Friday Philosophy – Your Experience can Keep You Ignorant

This week I was in an excellent presentation by Kerry Osborne about Outlines, SQL profiles, SQL patches and SQL Baselines. I’ve used three of those features in anger but when I looked at SQL Patches I just could not understand why you would use them – they looked to me like a very limited version of SQL Profiles.

There is a prize for spotting Kerry without a baseball cap

So I asked Kerry about it during his presentation (he had been encouraging us to ask questions and I was curious). The answer? They are almost identical in how they are used and the impact they have but, yes, they are more limited. You can only enter one line of hints (I think it can be more than one hint but I have not checked {update, see comment by Jonathan Lewis – it is 500 characters of hints you can add, so you can comprehensively hint most statements}) with a SQL Patch. But, and this is the crucial bit, they can be used without the tuning pack and can be used on Standard Edition. Which makes them very useful if you are limited to using a version of SE or have not paid for the extra cost tuning pack option on Enterprise Edition. Kerry told me the first part about no cost and Kamil Stawiarski the part about being available on SE.

That’s a really useful thing to know. Why did I not know it? Because nearly all my experience of performance work has been for clients who have Oracle Enterprise Edition and the tuning pack. Most companies who are willing to hire someone to do Oracle Performance work have paid for Oracle Enterprise Edition and usually for many of the options. A company who is saving money by having SE is far less likely to have the money to hire external consultants (more the pity, as I would really like to spend time working for smaller companies where you can usually get more done!)

My experience, or rather lack of it, had blinded me to the possible uses of an Oracle performance feature. I wonder how much other stuff I don’t know or appreciate about an area I claim to be knowledgeable and skilled in – because my experience is mostly for clients with a very full Oracle tool set? How true is this in all sorts of areas of my technical and personal life? Quite a lot I suspect. That can be a little dis-spiriting.

But mulling this over later that evening (with beer of course) four things occurred to me:

• If someone claims skills in an area but does not know things you do, it could well be simply down to their personal experience to date. It does not mean you know more, it means you know different stuff.
• How much does someone have to not know before you decide they are not the expert they claim?
• Do we partial experts keep ourselves slightly ignorant by not asking questions – as we fear that second point?
• I felt I did the right thing in asking a question about something I felt I should know – but did not. As now I know the answer (and two people at least got to show they know more than me).

I know I have said this before, as many others have. The more you know, the more you realise what you do not know. You just have to keep asking and remember that, we are all ignorant about something until someone tells us about it.