Episodes
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A common theme in my 30 years of using Oracle technology is that people love to label any and all things Oracle as "cool tech but way too expensive". But this argument is a reflection of a very dated view of Oracle, because times have changed. Nowadays there is a plethora of tools, platforms and initiatives provided by Oracle that are 100% free to take advantage of. In the same way that I don't run ads on this podcast :-) here is part 2 of my exploration of all of the cool Oracle stuff you can exploit without paying a cent.
Links from the show
Pre-Built VMs https://www.oracle.com/downloads/developer-vm/community-downloads.htmlVagrant on Oracle Github https://github.com/oracle/vagrant-projectsRunning WordPress on Oracle Cloud https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_S5VI7zZSsRunning MineCraft on Oracle Cloud https://recursive.codes/p/how-to-setup-and-run-a-free-minecraft-server-in-the-cloudCatch me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/connor_mc_d if you have questions.
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A common theme in my 30 years of using Oracle technology is that people love to label any and all things Oracle as "cool tech but way too expensive". But this argument is a reflection of a very dated view of Oracle, because times have changed. Nowadays there is a plethora of tools, platforms and initiatives provided by Oracle that are 100% free to take advantage of. In the same way that I don't run ads on this podcast :-), here's an episode that tells you all of the cool Oracle stuff you can exploit without paying a cent.
Catch me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/connor_mc_d if you have questions.
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Missing episodes?
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Login to a customer's Oracle Database and there are all sorts of permutations of how tablespaces are being used. Sometimes there is one giant tablespace for everything. Other times there are multiple tablespaces for different schemas, or different object types. The thinking on how tablespaces should be used has evolved over many years, and in this episode we'll take a look at the history of tablespaces and why this had such an impact on how tablespace layout in databases. We'll also answer a critical question - how should you be using tablespaces today?
Catch me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/connor_mc_d if you have questions.
Download the original paper from Juan Loaiza here
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There's a reason we don't just lump all of our data into Excel, Word and other such tools. Databases exist to give rigour to our data. They are the "statement of record" - the proof that our applications are meeting any business and/or regulatory requirements. The data stored in the database is typically the evidence that we provide to auditors and legal representatives that we are not breaking any rules.
But are you sure that your data will pass an audit? In this episode, I examine a real customer example - a customer that thought they were meeting all of their legal requirements, only to hit a firestorm when an audit of the database suggested otherwise. Achieving a correct ordering of transactions whilst still allowing high concurrency is an often overlooked issue.
If you like this episode, be sure you hit the Like button and share it with your colleagues. Catch me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/connor_mc_d if you have comments or questions.
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If you are the only person using a PC, then the concept of having to lock information is totally foreign, because all of the data is yours and yours alone. But databases were built for the multi-user world, where concurrent access to the data is the norm. To handle this, we sometimes need to lock the data to ensure it is controlled and updated in a way that guarantees integrity and correctness. In this episode, we discuss the "Optimistic" and "Pessimistic" locking strategies, how they are used to handle the "Lost Update" problem, and what role the internet played in changing our view of database locking. If you like this episode, be sure you hit the Like button and share it with your colleagues. Catch me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/connor_mc_d if you have comments or questions.
Blog post referred to in the episode: https://stewashton.wordpress.com/2017/06/17/avoiding-lost-updates-with-ora_rowscn/
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Known for many years as "the optimizer lady", there are very few people that can throw down with tech ubergeeks in the Oracle community whilst at the same time nonchalantly stroll into a meeting with Larry Ellision, but Maria Colgan is one of the select people that can do so.
Maria has nearly 3 decades of experience with the Oracle Database, covering SQL, performance, and the optimizer and even OS/2. In this episode, Maria and I talk about the rise of DevOps, the recent popularity of AI engines, her presentation style both in-person and on YouTube, plus some of personal passions such as going on safari and the Oscar movie cycle.
If you like this episode, be sure you hit the Like button and share it with your colleagues. Catch me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/connor_mc_d if you have comments or questions.
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Known for many years as "the optimizer lady", there are very few people that can throw down with tech ubergeeks in the Oracle community whilst at the same time nonchalantly stroll into a meeting with Larry Ellision, but Maria Colgan is one of the select people that can do so.
Maria has nearly 3 decades of experience with the Oracle Database, covering SQL, performance, and the optimizer and even OS/2. In this episode, Maria and I talk about what a face to face meeting with Larry Ellison is like; the cool features coming in 23c; JSON as the new data exchange standard and of course, her beloved Tesla :-)
If you like this episode, be sure you hit the Like button and share it with your colleagues. Catch me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/connor_mc_d if you have comments or questions.
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Known for many years as "the optimizer lady", there are very few people that can throw down with tech ubergeeks in the Oracle community whilst at the same time nonchalantly stroll into a meeting with Larry Ellision, but Maria Colgan is one of the select people that can do so.
