Mid-week, ETL and i-nodes
Nice to see that the first day outside of 'summer time' was one of the warmest, sunniest for some while. But other than that Monday was one of those depressing days when my choice of IT as career was remarkably suspect. People that had private emails from me that day may have detected an 'edginess' of course it could also have been the leaking shower pump and soaked carpets...
I spotted this SWOT analysis of the Oracle Sunopsis deal today - it seemed to match some of my thoughts so I quite liked it - strange how you somehow feel better when think that someone is agreeing with you - even if you didn't say it in the first place
I noticed a rebirth in the technical blog - Jonathan Lewis is interesting (as always) and writing on some interesting indexing (or not really indexing) ideas to help the CBO on its way. I might give one a try but my great fear is that a DBA tidying up actually builds one of those indexes. I know this sort of thing happens - I once had my account removed by one such efficient DBA once; one who did not know that his boss had a perverted sense of humour. The lead DBA always wanted to create an account for user SCOTT (but identified by something other than the expected!) but the junior DBA removed all accounts for user SCOTT for reasons of security - some of you might think denying me access to a database is a good idea.
The other blog I delve into is Kevin Closson's Although my employers expect me to know everything about everything or at least sound like I do, I must admit that I lean heavily towards the nx world (ok, n could also be i) and moving data around a lot also emphasises the need to look at the IO. So here I find some interesting posts. I also saw mention of i-nodes and remembered one of those old support war stories from the time I managed support for a government department with a strong interest in free text searching and pattern matching. The product they used (not a relational DB) had a quirk that for each update or insert it created an empty file on the Unix system - and that after a while the system ground to a halt when no i-nodes where left. Unix trivia - did you know that rm * does not work if there are too many files.