Freehold property what is that?

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 homeowners on how long they could rent their houses for each year!!! Here is the article from the SMH.

The best line for mind was from the Mayor who clearly has a socialist (perhaps watermelon) bent over private property and the use thereof.

Quote:"Asked if the impact would be to stop all summer lettings in the town's residential areas, Cr Barham said: "Essentially, yes. I'm challenging this because it has become so commercial it is having a negative impact on our community, and it puts at risk our legitimate tourism industry."

Someone better tell her that issuing compliance letters with the threat of fines will destroy summer lettings. That "so commercial" use of vacant property adds money to the local economy. I have been meaning to read up on Australian property law to get a better feel for freehold title, but this would smack of stepping over the mark.
More tourist business for the local councils which allow property owners to let as much as they want.
I wonder how much the 600 houses (homeowners) add to the local tourist economy? (see update)

This is one of those thought balloons which is floated to see what reaction occurs. Testing the waters, if this is let slide what is the next thing that local councils will issue compliance letters for???
There is already some NSW legislation which requires removal, introduced no doubt with approval from the watermelons. That is the native vegetation act, not only does this cover trees is also covers native grasses. So farmers wishing to improve their land can be fined for planting better pastoral grasses. So instead of running 20-30 DSE per acre they have to survive with grasses which can support 1-3 DSE per acre!! This means running 3 sheep rather than 20 sheep, so if the average profit per sheep is $30, that is $90 vs $600 per acre, that means you would need to own 6 times more land to produce the same profit.

The other side of this whole process is that local residents see tourists as spoiling their town and atmosphere. Instead of complaining, why don't they rent their houses during the summer period as well and holiday somewhere else! It makes good economic sense, as their holiday is partially subsidised by the renters and they don't have to be around during summer to get distressed about tourists.

Have Fun

Update: The cost of stopping the practice of holiday letting.
I did a search on Domainholiday for holiday houses and apartments in Byron Bay. Check it out. Places range from $700-$5000+ that would be per week.
So you live in Byron Bay and rent your house for 8 weeks over summer for an average of $2000 per week. That is $16,000 gross ($9000-$12000 depending on tax bracket) that you can spend on having a holiday somewhere else!
What if you want to be there for summer and work in Sydney or Melbourne for the rest of the year, the offpeak rate would be lower, say $500 per week,
so 52-8 weeks = 44 weeks @ $500 per week = $22,000.
That rent would mostly cover the loan on a investment/holiday apartment or house being slightly negatively geared.

After the holiday tourist has paid the $2000 for the week, they are probably going to spend $50-$200 per person if not more per day. That money is spent in town and surrounding areas.
So 8 weeks (56 days) for a couple or family spending $200 per day, that is $11,200 per house. Or $6.7 million for the 600 houses. If the current average letting period is 13 weeks (3 months), the town will forgo 5 weeks (35 days) or $7000 per house, or $4.2 million is tourist spending, plus the owners will miss out on $10,000 (5 weeks @ $2000 per week), a cost of $6 million.

Whereabouts

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 a lovely (little) daughter.
This means things have been slightly hectic over the last couple of days.

My sympathies to all the families who lost friends and family to the bomb attacks recently in London, and to the recent attacks in Iraq. I could say more, but you'll get better commentary at belmontclub for starters.

Have Fun

Trade deficit and Foreign Debt - 4

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. Scroll past the trend estimates (Moving average of seasonally adjusted figures) and seasonally adjusted figures (moving average of original (real) figures to the breakdown by type.

As I have mentioned in the past, non-rural, specially coal and iron ore are having explosive growth coal up 54% over last year and ore up 31.7%. Whilst wheat farmers, up until last week's rain were the focus of woe for the rural sector, meat goods have been going well too up 22% on last year. If you managed to catch landline (ABC TV) you would have noticed that live sheep exports have restarted, causing a very big jump in mutton prices!
So the drivers for exports are iron ore, coke and coal, and meat. The stuff to make and have a BBQ with... iron and coke for steel, coal for electricity and meat to eat!
Don't forget to gold plate that BBQ as non-monetary gold has been doing well.

The BBQ exports will continue to growth as the 90 day receivables start to be paid by Mr Japan and Mr China et al.

The forecast (sounding like an economist now) is for a trade surplus in the June or July 2005 figures.

