Tuesday, March 29, 2005

Oracle articles

Seems like Tuesday might be the day of the post.
I promised a database article and here it is.

I was hunting for something else the other day and came across the website for the Rocky Mountain Oracle Users group. The training day material is awesome.
I suggest you delve into the many presentations which are available. It will make you understand Oracle heaps better. I thoroughly recommend the articles by Tim Gorman. The one about using statspack with the lag function as a performance stat. datawarehouse is very good.

I have finally had the chance to play with Oracle 10G in a work development environment, supporting a couple of projects which are going into production. The wheels unfortunately turn very slowly. So 12 months after the new release we are finally getting CIO or equivalent willing to use Oracle 10G in a production environment. Risk aversion city!
The change in the amount of information available at the DBAs fingertips is refreshing. The added bonus is the amount of extra history tables which allow you to check what was happening in the past.
Whilst you can be as proactive as possible, sometimes problems still occur. The ability to see what the database was doing previously makes reconstructing what was happening at the time very easy.

It is refreshing to have this wealth of information because I have been supporting mainly SQLserver for the last 18 months. The lack of a historical table such as v$sqlarea (which stores executed SQL) means that this type of detective work is not possible when you are trying to solve a performance problem after the fact.
I think I am close to developing a solution but the amount of work to gather historical SQL info is a real pain.
Hopefully I will time to make this completely stored procedure based. It looks possible.

Have Fun

Tuesday, March 22, 2005

Consumer waste guilt-trip

Pack your bags we're going on a socialist, environmental guilt trip

The SMH has an article about "Wasteful Consumers". Shame about the statistical sample being 1644 people out of the population of 20 Million! That is 0.00822% of the population.

Deep down the authors of the report and this article want the reader to feel guilty for having individual tastes and wants...
"The value of wasted food and drink represented more than 13 times what Australian households gave to overseas aid agencies in 2003."

The cart the report is pushing is that individuals can not be trusted to spend their money wisely. That is their spending habits are wasteful.
Who should spend their money instead? blankout

I suggest the author of the report and the article should read some Hayek.

Have Fun

p.s. I have promised to write some database articles (and I will). However there has been too many easy pickings in the economic orchard at the moment.



Saturday, March 12, 2005

Education

The SMH is running an article about the refusal of the board of studies to release a students raw marks. The attitude of the education bureaucrats is typical. If the truth about their scaling scheme was revealed I wonder what the response of individual students would be?
But releasing the raw scores was quote: "The disclosure of this information is contrary to the public interest,". This type of statement means the exact opposite. It is in the public interest to disclose the information because it will show the current marking scheme to be a farce.

Behind the current scheme is the idea that every student is equal in ability and to fail is bad. Failing is a feedback mechanism like touching a hot plate i.e. you are doing something wrong so try something else.

It is any wonder that having been coocooned within the school system students hit the reality of working or university hard.

A former student runs a site discussing many areas of the current education system.

Have Fun

Tuesday, March 08, 2005

Trade deficit and Foreign Debt - 1

Have a read of "Your Say" on the smh on the day the trade figures were released.

The whole trade deficit scare campaign based on Chinese made consumer goods is plain stupid.
The Chinese are helping our living standards and we are close to running a trade surplus with them. At the end of the day selling to 20 million people in Australia is like selling to 20 million people in the same per capita group in China. I guess there will be more people in that category in China then Australia.

Immediate and Capital goods imports were larger than consumer goods and even larger than combined consumer goods and services. I have attached a table which breaks the component imports into percentages.

$Millions % of Total
Consumer goods: 4260 27.06%
Capital goods 2760 17.53%
Immediate 5589 35.50%
Services 3135 19.91%
Total imports: 15744


Capital goods are things like machines and computers to make the Australian workforce more productive. Immediate goods are refined petroleum products, parts to make capital goods etc.

There has been questions about GDP growth and of course debt. However the GDP is an income/expense item and debt is a balance sheet item. Finding what the asset base of Australia is harder... so I went to the ATO website.


The ATO (Australian Taxation Office) is a mine of information. Here is the latest 2001-2002 stats.

The ATO reports that these companies assets were valued at AUS $4.1 trillion. I looked but couldn't see an kind of assets for either personal, partnerships or funds.

The ABS (Australia Bureau of Stats) reported that Aus. net foreign debt was AUS$ 400 billion.

Some perspective is required. $400 Billion is only 10% of the assets as reported to the ATO by Australian companies. So foreign debt is nothing compared to debt denominated from within Australia.

Have Fun

Next articles:
Trade Deficit and Foreign Debt -2
Trade Deficit and Foreign Debt -3
Trade Deficit and Foreign Debt -4
Trade Deficit and Foreign Debt -5
Related Articles:
Australian Trade Partners

Saturday, March 05, 2005

Welcome

Gudday,

I thought it about time I took my opinions and experience and uploaded them onto net.

The diet here will be mostly articles about databases and the vast field of economics.

As the frequency of posts it will depend on time constraints.

Note: There are no comments. I want to wait and see how the battle on comment and trackback spam proceeds.

Have Fun