die Seilerwerks

In his paper “Using DBMS_STATS in Access Path Optimization“, Wolfgang Breitling writes:

Histograms are like drugs — An overdose [of histograms] can kill [performance].

I’ve gotten a crash course on this recently. More on that in a bit.

Following up on my earlier problems with Barracuda boxes, one of the sys admins today noted that the upstream “intent” list also includes foxnews.com and verizon.com. The former made me chuckle.

Now my understanding is that (more or less) when Average Joe User flags a message as spam (which can often happen accidentally), that message is sent back upstream, and any unfortunate URLs in that message get broadcast from the mothership to all the Barracuda installs around the globe. As far as I can tell, Barracuda offers no recourse for small victims like myself. Their support forums are dead and useless, and I haven’t received a response from their support email.

The harsh thing is that the Intent List gets BLOCKED at the filter. It doesn’t get filtered into the recipient’s Spam or Junk Mail folder. They simply do not receive it and will have NO idea that mail intended for them is being blocked. Nor did I as the sender get any kind of message that my mail was being blocked, but perhaps GMail hides this. Very frustrating.

ATTENTION DAVID SANROMA,

None of your old buddies and co-workers know how to get a hold of you. Your old Yahoo! email address just rejects mail now. HOLLA BACK.

<3,
Don.

brotherlove sent this news. Yeah that’s right, a movie adaptation of Welcome Back, Kotter! And who is a better choice to take on the role of Gabe Kaplan’s Mr. Kotter than Ice Cube! I guess Vin Diesel had prior commitments.

Although this does allow for the chance to fantasize about Travolta reprising the role of Vinnie Barbarino, and then just have Sam Jackson play Freddie “Boom-Boom” Washington. I can just see him saying the classic “Hi there” and then blowing some dude away. You know with Ice Cube running the class it’s going to be ultra-ghetto.

“Blind faith in bad leaders is not patriotism.”

Cold, Hard Football Facts.com: Archive: This dog has had his day: “It’s time for Green Bay management to heed the lesson of Old Yeller and put Favre out of his indecisive misery. Cut him today and reclaim the franchise from the feeble mind, wayward arm and rabid jaws of a slobbering old quarterback.”

I still can’t fathom why he came back. There’s no possible way he can do any real good this season, considering the rest of the roster.

If Frank Warren can pull it off and still look cool, then why not me? Probably because I’m not cool to begin with. So now I’ve got the trifecta of social networking going with LinkedIn, MySpace and Facebook. I do have an Orkut profile somewhere. I remember back in 1995/1996 when Pascal turned me on to PlanetAll.

But it’s all just a big circle jerk anyway.

So I was apprised of some goings-on wherein our data warehouse tables were going to (finally) be moving from separate monthly tables (e.g. FOO_200607, FOO_200608, FOO_200609) to a single table with range partitions on the year and month fields and local indexes.

The developers were going to just do direct insert into the new table (presumably holding off on building indexes and constraints until after), but I immediately saw my chance to finally use Oracle’s partition exchange. Paritition exchange basically allows you to do a logical swap of a single partition with a single table. The hitch is that the partitioned table and the to-be-swapped table have to be virtually identical in column types, sizes and constraints. The constraints part means you can’t have a NOT NULL constraint on a column in one table and not in the other. If you use INCLUDING INDEXES in your exchange command, then the indexes need to be identical as well in terms of columns indexed.

I didn’t even bother trying to do the “insert way,” but I rest assured that I’m saving a LOT of time doing partition exchange. Equally important is the space saved. If I were to simply copy the data via insert statements, I would basically need to use twice as much tablespace, and in this case that is a LOT. Partition exchange involves none of that. I just do the swap and them I am free to drop the monthly tables (which should contain zero rows now). Anyway the big migration is part of a crazy Sunday SUNday SUNDAY of zaps and releases coming up this weekend. All the time saved for something like this is a huge win considering everything else that we need to get done in a Sunday night.

And one famous DBA told me that partition exchange is clutch for doing dataloads into a NOLOGGING stage table, then exchanging that table into your normal partitioned table. That avoids ugliness with NOLOGGING and redo logs. I currently bump up against this all the time doing RMAN duplication recovery because all of our DW tablespaces and tables were created with NOLOGGING. Yes it seemed like a good idea when we just cared about load times. But now I know that it shrinks my recovery window on any given day and also prevents us from trying to use DataGuard. We’ll be going back to LOGGING next year after we have time to test and time it.

I can’t remember if the DBA was tkyte, HJR or maybe hali from #oracle. All three rock.

So … this is kind of gross.

How White and Nerdy Are You?