On the other side, imports are looking good. If the economic reporters actually looked at the figures in detail they see that consumptions goods are only part of the import picture.
The biggest growth in imports has been fuel (48%), and iron and steel (485), both immediate goods. The iron and steel is getting used to make stuff to make Australia more productive.

In capital good land, the land of greater productivity, machinery and industrial equipment and industrial transport have risen 22% or more over last year. This is stuff which enables us to mine more, sow and harvest more and transport to market more.

Things are looking good, companies are investing in more equipment to drive increased exports in our key comparative advantage areas.

Go and read for yourself, down deep in the report and see for yourself what Australia buys and sells. It is not ten billions of Chinese toys, clothes and furniture in a lopsided one way trade as the media and others portray. The Chinese are fourth behind Germany, Japan and the US.

Have Fun

Previous articles:
Trade Deficit and Foreign Debt -1
Trade Deficit and Foreign Debt -2
Trade Deficit and Foreign Debt -3
Next Articles:
Trade Deficit and Foreign Debt -5
Related Articles:
Australian Trade Partners

Oracle tuning stories - 1

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 Oracle, there will be an index for any tuning occasion. You have got to keep in mind though what the application is trying to achieve overall. Grabbing every row individually via an index, when you are going to read the whole table anyway should be dealt with differently then a complex or simple SQL join which randoms picks the rows it wants (adhoc user and search type queries).

I was talking to a developer about the log aggregation process which had failed and was taking a long time to catch up, about 8-10 hours for each days worth of weblogs. The application was in twlight zone, one of the applications and databases where the reason for it continued existence is questionable i.e. as long as it is stable and up, not much time is allocated to stressing over it.

A quick check of the logs produced nailed down the offending SQL.

select ... from t1, t2
where to_char(t1.username) = to_char(t2.username)

This was taking the 8-10 hours to run.

I checked the statistics, and added a function based index to t1.username
create functional index fx_t1_username
on t1(to_char(username))
tablespace ...

We rerun and it now takes.... 1 minute.

Now instead of the database being the slow portion of the whole process it is the perl scripts which aggregrate the weblogs. 1 hour per day. The catchup, instead of taking the rest of the month was finished in 12 hours.

Have Fun

AUS Credit Growth Year over Year

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 affordability eh :)

Have Fun

Media is becoming pull not push

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 gone.
Podcasting, blogs enabled by RSS and Tivo in TV land are pull. A pull medium allows the consumer of the content to decide what to listen/read/watch and more importantly when to listen/read/watch.

RSS is the protocol which allows software to check a website from new content and download it.

The consumer is in control of the content they consume. They can also consume content which they could never have been able to in the past i.e. overseas content.

The real beauty of podcasting for me is the amazing content from US technology conferences available from the ITconversations website. You can listen and in most cases see the same slides as someone who went there. The other important part is you can rewind or relisten to the presentation. So even if you were at the same conference and had to choose which to presentation, you can still see and listen to the rest.

My living standard has improved because of podcasting!!! As now I can listen and see material I which would have cost a small fortune to attend!! or in the case of radio shows never heard.

Have Fun

Oracle: Gotcha 1

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 will shortly...

I restart the db with a older parameter file, save that as spfile and do the catpatch.
However the alert.log complained about the parameter PARALLEL_AUTOMATIC_TUNING being depreciated. I remove the parameter and restart.

Later on the production support blokes can't connect, they are getting TNS-12516, TNS-12560 errors. I log on from home can tnsping, can connect locally.
Eventually even sqlplus "/ as sysdba" as oracle from unix doesn't connect (without any errors as to why). Finally Oracle throws an max processes exceeded error when I try to connect as a different user.

It turns out setting the depreciated parameter PARALLEL_AUTOMATIC_TUNING = false (or not specifying it) means Oracle sets the processes to 30 automatically!!!!

I found that info in a forum entry on metalink (Oracle support website). Apparently that behaviour is undocumented and was raised to be documented. It is not there yet as I use the Oracle documentation libraries from tahiti.oracle.com (requires technet login)

I fixed set the PROCESSES parameter to a reasonable number and the connection isssues (and TNS errors) disappear.

Have Fun

Interesting article about Trade Deficit

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 blog

I 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

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). The population has seriously exploded due to the number of extra watering points such as bores and dams which have been built to sustain the sheep and cattle.
Kangaroo tastes pretty good too. Must be cooked medium to medium rare due the low fat marbling.

