roobaron: Databases and Economics

Rent vs Mortgage: Round 2

2010-04-22T13:20:00.003+10:00

Way back in 2005, I did a study comparing rent to mortgage interest (both are dead money).The normal saying is "Rent is dead money", I proved that rent is not dead money if the differences between the rent and mortgage repayments is put into another investment.Low and behold, the New York Times "Is it better to buy or rent" has investigated just the differences between rent and mortgage interests

Unions Battle of Bulge

2010-02-06T12:22:00.003+11:00

Facing long term decline in membership and therefore fees to maintain the union staffers salaries lead to the unions in Australia campaigning hard to get Labor into power and get Work choices and a bunch of prior Labor government industrial relation laws rolled back. So we could go back to the union glory days in 1970's and 1980's.Now the party begins, the unions are beginning their big push to

Hollywood hates humans

2010-01-05T21:49:00.002+11:00

Even though I read some reviews on the film Avatar about its Gaia worshiping, anti-human, anti-marine, anti-business (read anti-US) themes, and still went to see the 3D affects.The film was in 3D, I was expecting a little more use of the theatre i.e. the use of 3D images which project far out from the screen, however I was a little disappointed.On the plot, this was a US vs Red Indian guilt trip

Resizing oversized Oracle datafiles

2009-08-08T12:33:00.001+10:00

I am always interested in new techniques or software if that software can increase my productivity. This post is writing using Windows Live Writer. Things to do Test numbered lists Test bulleted lists Test displaying code This is the bulleted list. Yeh boring eh? Thought so… moving right along So you made this far without clicking away. Here is some SQL code

GFC part 2

2008-10-20T22:11:00.001+11:00

I am so sick and tired of the rubbish and scaremongering from people who (on paper) should know better.It is a breath of fresh air to read something which actually nails the real cause of the problem andwhat the problem is (solvency vs liquidity)http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122428279231046053.htmlIt is like people complaining about shares going down and their super (like 401k) being down 40%

Zero interest rates?!?

2008-10-16T21:56:00.001+11:00

Ahh the Global Financial Crisis otherwise known as Global Fried Capitalism or GFC.Blame it on capitalism and use it as an opportunity for another experiment with socialism.Doesn't Russia's 75 year bloody detour into hell tell you something, what about North Korea....No the enlightened, elected few and their many unelected advisors believe they can do better to "manage" the economy.With a

More pain for working families

2008-06-01T22:15:00.000+10:00

Unless you read the financial section or watch some decent finance programs you may not have seen the continuing saga which will lead to higher natural gas prices in Australia. Especially in the main consumption areas of the Australian Eastern Seaboard (Brisbane down to Melbourne).Basically the local price for natural gas is completely disconnected (at least for most Eastern states) from the

Why Earth Hour is wrong

2008-03-29T13:43:00.001+11:00

A percentage of people in Sydney 2% last year will turn off their lights for one hour.The generators still run, even these people's fridges, hot water heaters, electronic devices stillrun.It is a bunch of people trying to feel good about themselves. They are supporting a idea which is trying to make the rest of us feel bad about ourselves and our current way of life.Their underlining argument

Housing affordability

2008-03-25T22:36:00.001+11:00

Big issue in Australia, especially in large cities is the lack of housing affordability, and rents which are increasing rapidly.Tonight the SBS insight program skimmed over the issue.All interested parties are lobbying hard for the Government to step in and "make a difference".The new PM ol' mate Kev says that is it the number one problem (amongst other number one problems) affecting working

Abolish Capital Gains

2008-03-16T13:45:00.001+11:00

I was reading a interesting article on Institutional Economics regarding capital gains on residental and investment propertyWhy not abolish capital gains tax completely on all assets. It is a tax on investment.We increase our capital stock and maybe productivity will increase as well eh?That would kill the stagnant productivity and lack of infrastructure problems with one stone.Of course this

ooohhh white flight from NSW public schools

2008-03-10T21:21:00.000+11:00

Sydney Morning Herald front page lead with the digg bait heading "White flight leaves system segregated by race"I am not going to even link to it. Google will find it for you.It is a nasty little article, the aim to increase funding for public schools within NSW, re-remove parent's choice of schools and of course label all those white Anglo-Australians as racist.Those parents are discriminating

Baby bonus is for everyone

2008-01-14T23:05:00.001+11:00

When the baby bonus was introduced into Australia there were are large number of naysayers as is expected.People tend to forget the treasurer at the time (Peter Costello) introduced the bonus as a way to increase the fertility rate, so that the demographic nightmares which will engulf Japan, Europe and China can be lessened or reversed in Australia.To put it simply. The Government introduced the

US Fed blinks

2007-08-19T22:05:00.001+10:00

For all the spin that the US Federal Reserve Bank (the Fed) Governor Dr. Bernanke was different to Mr Greenspan, when push comes to shove they both blinked.Providing liquidity for banks borrowing from the Fed was not enough apparently to stave off further spikes in overnight/fed funds/interest rate which banks would lend money to each other and borrow from the Federal Reserve. For a reasonable