Maria has nearly 3 decades of experience with Oracle, covering performance, the optimizer and even OS/2. In this episode, Maria and I talk about how she landed the role of Optimizer Product Manager, whether hints should be documented, and the obsolescence of the rule optimizer. We also chat about the role of social media for the modern IT practitioner.
If you like this episode, be sure you hit the Like button and share it with your colleagues. Catch me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/connor_mc_d if you have comments or questions.
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Known for many years as "the optimizer lady", there are very few people that can throw down with tech ubergeeks in the Oracle community whilst at the same time nonchalantly stroll into a meeting with Larry Ellision, but Maria Colgan is one of the select people that can do so.
Maria has nearly 3 decades of experience with Oracle, covering performance, the optimizer and even OS/2. In this episode, Maria and I talk about the beginnings of her Oracle career and how it led to Product Management, plus reminisce on our shared Irish heritage.
If you like this episode, be sure you hit the Like button and share it with your colleagues. Catch me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/connor_mc_d if you have comments or questions.
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In the high energy world of modern IT, it has become commonplace to float between companies on a regular cadence, which can result in diluting your skillset across an ever broadening landscape. But occasionally you'll have the good fortune to encounter someone who has expanded their breadth of skills almost entirely within a single organisation, giving them a incredibly in-depth knowledge of the product, a strong mentoring focus, and a unique perspective on how Oracle has evolved over the years.
Dominic Giles has 30+ years of experience with Oracle, and that makes him the perfect guest to talk about the Oracle Database. In this episode, Dom and I talk about CloudWorld, the role of the DBA in modern IT, and whether microservices is a good thing or just a giant mistake we'll never recover from.
If you like this episode, be sure you hit the Like button and share it with your colleagues. Catch me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/connor_mc_d if you have comments or questions.
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In the high energy world of modern IT, it has become commonplace to float between companies on a regular cadence, which can result in diluting your skillset across an ever broadening landscape. But occasionally you'll have the good fortune to encounter someone who has expanded their breadth of skills almost entirely within a single organisation, giving them a incredibly in-depth knowledge of the product, a strong mentoring focus, and a unique perspective on how Oracle has evolved over the years.
Dominic Giles has 30+ years of experience with Oracle, and that makes him the perfect guest to talk about the Oracle Database. In this episode, Dom and I talk about our favorite releases, how features get chosen for new releases, and how to best tackle patching your systems to keep them secure and up to date.
If you like this episode, be sure you hit the Like button and share it with your colleagues. Catch me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/connor_mc_d if you have comments or questions.
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In the high energy world of modern IT, it has become commonplace to float between companies on a regular cadence, which can result in diluting your skillset across an ever broadening landscape. But occasionally you'll have the good fortune to encounter someone who has expanded their breadth of skills almost entirely within a single organisation, giving them a incredibly in-depth knowledge of the product, a strong mentoring focus, and a unique perspective on how Oracle has evolved over the years.
Dominic Giles has 30+ years of experience with Oracle, and that makes him the perfect guest to talk about the Oracle Database. In this episode, I catch up with Dom to talk about the his origin story with Oracle, and what he's seen change over the years of his time there.
If you like this episode, be sure you hit the Like button and share it with your colleagues. Catch me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/connor_mc_d if you have comments or questions.
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Databases are incredibly sophisticated pieces of software, and hence as they mature, the algorithms and logic behind what at first glance would seem to be trivial functionality are often amazing in their cleverness and cunning. In this episode we'll explore the complexity and sophistication around what would seem to be the simplest of questions: When I want to insert a row into a table, where should the database store that row? For a database to answer that question, it needs to know which table blocks are empty, which ones are full and how to manage multiple sessions all asking for which blocks to use all at the same time. Time for some insight into the High Water Mark for a database table, and its impact on your applications.
If you like this episode, be sure you hit the Like button and share it with your colleagues. Catch me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/connor_mc_d if you have comments or questions.
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It is easy to be "too close" to things that you are familiar with, and thus become jaded and disenchanted with all of the minor frustrations one encounters over a long period of time. Frequent travellers revel in grumbling about the delayed take-off, the size of the plane seat, the annoying passenger, the slow arrival of baggage etc, at the same time losing sight of the wonder of flight. In the information technology industry, we can become similarly jaded, reduced to the cliche of "grumpy old IT folk".
Thus in this series, in my attempt to recapture the enthusiasm of youth :-), I catch up with a young woman at the very start of her IT career. Layla Massey is studying software engineering at college, and has just completed a summer internship at Oracle. To finish off this 3-part series, we discuss the challenges facing women in IT even at the college level, the role of exercise for work/life balance, how to exploit a social media presence to get ahead in the IT industry, and how to build a personal brand.
