It’s good to see some more people joining in, particularly those I already know and admire.

First up is Mark Bobak, who I’ve met at several conferences and, as you can tell from his first few posts, is likely to have some interesting technical tales to tell.

Oracle doesn’t make it terribly easy to run operating system commands from within a PL/SQL block. I suppose that’s understandable, given that PL/SQL is an embedded database-oriented language. Still, developers do ask me on a regular basis about how they can do this.

I was just looking up a link to the original YAPP paper so that I could include it in the course notes and then noticed Anjo Kolk’s site is back online. I think it might be a little while before things are back to normal, though - sounds like there’s a bit of work to be done ….

Time for a quick break from the final push to complete the course slides. I’ve (probably foolishly) decided to apply the 10.2.0.4 patch to my test database.

As I was confirming the details of when Oracle starts to flush information from the ASH Buffer to the workload repository, I thought I’d check the value as it’s defined in a hidden parameter, _ash_eflush_trigger. The default is 66, which means that the flush begins whenever the circular buffer is 66% used, to stop it from wrapping around on itself, or filling up, whichever description you prefer.

Collaborate08, annual conference of the International Oracle User Group, and several other national and international user groups, will be held in Denver this year, from April 13th to the 16^th. I am going to present three papers, including (for the first time) Weird PL/SQL. I thought you might enjoy reading about some of the weirdnesses of PL/SQL in my ToadWorld blog, so here’s an excerpt from the beginning of my whitepaper.

On the one hand, I regret the fact I seem to be posting a lot of links to other people’s work at the moment but I couldn’t let this one by, if only for those who don’t use OraNA or the like and might miss it.

The one consistent message I kept hearing from other attendees at Openworld this year was that a lot of sites seem to have run into performance problems when upgrading from 9i to 10g due to changes in the CBO and DBMS_STATS. Yes, there are some Oracle 9i databases out there, you know.

Via Laurent Schneider’s blog, it looks like 10.2.0.4 is out. I’ve just had a quick look on Metalink and unfortunately (but unsurprisingly) it doesn’t seem to be available for AIX just yet, just Linux, but it’s one we’ve been waiting for for a while, so it’s good to see the first signs.