Now I am just rambling...
At some point I will get over it and use my real name rather than a nick. I have been using the internet for a long time using nicks is second nature as anonymity was/is a big part of the internet.
Back in them olden days sonnie almost everyone used a nick.

Have Fun

Trade deficit and Foreign Debt - 3

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 estimates, modified using a price deflator (Seasonally adjusted).

The Balance on the Current Account improved 19%! improving $3.215 Billion!
The Balance on Capital and Financial Account naturally improved as well by the same amount.

My bet is an adjustment to the figures will be required in the next couple of months.

I am still amazed at the amount of print and air time the woes of the rural sector have in comparison to their actual proportion of Australia's overseas trade.
Rural Goods exports = $6.390 Billion
Non-rural Goods exports = $22.636 Billion, almost 4 times as big or 80% of the total Goods exported. I looked up some sample reports that the ABS has and COAL is Australia's main export.
There are some nice historical spreadsheets on the Reserve Banks website. Basically the rural portion of Australian exports has been decreasing since the 1950s.
Even Treasurer Peter Costello got in on the act, saying the rural downturn was dragging on the national accounts. Big woop!
If we diverted some of the fresh monsoon rain which flows straight back out to sea towards inland Queensland, providing extra moisture, we could be the world's steak sandwich, or Teraraki Beef with rice, depending on which country the food is going to.

Unfortunately the fallacy of comparing foreign debt to income (GDP) continues. Even the ABS gets in on the game. Australia's net liability position is now 66% of GDP. It was 52.7% a decade ago.
Lending criteria is based on existing assets and incoming producing capacity.
In December 1994, the GDP stood at $139.530 Billion, in December 2004 it stood at $200.287 Billion. That is a 43.5% growth in GDP over ten years.
In December 1994, total foreign debt stood at $244.492 Billion, December 2004 it stood at $548.464 Billion. That was a 124% increase in ten years. Hence the increase as a percentage of GDP.
Before we throw the towel in, and start yelling "Banana Republic", we need to see how much the asset base grew. That is a task for stats from the ATO (a future post). We already know that the tax figures at saving we have an asset base around $4000 Billion or $4 Trillion. And that was just for reasonable sized businesses.

Clearly not all that extra debt when into investing in business. If you live in Sydney, Melbourne or Brisbane you already know the probable answer, Property. Sure enough, the RBA has a nice spreadsheet showing credit growth.
Property credit has rocketed, taking on the old exponential trajectory. Interesting enough it has never been below 10% year over year since 1982. It peaked at 20% twice in the last 5 years.

The other interesting tidbit is the increasing portion of the property credit which is securitised. Securitisation is the buzz financial tool in the US. Basically you, the lender bundle up a group of loans, low risk with a sprinkling of higher risk loans and offload/sell those loans as an asset! Hence the use of Mortgage Backed Assets (MBS) jargon in the US. This offloading clears the decks and allows you, the lender to turn about and lend again! A more detailed explanation can be found at the Prudent Bear. Doug Noland really nails this practice.

Business credit growth recovered rapidly from the nadir of the 1990-1992 recession "we had to have" but peaked in 1996. However recently it has started to pick again. My guess is commodity prices have allowed companies to start thinking about borrowing to explore, build and invest in new mine equipment. The longer the China build,US spend boom continues the more likely the trade deficit will go closer to zero, as increasing volume of commodities from Australia fuel the chinese manufacturers appetites.

I would love to show the graph of credit growth, however blogger doesn't allow inline images, they must come from somewhere else. I will sort out that somewhere else in time.

Have Fun.

Update:

The ABS released April trade figures. The increased price of goods and services kicked in, as volumes remained stable or declined slightly. More info to digest. The figures for May should be interesting, more so if the volumes pick up.

Previous articles:
Trade Deficit and Foreign Debt -1
Trade Deficit and Foreign Debt -2
Next articles:
Trade Deficit and Foreign Debt -4
Trade Deficit and Foreign Debt -5
Related Articles:
Australian Trade Partners

Tax cuts are NOT inflationary and super wins!

This is the idea that the tax cuts announced in the current Australian Federal government budget will somehow be inflationary.
This demonstrates a mis-understanding of what inflation is.

Inflation is a monetary thing NOT price thing.

