The ICT division at my employer has just announced a number of Job Vacancies including one in my team. You can read about all of the vacancies here. I am particularly looking for people from a SQL Server background (since we are taking on responsibility for that technology) with an exposure to, or looking for exposure to, Oracle technologies. The job ad for for the DBA position reads as follows

Our DBA/Developer team support the technology that underpins some of the council’s key business applications, including housing services, social care and internal finance, HR and procurement, across Oracle and MS SQL platforms. As well as supporting packaged ‘off the shelf’ solutions, you will also be responsible for developing and supporting some of the key integrations that enable us to deliver services that are genuinely joined-up and customer focused.

We are particularly looking to build the SQL Server skill set within this important team. You will need to demonstrate a comprehensive knowledge of SQL Server databases and the tools which are used to develop and support database technologies. You will have experience in using these skills to provide appropriate support, advice and guidance to business users as well as delivering solutions for complex business requirements

The closing date is March 17th.  You can apply online and see the full details here

Recently a question came up on Oracle-L, but to tell you the truth it might have been anywhere about how on earth  one justified Oracle's licensing.  The question was

To get an idea of how much it would cost to license a point of sale database on Oracle and commodity hardware/software, we requested a quote for a 2-node RAC on Dell 2950's 2 Dual core's per server.  Quote was $306k.

Well if I were the business I'd choke as well. That's an indefensible software cost for that sort of install. I costed up a quad-core E5430 version of the above hardware, complete with, RHEL5, 16gb RAM and redundant SAN connections. Total cost of the hardware (but excluding the SAN/NFS storage that you'd use for RAC) just about $20,000. That's for the two servers. So the questioner was being quoted 15x the cost of the hardware (and 3 years worth or so of DBA time at US rates last time I looked) for the Oracle software. Any time you see the software costing more than dedicated admins and an order of magnitude higher than the hardware/OS then you have to work very hard to justify the cost.

There is an alternative though Oracle Standard Edition will do all of the above for you on that hardware. The Oracle store quote for the dual quad-core machines I listed above was $65k Now that's a much more defensible - though still high cost. Now it may be that the EE only features (DataGuard, Flashback Table (not query), block level recovery, the pl/sql function result cache in 11 and so on) are worth nearly $250k for the questioners business, but you do have to wonder. Of course on my quad-core based install the EE license fee would be $468,000

Update following Herod's comment and to make my quote clear. This is the oracle store quote for 8 processor licenses for both EE and RAC based on 50% of the total number of cores in the system. Next to it is the US pricing for the hardware

Cary Millsap of OFA, Optimising Oracle and OakTable fame has written the first part of one of those series (he'll finish before me) on how OFA got started. You can find it here. I don't have much to say on OFA itself - except that for my Apps readers I'm not talking about Oracle Financial Analyser - but this quote did jump out at me.

I don't know about you, but when I practice some task over and over again, I do tend to get better at it. For a while. Then I start to get bored, and when I get bored, I get sloppy. It's why I became a programmer in the first place: so I can do something a few times, get pretty good at it, explain to a machine how to do it, and then perform the task perfectly, over and over again for the rest of my life. It's a good formula.

I can so relate to this. In fact my work laptop now has over 3000 scripts going back to the late 90's.  All because I didn't want to do it manually again. And because i'd learned that when a customer says

Can you just update this data for me - it'll help immensely just this once

You'll run it at least 3 times.

One of those small private stories that may or may not have a place on Oracle blogs. In my last place of employment we had two Senior level DBAs (I was one and a colleague was, obviously, the other) I wrote scripts for everything , he maintained a whole slew of manual processes - think loading data from spreadsheets. Neither approach was obviously worse than the other in terms of results (well his probably wouldn't work for manual standby, mine would be a disaster for loading spreadhseet data when the colour of the text has significance) but it did betray a cultural and philosphical difference between us. For the vast majority of the time we worked together neither of us managed each other, now I've gone we both manage pretty successful teams. The lesson I'd draw - commonality of approach is as important to team success as the purity or otherwise of the approach.

--disclaimer if you need one - I'm a member of the OakTable

If you are like me you may well have some clone apps databases as a development or training environment. If you haven't I suggest you read Steven Chan on the subject here. As well as cloning our development databases we make a habit of turning on flashback database so that in the event that a developer messes up development or needs to revert to an older state then we can do quick point in time recovery.

