I should say that I had interesting experience this evening — a tornado warning in downtown Chicago.
The alarms went off as soon as we tried to get out of the restaurant. Below is a year old example but it sounded exactly like that + it was much darker — like if the skies fell [...]

Just a quick note that I’m going to present two sessions on the RAC Attack! event in Chicago next week — 4-5 August 2008. The event is organized as two threads — one for advanced RAC DBA’s and another one for beginners. Each thread will have one day of hands-on labs and one day of [...]

Back in May 2006, I have started my blog using the Blogger platform and one month later moved it to my own website using Wordpress. Couple month later, I joined Pythian and, since then, the vast majority of my blogging activities has been on the Pythian Group Blog.
The Pythian blog has grown significantly since then [...]

We hit an ORA-01450 error today trying to do online rebuild for an index in an unusable state. This was a non-unique index on a fairly large column — VARCHAR2(800 CHAR).

SQL> alter index i1 rebuild online;
alter index i1 rebuild online
*
ERROR at line 1:
ORA-00604: error occurred at recursive SQL level 1
ORA-01450: maximum key length (3215) exceeded

It [...]

If you have created a new Oracle 11g database using DBCA and opted to use by default 11g’s enhanced security settings or, at least, the audit setting, then you risk the unlimited growth of the SYSAUS tablespace that hosts the audit trail table SYS.AUD$. I realized that while reviewing the slides of my [...]

This is what I found in the APEX documentation that comes with Oracle 11g, in the chapter describing building a very simple application:
In Region Source, add the following at the end of the existing code:
WHERE nvl(DEPARTMENT_ID,’-1′) = nvl(:P3_DEPARTMENT_ID,’-1′)
This WHERE clause changes the query to display only those employees that belong to the selected department accounting [...]

Small local user group meetings have their own beauty because of the special intimate atmosphere. We expected somewhat higher attendance but it seems that people were already in the holiday mode — it’s been a somewhat hot day and school kids had their last classes yesterday — so we’ve got about half of expected 50 [...]

Today I’m doing a presentation at the Toronto Oracle User Group meeting. It’ll be my first time there and I’m really looking forward to it.
My session is called Oracle 11g New Features Out of the Box. It went pretty well at Collaborate 08 and I think it will be the right audience at the TOUG [...]

In case you are attending Oracle Open World 2008, the biggest Oracle conference in the world, and interested in either (or both) MySQL or Oracle Enterprise Manager Extensibility — I posted a proposal for a new presentation:
Extending Oracle Enterprise Manager by Example — Creating MySQL Management Plug-In
I’ve started looking into Oracle extensibility several years ago [...]

Back in April I was at COLLABORATE 08 and delivered a presentation on 11g — Oracle 11g New Features Out of the Box, including Oracle 11g ASM features. The first ASM slide was about diskgroup compatibility, and I have a bit more to share than I said back then.
Every diskgroup in ASM has two compatibility [...]