If you like this episode, be sure you hit the Like button and share it with your colleagues. Catch me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/connor_mc_d if you have comments or questions.
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It is easy to be "too close" to things that you are familiar with, and thus become jaded and disenchanted with all of the minor frustrations one encounters over a long period of time. Frequent travellers revel in grumbling about the delayed take-off, the size of the plane seat, the annoying passenger, the slow arrival of baggage etc, at the same time losing sight of the wonder of flight. In the information technology industry, we can become similarly jaded, reduced to the cliche of "grumpy old IT folk".
Thus in this series, in my attempt to recapture the enthusiasm of youth :-), I catch up with a young woman at the very start of her IT career. Layla Massey is studying software engineering at college, and has just completed a summer internship at Oracle. In this episode, we explore whether the content in college database courses matches the demands of the real world IT profession, what part IT professional have to play when it comes to ethical computing, and somehow ended up on a discussion about The Wiggles and Tame Impala!
If you like this episode, be sure you hit the Like button and share it with your colleagues. Catch me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/connor_mc_d if you have comments or questions.
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It is easy to be "too close" to things that you are familiar with, and thus become jaded and disenchanted with all of the minor frustrations one encounters over a long period of time. Frequent travellers revel in grumbling about the delayed take-off, the size of the plane seat, the annoying passenger, the slow arrival of baggage etc, at the same time losing sight of the wonder of flight. In the information technology industry, we can become similarly jaded, reduced to the cliche of "grumpy old IT folk".
Thus in this series, in my attempt to recapture the enthusiasm of youth :-), I catch up with a young woman at the very start of her IT career. Layla Massey is studying software engineering at college, and has just completed a summer internship at Oracle. In this first episode, we chat about how she scored the internship (and the cool merch that came with it!), how her interest in IT commenced, the Oracle volunteer program, and her first experiments with social media.
If you like this episode, be sure you hit the Like button and share it with your colleagues. Catch me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/connor_mc_d if you have comments or questions.
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I first met Jackie McIlroy a few years back where she was an attendee at a pre-covid conference. Since then she has gone from strength to strength in the Oracle community, being a much-sought after speaker, an Oracle Ace, ODTUG committee member and chair for the Kscope APEX program. I caught up with her at the Kscope22 conference in Dallas Texas to chat about the impact of APEX and Community on her career.
If you like this episode, be sure you hit the Like button and share it with your colleagues. Catch me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/connor_mc_d if you have comments or questions.
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Databases are incredibly complex pieces of software, which can come as a surprise given that anyone can throw together a few lines of C code to read and write data from a file. What differentiates a database from simple file read/write is how databases handle concurrent access to the data. For many years, the feature that has set Oracle Database apart from all others is its "read consistency" implementation or Multi Version Concurrent Control (MVCC). We've all heard the mantra: readers don't block writers; writers don't block readers. In this episode we'll explore why the feature is so cool, but also see what such flexibility could also lead a developer down the wrong path to corrupted data.
If you like this episode, be sure you hit the Like button and share it with your colleagues. Catch me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/connor_mc_d if you have comments or questions.
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Parsing is the act of preparing to execute a SQL statement on your database. It would seem to be a necessary activity - after all, that is what databases are designed to do - execute SQL. But the topic of parsing requires a more nuanced look, because a high transaction frequency database typically succeeds or fails based the amount of SQL parsing it does.
In this episode, I'll take you on a trip down memory lane on how slow servers used to be "Get Out Of Jail Free" card for IT practitioners, but how hardware advancements have shifted the responsibility for successful applications squarely back on the shoulders of developers. The way you handle parsing on the Oracle database could open the door to the incredible firepower of modern servers...or leave you scratching your head wondering why your CPUs are running hot but no work is getting done.
And believe it or not...if you have used a public restroom, you are well on the way to understanding how parsing relates to building scalable applications :-)
If you like this episode, be sure you hit the Like button and share it with your colleagues. Catch me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/connor_mc_d if you have comments or questions.
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No topic quite gets emotions rolling as much as the Oracle Query Optimizer. Thus you might expect that one of the least enviable jobs in the database world would be being the public face of the database optimizer. But since 2014, Nigel Bayliss has regularly fronted the community and shared the depth and breadth of his optimizer knowledge, whilst entertaining us with his sardonic wit on the challenges of databases and database optimizers.
In this episode, I ambush Nigel with some questions that came in from Twitter from the Oracle community. In particular, how to optimize queries that contain TABLE functions, and what is best way for developers to quickly and efficiently tackle SQL tuning.
Keep updated with the optimizer at https://blogs.oracle.com/optimizer. If you like this episode, be sure you hit the Like button and share it with your colleagues. Catch me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/connor_mc_d if you have comments or questions.
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