Consumption fallacy

2007-08-07T21:51:00.001+10:00

Not much technical stuff here, just my opinion, searchable, indexable, and hopefully readable until the sun burns out.I don't know how many times I have read articles which maintain the fallacy thatThe consumer and consumption are the largest part of any modern economy.That most people in a developed society/economy exist to consume.Without continued consumption the economy is going to crash and

What I am up to

2007-07-03T22:16:00.000+10:00

I have started a bunch of topic specific blogs on two main subject areas.Installing database software on Amazon EC2 at dbadojo.comandVirtual Machine Datamines at vmdatamine.comThe funny thing was I had owned the domains for both for a while and noticed that I could use blogger as the host, whilst have the domain something which didn't include a free blogger site, which apparently is bad form in

Continuous improvement

2007-05-28T22:52:00.000+10:00

Toyota are famous for continuous improvement and lean manufacturing. The process never ending. Thanks to Spooky action for the link.Writing a short blog about this article is useful in a couple of waysIt means I have this link saved on an external server. So when I reread this stuff in the future I can go and reread that article, revisit the sites which are linked.Reinforces the article just read

10,000 hours to expertise or why senior DBAs normally have 6 years experience

2007-05-22T21:51:00.000+10:00

Watching this video presentation by Malcolm Gladwell at New Yorker 2012 conference.Interesting. As a contractor you normally work on a 220 day working year.220 x 8 hours = 1760 hours per year.If you use the 10,000 hours to expertise that is 5.68 years. This is interesting given that most jobs roles advertised as "Senior DBAs" want at least 5 more like 6 years.Now I would argue that no DBA does

Australian postcode T-shirts

2007-05-11T11:47:00.000+10:00

Here is a mate's website which sells T-shirts with Australian postcodes, equivalent to zipcodes in North America.I had a chat to him on gtalk and told him he should extend it to include a image of google maps mashup.Go and have a look http://shop.qpzm.com.au/Have Fun

MySQL summary posts

2007-05-03T22:31:00.000+10:00

I have Frank's blog on my RSS feed.Here are a couple of posts discussing some recent presentations at the MySQL conference.Google and MySQLInnodb performance optimizationIf you are looking for the MySQL conference presentation materials they can be found hereUnfortunately given the push for sparse presentations (in terms of words). Having the audio andany screendumps/movies would help as well.

Earth hour < Green vote

2007-04-19T21:11:00.001+10:00

Hat-tip to Institutional Economics blog for this link to a discussion about Earth hour and its insignificance.Lets jump straight the conclusion the irrelevance of 2% in the normal variance is actually less than the Greens vote in the recent NSW state election.The Greens got 8.15% for the legislative Council (equivalent to the senate), slightly less than the informal vote. The informal vote is

Gapminder the founder speaks

2007-04-17T22:27:00.000+10:00

Many thanks to my mate James for the link.I wrote an article about this great tool gapminder a while ago and this video is of gapminder's founder of sorts. He is talking about how the publicly funded data from UN sources shows a different picture to the one which is normally portrayed through the media.http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/66Like I mentioned recently I want all countries to

Climate Change = Fear campaign

2007-03-31T12:26:00.001+10:00

I am going to out myself, yes am I a heretic amongst my heretic leanings...Who cares about a foreign trade deficit when the domestic economy is much much larger.Who cares about foreign debt as it is about 10% of total domestic assets.The claim that the Western economies are hollowed out of manufacturing, when it remains much larger than retail, second only to financial based companies.Your job as

China and India are going to rule the world

2007-03-13T23:38:00.000+11:00

I can see them now, the smoke filled room, the world map, the evil laughter bwahahahaha.China: India, you can have services and we will take manufacturing, we will teach these barbarians their rightful place. We will bring back the glorious days of the Ming dynasty or the Raj in India. Same old romantic garbage.Nope. Welcome to the whirlwind. The forces unleashed mean there is no going back.I

Liberty World Series

2007-02-02T21:36:00.001+11:00

I was watching a TV show about the Waffen SS and how the defeat of the axis left the survivors of that army with nothing. Indoctrinated into the beliefs of the Nazi war machine, left with nothing when defeated, realizing in fact that they were the baddies. I have also been reading the Constitution of Liberty by Hayek.The fight for freedom.Liberty the freedom from arbitrary coercion.The prize

Dangerous precedence Shareholders are not creditors

2007-02-01T17:58:00.000+11:00

I am not sure this ruling on shareholders getting equal share with creditors will last long. The banks and any business will be lobbying hard for this to be legislated away.Sorry shareholders are taking the most risk so get last piece of any cake after everyone else.Look at the balance sheet of any company, where does the equity (which is where the shareholders are) come into the equation. This

Various thought balloons #1

2007-01-30T21:09:00.000+11:00

Not too many people visit this site, which is fine. It is an ongoing experiment in learning blogging, mucking around with ads etc.You might have noticed the adsense ads are gone. I did a quick check on google and even the pages which used to be on google are gone now.Seems I must be a spam blog or splog in Google's eyes. oh well. Does this look and feel like a splog?I was struck over the weekend

Just works right.

