If you are a director, manager or project manager who works with DBAs, you probably have had the nagging suspicion at one time or another that a DBA’s assertions regarding his or her practices lack an empirical or scientific basis, or are simply deflections intended to pass the buck.

Manager: Mr. DBA, the application is really slow. Do you have any idea what’s wrong?

DBA: Oracle is very complex. It could be any of 100 different possible causes. I will begin checking each. Anyhow, what makes you think it is the database?

Some DBAs are professional, thoughtful scientific-minded contributors. But the sad truth is that many DBAs lack the skills to professionally manage their systems. To cover, they use deflections such as the example above, or fall back on old, long-disproved practices without the benefit of evidence. Why is this true of DBAs?  One reason is that the …

Before launching into this, I must give due deference to Mogens Nørgaard’s landmark article, You Probably Don’t Need RAC (YPDNR), available here, but originally published Q3 2003 in IOUG Select Journal.  Mogens showed that you can be a friend of Oracle without always agreeing with everything they do.

At Blue Gecko, many of our remote DBA customers have been asking us about Golden Gate.  In July 2009, Oracle bought Golden Gate Software, just one of several companies that have developed log-based replication mechanisms for Oracle and other databases.  This was one of many major acquisitions by Oracle in 2009, including Sun and Relsys. But unlike most of Oracle’s acquisitions, …

Openworld 2010, despite the supposedly lagging economy, had record attendance again this year.  No doubt this was the result of Oracle acquiring something like fourteen companies since last year, including Sun in 2009.  The crowds were thick, divided about evenly between geeks in badly-fitting vendor t-shirts and slick sales-side hustlers with dress pants and shiny shoes.  I landed somewhere in the middle of the two (badly-fitting dress shirt, comfortable jeans and loafers), proudly sporting a long dangling codpiece of ribbons from my attendee badge:

My OOW2010 Codpiece

Oracle made a number of important announcements this year at OpenWorld, including a the Exalogic machine, and support for Amazon EC2, which I blogged about …