When I came in this morning I noticed that our recently cloned training environment was down. having ascertained that in fact the clone had been completed 'successfully' last thursday I started to investigate. Starting the database manually gave me this interesting error.

comp-dev-db-1:ora.TRAIN.TRAIN1.inst:Done removing ipc resources for sid "TRAIN1"
comp-dev-db-1:ora.TRAIN.TRAIN1.inst:
comp-dev-db-1:ora.TRAIN.TRAIN1.inst:SQL*Plus: Release 10.1.0.4.0 - Production on Mon Jan 14 09:46:57 2008
comp-dev-db-1:ora.TRAIN.TRAIN1.inst:
comp-dev-db-1:ora.TRAIN.TRAIN1.inst:Copyright (c) 1982, 2005, Oracle.  All rights reserved.
comp-dev-db-1:ora.TRAIN.TRAIN1.inst:
comp-dev-db-1:ora.TRAIN.TRAIN1.inst:Enter user-name: Connected to an idle instance.
comp-dev-db-1:ora.TRAIN.TRAIN1.inst:
comp-dev-db-1:ora.TRAIN.TRAIN1.inst:SQL> ORACLE instance started.
comp-dev-db-1:ora.TRAIN.TRAIN1.inst:
comp-dev-db-1:ora.TRAIN.TRAIN1.inst:Total System Global Area 1073741824 bytes
comp-dev-db-1:ora.TRAIN.TRAIN1.inst:Fixed Size               782648 bytes
comp-dev-db-1:ora.TRAIN.TRAIN1.inst:Variable Size                 265555656 bytes
comp-dev-db-1:ora.TRAIN.TRAIN1.inst:Database Buffers      805306368 bytes
comp-dev-db-1:ora.TRAIN.TRAIN1.inst:Redo Buffers                    2097152 bytes
comp-dev-db-1:ora.TRAIN.TRAIN1.inst:Database mounted.
comp-dev-db-1:ora.TRAIN.TRAIN1.inst:ORA-38760: This database instance failed to turn on flashback database
comp-dev-db-1:ora.TRAIN.TRAIN1.inst:
comp-dev-db-1:ora.TRAIN.TRAIN1.inst:

That is a new error to me so I started digging around in the alert.log. There I found some interesting ORA-600 errors as follows.

Errors in file $ORACLE_HOME/admin/$CONTEXT_NAME/bdump/train1_smon_32219.trc:
ORA-00600: internal error code, arguments: [15709], [29], [1], [], [], [], [], []
ORA-38701: Flashback database log 96 seq 12 thread 2: "/<flashback location>/flashback/o1_mf_3rfh3tkd_.flb"
ORA-27037: unable to obtain file status
Linux Error: 2: No such file or directory

It seems what had happened was that after the cleanup the DBA who had carried out the cloning recalled that he hadn't deleted the old flashback logs and so he deleted all the files in our flashback location. Oracle crashed at this point and would not restart. There are similar notes on metalink regarding this same behaviour if the flashback log becomes corrupt. Lessons learned

1. Make sure that you complete all your cloning activities in the correct order before handing a clone over to users.
2. Corrupt flashback logs are a threat to database availability - something I wouldn't have expected.

For starting the blogtag game which as Howard points out here is a pyramid scheme which is illegal in my country and elsewhere. This one however doesn't promise money but an overwhelming amount of useless trivia about people you don't know. As such it seems to me both an excellent bit of web 2.0 and harmless entertainment. Besides Lisa tagged me and she throws a mean glass of water. So 8 things you didn't know or want to about me.

1.  I'm married to a wonderful lady called Laura - she's a professional pedant, sorry patent attorney - given that I'm a dba we argue about the precise nature of words we are using when arguing, ever wanted to know the difference between constantly,continuously and continually - come to our house it's a blast.
2. I attend this church here. If you are ever in Basingstoke, and who would be voluntarily, come along we don't bite - much.
3. I started professional life as a bean-counter for KPMG. Consequently I'm a DBA who respects auditors, not least because they have to stand in unheated warehouses in the middle of winter watching other people count things- I know I was there.  
4. I have also extensively used microsoft technologies which makes me an Oracle-head who likes both Windows and SQL server. 
5. My grandfather played rugby in the early years of the 20th century for the Lansdowne Road rugby club 
6. Despite this I don't like rugby at all, much preferring 5 days of rain followed by no result.
7. Hearing the sound of automatic weapons fire, whilst pretty rare in the UK, is a regular part of life for me as I live no more than about 1/2 a mile from an area regular used by the SAS reserves for live weapons training.
8. I once ate a meal with 4 separate fish courses in Oslo - right here in fact. I thoroughly recommend it.  
9. I can't count!

Anyway  that's a bit of me. Now lets see if we can't poke Alex, Hans, Richard, Noons, Shrek and see what happens. - See I told you I couldn't count.