2007-01-16T21:16:00.000+11:00

In my day job a reasonable percentage of my time I tend to have to check the same things, in some cases fix or monitor the same problem.I have a need for automation and I spend time making scripts so I don't have to type, using dynamic sql is a good example. I dislike GUIs which force too much of the workflow onto you by not handling the general case well.If you don't know the power of dynamic

Great article about Enron and disclosure

2007-01-03T16:44:00.000+11:00

I found this article on Enron and puzzles via econlog and whilst it is a long read it is extremely interesting.Basically the information is in plain sight that Enron was in trouble.Here is the student report that Malcolm Gladwell. A little bit of Google produced the pdf.Perhaps a good rule of thumb is to always get the cashflow against profit and also profit against tax paid.Whilst Malcolm

MySQL Recipes: promoting a slave to master or changing masters

2006-12-04T16:22:00.000+11:00

In the corporate world, promoting a slave to a master requires many years hard work, obtaining a suitable business degree, getting an MBA, and having a taste for promotion. The alternative is getting that break as an entrepreneur where you start as the master of your own destiny and end being the master when the money runs out or you take the money and move on. In MySQL land, failovers for

SQLserver performance tricks

2006-10-16T21:50:00.000+10:00

I came across this post at Adam's website on using TOP and ORDER BY to achieve intermediate materialization of inline view.I promised Adam in the comments I would pass it on and I have, via email to my DBA mates who I am sure haven't seen this technique and now here.This is a very good technique, I was going to type trick however a trick is something which seems to conjue up an image of magic,

Infrequent blog posting

2006-09-29T21:36:00.000+10:00

Seems a while since I have posted here and recently I haven't posted anything here about databases. But I continue to write and post blog articles. I have been writing some articles for my new employer over at PythianI went through a period where I haven't had a lot of time to keep up-to-date with what has been going on and some of the sources which I had been using as a quick summary have

Little gem found whilst websurfing

2006-09-02T22:14:00.000+10:00

Do you still websurf?Or is it all google and RSS and aggregators?Is what you read presented to you as the result of a popularity contest at digg, reddit, or even google (page rank is a popularity contest)?I am beginning to understand, partially as some of those sources signal to noise ratio decreases and partially from watching how articles become popular and how there is a huge demand for Search

Great complex systems thinking diagram

2006-08-14T22:15:00.000+10:00

Go check out this website called Idiagram: The Art of Insight and Action specifically this page which not only shows a great diagram of complex systems thinking but also the impressive way to blend java-script with graphics to present a freeform user driven diagram.I found this great website via the Anecdote blog entryHave FunPaul

Design or Evolve?

2006-08-03T16:55:00.000+10:00

Here is an interesting couple of articles from Steve Jurvetson about weighting up the benefits of designing your algorithms or letting them evolve. Read the comments as well as they are pretty good.The Dichotomy of Design and EvolutionRecapitulation in Nested Evolutionary DynamicsMore work is required in using Bayesian reasoning on evolved algorithms, essentially using the power of Bayesian to

Howto: copy of a production mysql database using mysqlhotcopy backup

2006-08-03T16:04:00.000+10:00

Do you need to see what the data was like yesterday, last week in your tables?Here are the steps to create a copy of a mysql database on the same machine, with no downtime.Assumption: You have made backups using mysqlhotcopy and are using myisam tables.Caveat: Make sure you copy the backup into the new directory, otherwise you will nuke the current database. You have been warned.Create a new

How inflation happens or What inflation is

2006-08-02T17:13:00.000+10:00

So what is inflation, how does inflation happen?It is not increasing prices, that is the effect of the cause.The cause is an increase in the amount of money in the system.If you think of prices as ratios eg. a kilo bag of potatoes cost a certain number of dollars.Prices are signals, signals of demand and supply.Recently Australian bananas have been really expensive due to a couple of

Gapminder visualization of demographic info

2006-07-21T16:04:00.000+10:00

Hat-tip to Catallarchy for this awesome visualizer of demographic info.The ability to move through time takes a snapshot in time and turns it into a good indication of behaviour.Try a movie (playing the data) of children per women (fertility rate) against life expectancy.orChild Mortality against Fertility rate.People are rational.Have FunPaulTrackback

RSS and the subscribe model

2006-07-17T20:32:00.000+10:00

There has been a idea (a meme) building for a while around the use of RSS (or atom) as a possible way of sharing and propagating information both internally and externally in a business.Adam Bosworth has a great podcast on this subject when he was talking about Google and his version of a distributed DNS-like database.As I was reviewing by blog aggregator (sage) for firefox I found another link

