The way things are

You wait for weeks for something to blog about then the basis for three or four articles come along at once.

Last week I was chatting by email to Chet, big bundle of enthusiasm that he is, about stuff, amongst other things, the lack of articles here.

I’ve not fallen off the blog wagon but truth is that for the past six months I’ve not really done any significant development work or performance tuning and that is what normally kicks off something to write about.

Plus I’m trying to avoid the sort of low-value, self-indulgent posts (like this one!) which tend to characterise this blog.

Due the economic downturn, the projects that I work on have gone into more of a maintenance mode so I’ve been somewhat under-utilised and have been doing more minor bug fixes, one line code changes and much, much less big development or tuning.

My heart is in development but small changes in no way float my boat.

It does make me think I should turn towards DBAdom and try and find DBA roles (and maybe it’s less roles but probably more company and departmental cultures) where the DBAs are involved welcomed into and are an integral part of the development process rather than find the sort of Development-focused roles that I’m struggling and have struggled to find recently.

The past couple of weeks I’ve been doing some work for a different team, giving me a change of perspective on the client’s business and data and giving everyone on the previous team a break from my attitude and tone (aggravated by my work frustrations).

No sooner have I moved over when the new team have got a SQL performance problem (not me, I haven’t touched anything).

The system is a model example of reusability and complexity, involving several of these:

• View -> View -> View -> Pipelined Table function -> View -> View

(i.e. look through the object definitions and you will see that the top level views references several other views which are themselves based on views, in turn based on pipelined-table functions which are based on views of views)
(Reusability and complexity – or rather lack of complexity aka maintainability – can be two points on a trade-off triangle with the other being performance or cost)

The problem is a classic and I’m just working on the spin-off posts which touch (links to be updated shortly):

• “blind” investigating with AWR,
• hinting,
• dbms_xplan display issues and
• troubleshooting big ugly plans.

It’s the Friday before Christmas, I’m snowed in and working from home.

Is that a sled I see before me

I was just doing a half day (finished now of course) because:

1. I find working remotely incredibly difficult without the two full screens I’ve become accustomed to, I have to remote onto my VM desktop at work where all my files are open via a less than full screen window, and half the open windows are on the second screen which I can’t see remotely;
2. the kids are here because snow has closed their school;
3. that sled in the photo is waiting for me.

I was thinking also that I might be the first to make a break for this year’s New Year Resolutions post two weeks early (snow’s made me go scatty)…

In the New Year, I aspire to (in no particular order):

• Try to be a better person, parent, husband, friend and colleague.
• Take more holidays.
• Upgrade my certifications.
• Find a more satisfying role.
• Write better technical posts.
• Write less low-value drivel.

Have a good one.