Even the dictionary has it right.

Inflation: A persistent increase in the level of consumer prices or a persistent decline in the purchasing power of money, caused by an increase in available currency and credit beyond the proportion of available goods and services.

The sooner more people in Australia (and elsewhere) realise what inflation is the sooner we realise what is happening and why prices seem to always increase.

How can a tax cut be inflationary if the amount of money doesn't change (increase). The government isn't creating new money to give back, it is just giving back a small portion of the total tax. The amount of money hasn't changed.

The only way the tax cut can be inflationary is if there is new credit (loans) involved.

For example:
Mr 1.2 times-average wage (considered rich by some people, including the leader of the opposition) takes is $100 per month and uses his credit card to buy that $7000 plasma TV. Eventually he will pay the full $7000 back, but at the purchase the amount of money in circulation has increased through his use of credit. As he pays back the $7000 and watches new TV with better features sell for less than half his purchase price, that money disappears from circulation.

Mrs 2.5 times-average wage (got to be a stinkin' rich capitalist sow) puts her extra money $86.58 per week into a high interest term deposit (starting with $1000) earning 6% for her child's future university fund.
In 15 years, junior has a little over $110,000.00.
If she invested that money in a share fund returning 12%, junior walks away with a shade under $195,000.00 in 15 years.

Now the real deal, super.
On $125,000.00 she is getting super payment of $384.62 per fortnight, 8% of the salary is paid as well as super. Normally this would mean she is on a $135,000.00 package.
If she puts the tax cut money into her super fund returning 12% (without the stupid surcharge) with pre-tax dollars ($100?) and works for another 30 years, she is way better off.
Starting with $10,000 in the fund, she walks away with a cool $4.8 million!!!

Does she need a pension when she is 60-65?? She could (will) live for another 30 years and have $161,000 per year to live, assuming she took the whole amount out and put it under the bed.

It gets better...

At 65, she takes out $1 million and buys the dream everything, then she rolls the amount over and continues to get 12%, 12% of $4.8 million is $580,000 per year. Even if she lives it up and spends $200,000 per year, the nest-egg continues to grow and grow (the power of compounding) at aged 95 (who knows how far medical tech will advance in 30 years)
She will have $66 million dollars!!!

I added in inflation, it makes little difference in real term over the longer term. The numbers are smaller but given that apart from capital city housing, everything material tends to get cheaper over time (even food) someone earning $200,000 in 30 years will be better off than someone earning $100,000 now.

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Trade deficit and Foreign Debt - 2

The SMH and the Australian still run the same old scare campaigns about trade deficits every month.
The SMH article is clearly a cherry picking exercise. Picking and choosing from the different figures from the ABS report i.e. trend estimates, seasonally adjusted and original (read real).
The article takes the trend estimate number for the headline deficit and uses original figures for fuels and lubricants.

From the SMH

"Australia has recorded its second largest trade deficit ever, casting further doubt on the health of the economy ahead of next week's budget."

This is a fallacy. Countries have run trade deficits in the past and have had booming economies. This fallacy assumes that the health of the economy is purely determined by its international trade position. Plus given the economy grows over time, in the future we will probably have a largest deficit on record. yawn

If you read the ABS report, the original (real) numbers tell a different story.

Like I mentioned last month. The imports are the good stuff. Capital and intermediate goods to make companies (and employees) more productive. The consumerables dropped off after the Christmas splurge.
An example of why investing in capital goods and intermediate goods makes sense for Australian companies.
March 2005: Buy $100 million of mining equipment which enables expansion of production of mine. Mine production expands from $20 million to $25 million per month.
Assume an equipment life of 3 years (36 months) and the company is now $80 million better off at the end of 3 years.
Calculation: 36 x $5 million (extra) - (cost of new equipment $100 million) = $80 million.

Before people do the culture cringe and say Australia is just a mine and a farm. There is good reasons, we have a big comparative advantage in both those areas.

For all the worry about rural exports, resources are the biggest export area for Australia.

	Goods				Services
	Rural	Resources	Manufactures	Other
Dec-04	6340	14704	7298	2362	8479

Rural exports only made up 16% of the total exports in Dec2004, less than services. The source is ABS but the Reserve Bank has a nice downloadable spreadsheet on this page.

The last laugh was that because rural exports are down that means drought. Sorry, no rain means drought.