SQL Server 2005: Creating V$ACTIVE_SESSION_HISTORY

2006-07-07T13:59:00.000+10:00

Are you are DBA like me who works on both Oracle and SQL server (and MySQL)?Do you miss Oracle performance views like v$session, v$sql and in Oracle 10G v$active_session_history?I have created a series of tables and procedures which provide roughly the same functionality in SQL server 2005, basically mirroring the same view that is in Oracle 10G. I will backport the stuff to SQL server 2000 at

SQLserver 2005 query efficiency sql scripts

2006-06-29T19:58:00.000+10:00

Until recently if you wanted to determine what queries or stored procedures were the least efficient you would have to capture all SQL either via SQL Profiler as described in these early posts on automating SQL Profiler and tuning using SQL Profiler or have a scheduled job which dumped the sql running from sysprocesses.Now with the new dynamic performance views available in SQLserver 2005 you can

SQLserver 2005 team blogs

2006-06-25T21:37:00.000+10:00

I have been scanning some blogs by different teams involved with SQLserver 2005.Here is a short listSQLserver 2005 Database engine tipsSQLserver 2005 Query OptimizerSQLserver Query optimization - talking about SQL/TSQL optimizationSQLserver storage EngineThere is a bit of cross linking happening so some articles are repeated on one or more blogs, nothing like helping the SEO along.This article

Interesting web articles

2006-06-16T22:05:00.000+10:00

I am getting back into the groove, catching up on all those interesting blog entries and web articles which I missed in Canada, not because I didn't have internet access, just my whole RSS feed reader wasn't there, neither were my bookmarks/favourites. My setup is the result of many hours of filtering which I don't need to spend time remembering (unless I need to).I am working from home in the

Back to Sydney

2006-06-11T09:29:00.000+10:00

My three weeks in Canada is almost over.I am killing a couple of hours in Vancouver before heading back to Sydney.If you get a chance go and have a read of the Pythian blog. Like I said before these blokes and gals are smart. Christo is a damn fine Starcraft player as well. I thought I was reasonable, but hey 6 minutes and its over is really really good.I am going to being spending time getting

Kaplan-Meier analysis

2006-06-04T03:18:00.000+10:00

The blokes at Pythian are damn smart.Paul Vallee mentioned the use of a statistical analysis of survival. Specifically Kaplan-Meier survival analysis.After Paul explained how he was using it, I thought of other areas where you could use it. It comes down to how or what you class as being survival and death.Database performance. At what point does the performance hang (or die) and what is the mean

First week in Canada or cleaning internet cafe computers

2006-05-28T01:20:00.000+10:00

Finally I have a chance to use a computer without the threat of spyware,adware and rootkits. I thought I could use a internet cafe a couple of blocks from where I am staying, but the last visit required 40 minutes of downloading spybot, ad-aware, firewalls and sysinternals rootkit revealer just to make the machine ok to use. It was affected with spyware and adware badly.Anyway I chose to come

Blogging from Canada

2006-05-20T06:14:00.000+10:00

As part of my new role I am going to meet the Pythian team based in Ottawa, Canada. It will be great to meet the guys and girls face to face.So at the moment I am sitting in the departure area of Vancouver Airport waiting for the connection to Ottawa. I have time to burn so I thought it might be fun to write an article from an airport internet terminal. Humour me...I have a couple of ideas for

Google Ads and feed links

2006-05-15T23:42:00.000+10:00

All those returning visitors would have noticed that there now google ads and some RSS feeder links.This is an exercise in reviewing and working with the various web technologies rather than a chance to make any money. Given the site cracked 300 visitors this month (as measured by statcounter.com) you see what I mean.I have been playing around with including google ads for a while. I might also

Market Profile perl script

2006-05-14T11:48:00.000+10:00

I posted ages ago on a ASX stockmarket forum that I had developed a perl script to display a market profile.What is a market profile?Here are links to the CBOT education site with another link to Market Profile 101In a nutshell, a market profile seeks to show the distribution of prices intraday from tick or trade-by-trade data.It is simple to draw, which allowed floor traders to draw (before

Commentary of RBA Interest rate rise

2006-05-03T22:34:00.000+10:00

The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) decided to raise its money market rate by 25 basis (0.25%) to 5.75%. It also released a media statement injunction with the announcement.A quick summary (although you should go and read it)International growth is driving strong growth in business profits, which is enabling business to invest and borrow on the strength of those increased cashflows.Domestic

Downgrading from Enterprise Edition to Standard Edition

2006-05-01T21:56:00.000+10:00

The business decided that one of the databases that I support, that there was no requirement to run Enterprise Edition. So today and tomorrow morning early we (Junior DBA and I) are going to through the process of downgrading to Standard Edition.Here are the steps Oracle recommends:Export the whole database to file using exp or expdb, depending on the version.Deinstall the Enterprise Edition

