(You may need to be a member of Linked-In and/or the Oracle Connections group to follow the link).
I think we've all been there, confRigurating away to our heart's content, haven't we? It certainly explains a lot of the problems we see in production.
These problems seem to persist whether I am in Italy with no bars on my reception, or in the west end with 5 bars. Does anyone have any idea what's going on?
Leaping shamelessly onto a passing bandwagon, Vitria explains M3O as "think iPhone meets dashboards" (quoted from ebizQ). The idea is that the "iPhone coolness" of the Web 2.0 interface will remove the gap between business and IT people. Well, as long as it doesn't (like the iPhone) lock users into an expensive long term relationship...
This looks like the first fruits from the return of JoMei Chang as CEO last July and the decision to go private, executed last March.
Philip Howard's commentary Merchant relational databases: over-engineered and out-of-date? supports the idea that perhaps general purpose relational databases should now be treated as "legacy". He references a paper The End of an Architectural Era (It's time for a rewrite) by Michael Stonebraker and others from MIT.
My first thought was that RDBMS developers such as Oracle have seen off previous architectural challengers - most notably object oriented databases (OODBMS) - in the past 25-30 years. What makes Stonebraker's H-Store any different?
First, a quick summary of the paper:
The paper claims that H-Store can beat a traditional RDBMS at TPC-C style benchmarks; an early version runs up to 80 times faster than "a very popular RDBMS" which itself underwent several days of tuning by a "professional DBA".
H-Store's secret sauce is that it is (in effect) single threaded. It makes the assumptions that all transactions are very fast; then it executes each transaction in turn. This gets rid of the need for complex read-consistency models. Other optimisations include keeping undo in memory (because transactions are short and sharp) and discarding it at the end of the transaction.
Well, go off and read the paper for the details, but here's what I think.
On the negative side:
On the positive side, though, this represents a call to action for the traditional vendors.
I may revisit this paper to tease out other issues - for example Stonebraker rants against SQL (perhaps he's never got over Ingres being forced by the market to provide SQL rather than the more academically respectable Quel). H-Store uses C++, and may move to Ruby; the implication is that applications will be object-oriented, making row-by-row navigations (like so many J2EE apps, and suspiciously like COBOL/Codasyl) rather than being set-oriented.
Let's watch this space.
set echo off feedback off
set timing on
set termout off
variable v_loops number;
exec :v_loops := 1000000;
set termout on
prompt Testing sys_context
declare
l_user varchar2(30);
l_action varchar2(32);
l_module varchar2(48);
l_sid number;
l_loopcount pls_integer := :v_loops;
begin
for i in 1..l_loopcount loop
dbms_application_info.read_module(l_module, l_action);
l_user := sys_context('userenv', 'session_user');
l_sid := sys_context('userenv', 'sessionid');
end loop;
end;
/
prompt Testing mystat
declare
l_user varchar2(30);
l_action varchar2(32);
l_module varchar2(48);
l_sid number;
l_loopcount pls_integer := :v_loops;
begin
-- note this only gets one of the three pieces of information
for i in 1..l_loopcount loop
select sid
into l_sid
from v$mystat
where rownum = 1;
end loop;
end;
/
C:\sql>sqlplus testuser/testuser
SQL*Plus: Release 10.2.0.1.0 - Production on Tue Feb 26 22:23:10 2008
Copyright (c) 1982, 2005, Oracle. All rights reserved.
Connected to:
Oracle Database 10g Express Edition Release 10.2.0.1.0 - Production
SQL> @sys_context_test
Testing sys_context
Elapsed: 00:00:07.31
Testing mystat
Elapsed: 00:00:38.57
SQL>
It is depressing to me that so many projects keep their business critical metadata in Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and Visio drawings. Some developers prefer to rely on their IDE - keeping DDL definitions as SQL in text files. That protects the definitions (at least you can find them quickly), but it doesn't get the maximum value out of it.
CASE tools have been around since the mid 80s or before - Oracle's SQL*CASE, now better known as Designer, was under development when I joined in '86 - so how come they are used less and less? They did get a bad name for encouraging complex, expensive and ultimately useless corporate data models - and we're glad to see the back of those, and the ivory towers they came from - but they can still be very helpful in defining and developing the metadata we need as a basis for system development.
I wonder whether the main problem is that many CASE tools are simply too expensive and/or too closed; they just can't cope with all the different kinds and layers of metadata we would like to throw at them, and they don't integrate well with all the other development tools around. Look at Designer - it's been more or less static for the last 10 years, and other Oracle products barely take any notice of it. No wonder it's slowly fading away.
Perhaps it's time for Oracle to get a grip and provide some common repository / metadata management for use across all its myriad of tools? Or for a small vendor or OSS project to take up the challenge? Let me know if you've already found the tool that can pull together ERDs, schema models, UML process diagrams, Discoverer EULs, a BO universe, Warehouse Builder or ODI transformation definitions and all the other kinds of development metadata that projects deal with every day.
Building that tree is a major overhead - in this case - though obviously it wouldn't be if you actually needed to navigate around the tree adding/moving/updating or pruning nodes and branches.
DBMS_XMLDOM.WRITETOFILE(
doc IN DOMDOCUMENT,
fileName IN VARCHAR2,
charset IN VARCHAR2);
A complex application version upgrade should be treated with as much respect as a data migration project. There should be a strategy (sure, it may be a standard strategy). Use standard tools / scripts. The more the process is repeatable - and the more it is repeated - the better. Make sure that all likely error conditions (missing log files, out of DB storage, non-writeable working directories, no listener) are tested for - test the tests!
By the way, the "process" includes all the operating procedures. Make sure that upgrades aren't nannied through by developers. Script the whole thing; have the production DBAs try it out the procedures as early as possible in test to make sure that they understand what's supposed to be happening (and how to know if it worked OK; the best thing is if the script just says:
IT ALL WORKED OK
or
SOMETHING WENT WRONG IN STEP 13 - SEE LOGFILE xxxyyy13
By the time the schema-and-data upgrade is executed for real, nothing - not even the unexpected - should be unexpected.
Of course, Constellar wasn't alone at the time. We competed over time against ETI, Prism, Vmark/Ardent/Ascential, Informatica, and all the others (as well as the ubiquitous roll-your-own, which is still probably the market leader).
Slipping the litigants $2 million may be cheaper than arguing the case for Oracle - but for the rest of us (especially any cash strapped open source projects) it's not an option. And I'm sure a sharp lawyer at IBM might like a bit of ammunition to see them off. Hey IBM, you're innocent!
So if any ETL pioneer (or their heirs and successors) wants my testimony to fight off JuxtaComm's malicious and meritricious suit - just let me know! I'm available for testing out the trans-atlantic business class beds any time you like...
Update 13 March 2008: more from Vincent here.
Either email me (nigel at preferisco dot com) or comment below. I would like to publish the results but let me know if any part(s) of your information is too sensitive to be broadcast, even anonymously.
Thanks in advance...
