Friday, September 4, 2009

Random Things: Volume #6

News
Of course the big news of the week is the latest release of the Oracle database, 11gR2. Everyone and their mother wrote about it, including yours truly. Seemed like a fun game to get a post out as quickly as possible.

Eddie Awad has compiled a pretty nice list of links to the "What's New" documentation section for the past 6 releases.

Sun + Oracle is faster
Oracle and Sun together are hard to match. Just ask IBM. Its fastest server now runs an impressive 6 million TPC-C transactions, but on October 14 at Oracle OpenWorld, we'll reveal the benchmark numbers that prove that even IBM DB2 running on IBM's fastest hardware can't match the speed and performance of Oracle Database on Sun systems. Check back on October 14 as we demonstrate Oracle's commitment to Sun hardware and Sun SPARC.


EU Investigates Oracle Bid for Sun
Two weeks ago the Department of Justice approved the Oracle/Sun deal. Now the EU has set a January 10, 2010 deadline for it's response delaying the acquisition further. I know both Oracle and Sun are international/global companies, but they are based in the US. How exactly does the EU have authority? A monopoly you say? Bollocks I say. There are plenty of choices out there. Oh well.

Coding
What is the deal with mixed-case PL/SQL? I have a pretty strong aversion towards it. PL/SQL is not Java, Ruby, .NET or any other programming language. Pick a case, any case, just don't mix them.

DBMS_PROFILER
Back in July I had a nice conversation with Cary Millsap over email. I had asked him to explain the difference between logging, debugging and instrumentation. He suggested checking out DBMS_PROFILER. I've been able to try it out recently (details/examples coming soon) and it's pretty freaking cool...and scary. I got to see the (many) steps that are taken while performing a specific task.

OpenWorld
Last week I announced I wasn't going, recanted and then this week recanted the recant. Fun huh?

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