Trade deficit and Foreign Debt - 6

2006-04-27T20:55:00.000+10:00

It has been a while since I wrote something about Australia's Trade Deficit and Foreign debt. In fact that last article was way back in June 2005!!The Aus. Bureau of Stats. (ABS) released the figures for International Trade in Goods and Services February 2006 recently, and the original figures are so close to balanced, there was a minor $AUD 105Million in it.This increase in Goods credits is

Battlefield 2 fun #3

2006-04-26T22:12:00.000+10:00

I made the 5000 point Staff Sergeant rank last week, I took the upgrade to the assault weapon. I have been playing around with a tool FRAPs which displays the framerate in the game and also can take movies as well. Every time I do something which would be interesting to see again it is too late unfortunately.I have been disappointed in every upgraded weapon apart from the medic upgrade. The scope

New Job

2006-04-26T21:52:00.000+10:00

I have resigned from my current job (still working due 4 week notice and no replacement) and taken a role with Pythian.The new role starts on the 22nd May 2006 and I will traveling over to Canada to catch up with Paul Vallee and the team. After that I will be back to Australia to provide coverage for the North American evening and early morning, at least in the beginning.The role should be great,

UNION and Venn diagrams

2006-04-26T21:33:00.000+10:00

I had a developer come around today with a problem piece of SQL where he needed to get a distinct list of users (userids) which the application hadn't set preferences correctly for.The joys of no constraints in the db. Here was a classic example where a constraint/rule i.e. a user must have a preference (or at least a default) in the beginning would have saved this whole data cleansing process

Great article as always

2006-04-25T11:04:00.000+10:00

The number of blogs which I use RSS to check grows over time. I use an Firefox extension called Sage to perform the aggregation and checking.The blog: Creating Passionate Users is always a great read. This article covers the data to wisdom hierarchy with plenty of great links.I have thought that the killer app (or at least one) is transforming data into wisdom. Given my functional programming

Expanding Oracle knowledge

2006-04-12T22:13:00.000+10:00

I have been using Oracle XE on Ubuntu to build the basic stock indicators. I have been using SQL to get a idea, later I am going to rewrite as functions and bundle into a package.The main reasons for using Oracle over writing the equivalent in perl or something else is. The data now resides in a database, selecting and manipulating data is a breeze using a language I am intimate with (SQL).There

Performance Tuning: Proactive tuning

2006-04-08T21:57:00.000+10:00

Matt Rittman has a good review of a talk by Mogens on the different tuning methods and some comments about technology.Tim Gorman had a talk about using the analytical functions LEAD/LAG to make statspack or AWR snapshots into a datawarehouse. Allowing you to track the performance of SQL across time. This allows you to identify the troublemakers that Mogens is talking about.This link contains the

SQL Server vs Oracle: Ease of Administration

2006-04-05T06:52:00.000+10:00

Oracle has released a study which shows that Oracle is easier to administrator as a DBA than SQL Server.Here is a blog article about the results. I would have to agree with that blog article that any commissioned study has to very careful about bias.My take on both databases is this, and I am in position to know as I am a DBA for both Oracle and SQLserver.As long as nothing goes wrong SQLserver

Oracle XE on Ubuntu

2006-03-25T17:05:00.000+11:00

Finally I had a chance to fix up my install of Oracle XE (Oracle Express Edition) on my ubuntu linux box. This humble machine Pentium 3 660, 512M RAM is my play area for unix.At some point last year I was completely over the stuffing around with Redhat (or Fedora) and tried Debian. That was a nightmare as well, the install hanging with no idea as to why.So I asked my friendly unix team what they

SQL Server procedure cache weirdness

2006-03-18T21:51:00.000+11:00

We have had a ongoing problem where a sqlserver instance logging web activity and running reports takes 100% of CPU. This is a dual xeon CPU box, with each xeon hyperthreaded which is almost equivalent to 4 CPUs.Yesterday I had the luxury of looking at everything about this problem as it was occurring without the need to return the system to a more stable state rapidly.I looked at everything, and

US real interest rate and emerging market financial crisis

2006-03-18T21:13:00.000+11:00

This article talks about the correlation between US real rates and emerging market financial crisis.Essentially a carry trade of borrowing in a low rate country and buying/investing/speculating in a high rate country is effected by rapid increases in the real rate in the low rate country.There are plenty of investments which rely on and extrapolate current growth rates to justify higher Net

Modeling connection pooling

2006-03-13T23:25:00.000+11:00

There is a good direction in database land away from the idea that tuning is all seat-of-the pants, smoke-n-mirrors stuff. In Oracle land it was the recognition of Oracle's wait events and the ability to see what Oracle was waiting on and hence discover a probable bottleneck. This replaced the hit ratio and other ratio crowd as the logical and objective nature of the using Oracle waits proved

Replacing Perl with MySQL and maybe Oracle XE

2006-03-12T18:25:00.000+11:00

I have a series of Perl scripts which use Perl modules to perform some statistical calculations of stock market End-Of-Day (EOD) data. I had the prospect of writing a Perl script to return the values of statistics calculation.So I decided it was time to convert from flat files to storing the data in a database. So I downloaded MySQL 5.1 and installed on a box running Ubuntu. It was a reasonably

