pills seem to work but make me dozy. I’d love it if those anti-travel-sickness pills were really placebos and I had a placebo side effect 🙂

The last day was rounded off with a nice meal and one or two (or three, or four) beers in a bar and some excellent times. I of course spent time with the Other Martins (we could not disband the cluster too easily), Doug, Holger, Maria, our Norwegian hosts and many more of the other people there. If only I had managed to fit in the other 10, 15 people I wanted to see but I’m getting old and I was very, very, very tired.

I have to say, it was one of the best conferences I have ever been to. OUGN 2013? Get yourself on that boat.

OUGN 2012 Second Day – Out on the Open Seas March 23, 2012

Posted by mwidlake in Meeting notes.
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As I said yesterday, I am not one for blogging about conferences. So what the heck, I’ll do another post on this one :-).

You might have picked up on the fact that I am not very good on the sea and have a lot of nervousness about this idea of spending 2 days on an ocean-going liner. So today is the day we move over to being on the water, the OUGN conference proper. I’m delighted to say I am not the only one nervous about this boat lark, Marie Colgan {or, as I should be calling her, “The Optimizer Lady” – since Doug Burns christened her back at the UKOUG 2011 conference} feels the same. There is nothing better to reduce one’s apprehension about something than finding someone else who is just as if not more anxious about it. I suspect this is an evil way to think but I can’t help it.

The day went well, my overview of VLDBs could have maybe been a little more polished – I think I was trying to cover too many topics and not spending enough time on anything, apart from “why a small number of spindles is bad” which I spent too long on. But I did make two points that I think are major considerations with VLDBs and are actually not very technical. (1) If you are going to have to look after a massive database, try very, very, very hard to keep everything as simple, standardised and controlled as you can. (2) Find other people to talk to about VLDBs. Most companies that have them are reluctant to talk, either because of the industry type (Defense, Banks, Pharma) or a perceived giving away of corporate advantage (Banks, Pharma, Utilities and pretty much all companies really).

Anyhow, having done my talk I was now free for the next 2 days to enjoy other talks, socialise, relax – and keep internally checking if I felt nauseous or not. The sea has turned out to be very calm and the boat very stable. But I keep checking and, of course, that makes me feel a little anxious – and thus ill.

However, I have to say that the travel sickness pills I have been taking do seem to be very effective. They are effectively in making me feel woozy. But, and this is important, not ill. I’m having to rely on beer for the latter.

One thing I really, really like about this conference. Everyone is stuck on a boat, they can’t escape. Which means you get to see lots of people all day and it makes the whole thing have a nice sense of community.

Right, Maria is about to present again. I’m going to go and sit in the front row and sway lightly from side to side. Apparently it makes her feel even worse…

OUGN 2012 First Day – First Panic March 21, 2012

Posted by mwidlake in Meeting notes, Perceptions, Private Life.
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I’m not really one for blogging about conferences – I mean who cares what someone else saw being presented? But this is the first time I have stopped moving long enough (and been in contact with the internet world) to blog and my brain is too fried to do a technical one.

The journey here was very smooth and the train from the airport to central Oslo makes the ratty, tatty, confined coaches of the UK look as awful as they really are. So I arrive in the central station and decide I will need some local Kroner to pay the taxi to the hotel. So I find an ATM, put in the card and ask for money. Card refused. Huh? But I rang my bank at the weekend and let them know there would be transactions from a foreign country (after some issues a couple of years back my wife always lets the bank know when she will be away and she made me do the same). I tried another ATM from a different company. Refused. OK, damned bank, I’ll use my other card. Refused. Errrr…… In a foreign country, no idea really where I am, not got any local currency. Not looking good.

I wander into Oslo looking for a real, proper bank. Most Norwegians speak perfect English, maybe if I still have problems I can go in and ask. Find bank, go to ATM, about to ask for money….Notice the figures being suggested on this ATM are a lot smaller than the last place. Yes, I had my mental decimal place in the wrong location and I had been asking for almost £1,000 rather than £100. No wonder the request got refused (I keep my daily limit low, it stops be buying too much rubbish on any given day).

So, I head off to the event, get there for Lunch and have a great afternoon. My presentation on IOTS went well and, as I said yesterday, I think I’ll put it to sleep for a while now.

I saw Harald Van Breederode talk about Oracle Database Smart Flash Cache before I did my slot and I always like to hear Harald talk. It was good as ever, but I found myself not so much interested in the idea of using SSD-type storage as an extra “slow SGA” extension (as opposed to a “fast storage” extension) but more that in 3 or 4 years, memory-based storage will be the default and a whole swathe of my knowledge will once more become redundant. I mean, how important will it be to keep physical reads down via things like IOTs once physical reads are relatively cheap? You won’t really care much about expanding your SGA with a secondary cache when you have 4TB of main memory and 100,000 IPS (inputs per second, we will have to see how much faster Output can be made with memory-based storage).

This highlights one of the things I really like about conferences, meetings and chatting to fellow techies in the pub. The actual main topic or point might well be interesting but the secondary thoughts and ideas can be just as striking. I was talking to Uwe Hesse after the talks had finished and part of that was about learning new stuff and training courses. It made me realise that it is way too long since I ran any training courses. I love running training courses.

OK, I’ve had a rest, back to socialising with fellow OUGN 2012 attendees.

Sail Away, Sail Away, Sail Away March 20, 2012

Posted by mwidlake in Meeting notes, VLDB.
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I’m just doing some last minute preparation for the Norwegian User Group Spring Seminar. This is quite a large conference with 5 concurrent streams and a very good line-up of presenters. You can see the agenda here.

What is also a little unusual about this conference is that it is mostly on a boat, or rather a ship. When I was first asked if I would put forward a talk or two I declined – as I am very prone to being sea-sick. Truls Bergersen, who helps organize the event, got in touch with me a few weeks later and said “we are doing a day on land first, do you want to present then?”. Sure! That would be great! So I am, I’ll be doing my talk on Index Organized Tables once more {and then I think I’ll put it to bed for a couple of years}.

Now, I am not exactly sure what made me agree to this, but then Truls asked if I would consider doing another talk I had suggested, on VLDBs (Very Large DataBases), the following day. Yes, why not?

Only, the next day we are on the ship. I’m a bit nervous about this. I don’t think that a good presentation should include the presenter going green and dashing for the door (though I did have a similar experience at Oracle Open World once, as a result of an all-you-can-eat Chinese meal the day before, but as it affected “the other end of things” you really don’t want details of that).

Thankfully, I’ve not been worrying about sea-sickness for the last couple of weeks. That will be because my laptop hard disk died and I lost everything on my still-new machine. It was still so new that I had not started backing it up properly – after all, there was nothing on there I could not replace easily.

It has been a real trial to replace all those things that I could easily replace. At least I had the presentations and some other critical bits on my temporary USB stick backup…