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.

One of the headline recommendations during the Real World Performance groups presentations at Openworld 2007 was to review your parameter files as part of your upgrade process. It sounds like simple common sense, but they suggested that inappropriate parameter settings that had been implemented during version 7 days for long forgotten reasons were often the root cause of performance problems on 9i or 10g databases that they were asked to investigate. One of their first actions was to review the parameters carefully and question them.

After my last post about SQL*Net message to client wait event I had a follow-up question about what’s the difference between SQL*Net message to client and SQL*Net more data to client wait events.

In a recent Oracle Forum thread a question came up how to use SQL*Net message to client wait events for measuring network latency between server and client. The answer is that you can’t use it for network latency measurements at all, due how TCP stack works and how Oracle uses it.

Just how popular is PL/SQL? And how many PL/SQL developers are there "out there"? These are surprisingly hard questions to answer. Officially and even unofficially, Oracle Corporation's point people on PL/SQL do not have any idea (or refuse to say) how many PL/SQL developers there are.