Interesting articles and Dynamic SQL

2006-03-09T20:43:00.000+11:00

I was websurfing and came across Steve Yegge website/blog from reddit.com.I spent time last night and time day digesting the articles on the site. I would recommend you go and have a read of some of his articles. He has also put his top 7 most popular by traffic at the top.I have played around a bit with various languages since starting with computers. Given my area is more technical and support

Battlefield 2 fun #2

2006-03-08T22:26:00.000+11:00

I have been playing Battlefield 2 (BF2) a bit over the last month or so, and it has been fun. There are some annoyances and suspect deaths (people shooting the other direction and getting a head shot) but the online game play is good, most players who have managed those JFK ballistic miracles don't last long as the admins are quick to ban suspect behaviour.There are weapon upgrades for most kits

Oracle: Performance feature 1

2006-03-08T21:45:00.000+11:00

A lot of people have known that since Oracle 8 you have had the ability to create functional indexes. Basically functional indexes allow you to create an index of calculated values. The most common example provided is the infamous to_char (date-to-char) conversion function.Consider this SQL, which returns the product and amount for today from the sales table.select product,amountfrom saleswhere

Oracle SQL equivalent to SQLserver TOP

2006-03-06T21:31:00.000+11:00

In SQLserver, you can issue the following code to only return the TOP n rows.Eg. To return the first 300 rows from a search table (to return to a webpage) order by price (lowest first) where suburb is rich and transport_rating is less than 3select TOP 300 * from searchwhere suburb = 'Rich'and transport_rating <= 3order by priceIn Oracle, there is no TOP function to perform this, the simplest

Oracle 10G SQL Tuning Advisor

2006-03-04T19:51:00.000+11:00

Over the 9 months or so I have been supporting a datawarehouse which has been running on 10G R1. The experience has been fun, given the new features and strange in other respects (see my post about PARALLEL_AUTOMATIC_TUNING behaviour.Oracle 10G comes with a new PL/SQL package called DBMS_SQLTUNE, which is the API or command line way of running the SQL Tuning advisor, instead of through Oracle EM

Database performance articles and the need to understand your database.

2006-02-24T21:37:00.000+11:00

I was reading through various blogs and this site caught my eye. Lo and behold here are some great articles on SQLserver performance tuning by Dennis Forbes.Whilst the articles are written with SQLserver in mind, the 95% saving or 20x faster is a metric I can understand and have seen from experience. If you have time read them now, otherwise bookmark for later.I would add that whilst a lot of

Charolais website

2006-02-05T21:16:00.000+11:00

My sister and brother have a Charolais Cattle stud. I thought I would provide a link to their website.They have been breeding for the tenderness and marbling genes are pretty close to having the all genes required which have been discovered and can be tested.Have Fun

SQL Performance reports from profiler traces

2006-01-22T12:05:00.000+11:00

Over the December and January period I have been working with some developers to get their database performance improved. Not that there has been a problem with performance, rather we have been looking proactively at the slower stored procedures and reviewing the SQL and the logic behind each to see if we can improve.This has lead to the need for the ability to compare the performance of stored

Battlefield 2 fun

2006-01-22T11:41:00.000+11:00

I haven't played FPS (First Person Shooters) in a while. Having a family with 2 little kids doesn't lend itself to having much time to be mucking around playing computer games.However after I cleaned up the study (spare bedroom) in the house, Santa was good enough to give me Battlefield 2 for xmas.I had been playing the demo on and off for 2 months and decided to buy the game. Demos are a great

Oracle vs SQLserver: Consistent Reads

2005-12-13T22:59:00.000+11:00

I am in a good position given I work extensively with both Oracle and SQLserver databases to see the subtle but major differences in how certain parts of the database are implemented.What is a consistent read?It is the C in the ACID (Atomic,Consistent,Isolated and Durable) transaction model. It means when you read the data, your query will see a version of the data which has not changed from when

SQL Server: Remote queries on views

2005-12-11T11:00:00.000+11:00

I spent most of Friday testing out different methods for retrieving data using remote queries with SQLserver.Remote queries are of the formselect ... from databaseServer2.databaseName.TableOwner.TableName JOIN ...One of the limitations of remote queries is you can't use TABLE HINTS like (NOLOCK) on remote queries. Given that this query call was for a report which doesn't require uncommitted data

Personal DJ

2005-12-11T10:49:00.000+11:00

Here is an interesting website Pandora, (ht: Steve Pavlina) which allows you to search for an artist or song title and builds a music feed based on that search. You can also guide your computer DJ by giving it feedback on whether you like to song or not. Very cool.This service is a similar progression towards more consumer (individual) driven pulling of media content like time shifting TV, radio,

Demographics explaining housing boom

2005-12-08T15:11:00.000+11:00

I was looking at this article on Stephen Kirchner's economics blog, it is an interesting article from the Federal Reserve in the US about a model which uses demographics to predict housing demand and hence property booms.Here are link to the PDF article from the Federal Reserve.I noticed that the author of the article didn't run the model over Australia or New Zealand. It would be interesting to

Oracle: Silent installs using response files

2005-11-28T22:30:00.000+11:00

I have been setting up Oracle 10g R2 on a Redhat box which has to be reached by logging into 3 separate boxes (3 hops). Unfortunately the ability to run a x-windows client and use the Oracle universal installer GUI is not possible.So I spent 30 minutes studying how to make a response file to pass to the installer.The Oracle installer (on unix) is called normally from the command line using the

More site changes

2005-11-21T23:04:00.000+11:00

I have been playing around with the various bits and pieces which you can plug into the blog. You will notice I have shed some anonymity.I have noticed a couple of people who have come to the site have looked at my profile and I guess it is time to step into the 21st Century internet.Will I add adsense? I am not sure, I have reading elsewhere that more specific blogs which focus on a specific

Oracle: Automatic Statistics Collection

2005-11-21T14:48:00.000+11:00

I have been reading about the new features in Oracle10g. One of the nice add-ons is the out-of-the-box automatic statistics collection.This means one less script to run externally from the OS, whether it is cron or AT or whatever.DBMS_SCHEDULER is a PL/SQL package which provides a complete scheduling system. You can have groups of windows of schedules. This provides plenty of flexibility to

SQL Server Logshipping and Daylight saving

2005-11-05T16:06:00.000+11:00

Last weekend, Most of eastern Australia switched to summer time or daylight saving time.Fun and games. The logshipping is normally done every 2 minutes, unfortunately those jobs which run on the hour (2am became 3am) broke.SQLserver job agent reruns all jobs between 2am and 3am. So BACKUP LOG was run up to 30 times at 3am. Unfortunately the filename was not sufficiently unique, even a timestamp

Rent vs Mortgage: Comparisons of Dead Money

2005-10-16T13:31:00.000+10:00

The standard advice is that rent is dead money. But is it?In this article we'll be delve into this standard financial advice. We will compare the differences between paying rent and paying a mortgage, and investing the difference.If one is better than the other, is there an optimal point for either.Any bank website will provide information about the loan repayments and also the schedule of the

Oracle Text LOBs - space allocation

2005-09-21T11:38:00.001+10:00

Careful allocation of space for Oracle Text or other LOBs is extremely important, given that the storage unit is in chunks of Oracle blocks.The CHUNK size is a multiple of the blocksize!So you have chosen a reasonable blocksize of 8K for your default blocksize in the database,what happens if your LOBs are much less than 8K? ... All that extra space is wasted per lob.I noticed Oracle have released

The difference between debt and equity

2005-09-16T10:07:00.000+10:00

This is an interesting ruling to say the least. The SMH reports the ruling in favour of a shareholder to be classed as a creditor.This is plain wrong.Investing in a company makes you a shareholder (you own a share of the company). A part OWNER in the company.When a company appoints an administrator, it is saying the current owners are no longer capable of running the company. Normally the

Automating SQL Profiler

2005-09-14T22:31:00.000+10:00

Stored procedures to automate SQL profiler. Here is the two scripts which I use to automate running SQL profiler on a weekly basis.This script sets the necessary settings for profiler.Three things you must do before running this stored procedure. You need to add a path to the file. I normally use d:\perfmon\database_... This script will add the date and time to the end of the filepath. This

Performance Tuning using SQL Profiler

2005-09-14T22:15:00.000+10:00

The standard method of capturing SQL within SQLserver is to use Profiler. The output produced from the profiler can be saved to a file or to a table.Once this information has been captured you can start checking out what SQL has the longest duration, one way to start SQLserver performance tuning.Reading around the various SQLserver websites it is better to save the output from the profiler to a

Trade and Foreign Debt - 5

2005-09-06T21:11:00.000+10:00

The trade deficit was close...so close to become a trade surplus in July, it will be interesting to see what happens in August.As per normal the ABS has the document as a PDF which you can download and read at your leisure.The real numbers had the deficit at AUS$389 Million, wiping $1,768 Million of the June Deficit. As always the moving average (Seasonally adjusted) and Trend Estimate (moving

Is rational economics heartless?

2005-08-25T23:08:00.000+10:00

To be rational to use reason. To be heartless is to lack compassion or morals/ethics, something like a sociopath.EconLog have a good article on this very subject.This is more of a philosophical question. Is being rational, using the facility of reason or your mind mean you lack compassion?That is the real kicker, Adam Smith nailed this centuries ago. You can be completely self directed in your

Economic illiteracy - 1

2005-08-17T14:45:00.000+10:00

Is this bordering on a political opinion piece... maybeHere is a quote the maiden speech from a certain new Aussie senator."The purpose of the economy is not to produce the lowest price product for the end consumer. That may be a consequence of a good economy but it is not the purpose. The purpose of the economy is to create the greater nexus between the wealth of the nation and its people, and

Articles on CAPM model

2005-08-16T15:27:00.000+10:00

This blog has a entry to some essays written by Arnold Kling about the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) developed by Fischer Black.It is worth reading all the essays. They are easy to find by using the articles by the same author link on the left side of the techcentral station website.It gave me a couple of ideas on how to get the most diversified portfolio. Basically you want to hold stocks

Australian trading partners

2005-08-02T19:45:00.000+10:00

I still can not believe the lack of research in some of the opinion pieces in the newspaper. China is not our biggest trading partner.Here are the facts (from the ABS May 2005 Trade figures) and this release from ABS from 2004Trading partners (AUS$) overall#1 US -$10.9 Billion#2 Japan +$6.7 Billion#3 Germany -$6.7 Billion#4 China -$6.6 Billion#5 South Korea +$4.3 BillionGo and

Freehold property what is that?

2005-07-23T22:29:00.000+10:00

I noticed an article yesterday about residents in Byron Bay having a bad case of the NIMBYs (Not In My BackYard), no it is not that nuclear reactor or power station, or that three storey development over the back fence. It is about summer holidaymakers i.e. Tourists.Byron is sick of tourists who won't use the motels, hotels and caravan parks!Today the local council discussed issuing rules to

Whereabouts

2005-07-17T21:18:00.000+10:00

I have decided I should spend more time developing a proper essay rather than short newspaper like opinion pieces, not that I won't post short articles. I might even write a book review occasionally. I read alot, but I tend to reread the books I have as I get more ideas on the 2nd and 3rd reading.In amongst that my wife and I became proud parents for the second time on Wednesday 3.48pm Aus EST to

Trade deficit and Foreign Debt - 4

2005-07-05T22:11:00.000+10:00

That time of the month again. Most papers ran the same article from AAP on the day of the release of the May 2005 Trade figures. The next day it was doom and gloom again.SMH:Australia falls off Sheeps back. How old is this, it has been happening for a century or more. The 1950s were a blip caused by cold climate Korean War.Here is the full publication of the May 2005 trade figures from the ABS.

Oracle tuning stories - 1

2005-06-28T22:32:00.000+10:00

Like any DBA I have a warchest of old tuning stories. I tend to use them to illustrate a point to a developer who can't see the reason for changing the way the program runs.The easy low hanging fruit in tuning is finding the dodgy SQL which is not using a index. The performance increase with proper indexing can be truly amazing.Given the large variety of index types and options available in

AUS Credit Growth Year over Year

2005-06-21T22:59:00.000+10:00

AUS_credit_growth_yoy Originally uploaded by roobaron. Here is the graph I was talking about earlier. It shows the credit growth by broad type (RBA defined).It is current up to March 2005.The most interesting info is the fact that housing credit has never been below 10% the start of 1984!!When I upload the total credit, you will see what 20 years of compounding more than 10% does.Housing

Media is becoming pull not push

2005-06-19T10:31:00.000+10:00

Here is a article really a rant about podcasting which completely misses the point how media is changing. Podcasting is cast as a step back from broadcast radio. What about all those people from around the world who can now listen the writer's radio content via podcasting.Media has been a push medium, where the content is broadcast (pushed) at set times. Normally only once. You miss it and its

Oracle: Gotcha 1

2005-06-15T10:49:00.000+10:00

I did an patch upgrade to 10G R1 (10.1.0.2) -> 10.1.0.4 on linux last night.The patch went thru fine, cygwin x-window connected to linux with xauth.A couple of clicks and then simple @?/rdbms/admin/catpatch.sql from sqlplus and its done.However we have been having issues with Oracle being able to see more than 3 Gig of memory on linux. There is a solution, however I haven't seen the solution. I

Interesting article about Trade Deficit

2005-06-07T22:28:00.000+10:00

By now you might have guessed my low opinion of the MSM economic reporting and opinion. Here is an interesting article about trade deficit and housing on another Australian economics blogI need to create a flckr account so I can upload some nice graphs here. The main one I want to show is credit growth.Have Fun

Reason for it all

2005-06-07T22:05:00.000+10:00

Why roobaron? Started as a joke and it stuck.In Aus. we have beer barons, media barons and cattle kings. So why not one animal which is unique to Australia, the kangaroo or known locally as roo or due to their massive numbers roos. So was born the nick "roobaron".I remember a while back there was a media storm about the culling of roos which I think even made it to the UK (I was there at the time

Trade deficit and Foreign Debt - 3

2005-06-02T22:01:00.000+10:00

Another month and another bunch of cherry picking economic reporting and analysis from the leading newspapers.The ABS report releases a couple of different numbers; The trend estimate, seasonally adjusted and original. Most commentators seem to cherry pick the numbers to build a case for their report.I will continue to use the original numbers where available rather than averages (Trend) of