"These falls suggest that the emerging debate about whether Australia is heading into drought is largely academic, with rural exports already behaving as if one is under way."

There is always the Australian dollar mentioned as well, it is too high, it is too low. A good exchange rate works both ways, yes exports seem dearer to our customers overseas, but imports are cheaper. Customers will want to pay lesser price... but we can pay less as well.

My guess the foreign debt issue will be another sore point. These companies and consumers just don't know what they are doing, maybe the Government should step in and regulate. Damn sovereign individuals.

Have Fun

Previous articles:
Trade Deficit and Foreign Debt -1
Next articles:
Trade Deficit and Foreign Debt -3
Trade Deficit and Foreign Debt -4
Trade Deficit and Foreign Debt -5
Related Articles:
Australian Trade Partners

Database design - 1

There are plenty of good books and websites on database design. A keyword search for "database design" is sure to return plenty of hits.

The unfortunate fact is that design is overlooked for many applications which decide they need a database to store their data. So most databases become little more than data repositories or glorified text files (with a SQL wrapper).
Mention the word constraint and most developers throw their hands in the air and think immediately of the "constraint violated" errors. Even dedicated database developers try to get out of using constraints. The excuses are varied, here are some examples:

1) Constraints are slow.
2) Constraint errors are database specific.
3) What is a constraint? (common response from free database land)
4) The application implements the business logic not the database.

Good database design is determining what tables are required and relationships between those tables are required to implement business rules.
eg. If you have a sales app, a simple database would have a sales table and customer table. It makes little business sense to have a sale without an customer. An enabled constraint would stop a user or application adding sales without customers.

The main reason developers try to code the business logic in the application is so the application can be database generic.
If a designer designs the business logic into the database, the database becomes application generic.
Making the database application generic does not mean that there is no need for a specific app. It means that the database can be accessed by more than one specific application.

There seems to be a flow from everything runs on the server, to everything runs on client, with the potential of grid and clustering, once again running most of the stuff on a server becomes the best idea from a performance and recoverable viewpoint.

From a DBA perspective, performance is determined by design. No amount of indexing or parameter changes, memory, disk etc will fix flawed application logic and poor database design.

More on the markers of good and poor design later

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Woeful Manly

For all those NRL (National Rugby League) fans... Tonites Friday night big game was a fizzer. I tried to watch Manly vs Brisbane and it was a shocker. Manly's mistakes (and an interesting referee decision early) made it painful to watch. The Manly fans from work will be spewing.

I enjoy watching a good game of league or any footy for that matter. It is no fun watching one side self-destruct.

Unfortunately the range of footy on free-to-air TV is now League or AFL. Premier League Soccer summary is gone and the summary show and shortened game for Super 12 union is gone. And noone bothers with NFL, NHL either. I want to now why my hard-earned tax dollars go to buying junk science programs on the ABC rather than showing some days old sports summary program from the NFL or NHL. At least the sport is reality, super-volcano and mock-documentaries are pure fiction.

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SQL server 2005 or is that 2006

Database journal has a series of articles about SQLserver 2005 or codename Yukon.

It seems that a beta release is the standard practice, which allows the software company to gauge what features to spend the most time getting stable. Ahhh I am just an cynical DBA.

Considering security is a big issue for databases, the list of features apparently in SQLserver 2005 which look like low hanging fruit for those black hats out there is interesting. Peer-to-peer replication via http or https, with replication from Oracle databases!! hmmmm.
The mention that replication could be done over the internet using anything but https or more likely a hardcore VPN channel i.e. http makes the idea of "secure as default" an interesting statement.

There was no mention of fixing the locking mechanism where readers can block writers (by default) using a shared lock. Considering that the majority of database applications tend to be 90-95% reads, the idea of slowing down writes to tables, in an attempt to achieve read consistency is interesting.
You want transactions to write and get finished asap. Especially when trying to scale to handle larger number of transactions.
It depends on your application, but unless you must be sure that large read sees the data without changes, you should use the NOLOCK hint as required. This is definitely the case where the database is used more as a data repository than a well designed source of data and more importantly business rules.

For all the auto-tuning that Oracle 10G and SQLserver 2005 (apparently) can do. The big gainers, massive improvements in performance are in the design and the communication logic between the app and the database. Missing indexes and I/O balancing are simple, and shouldn't occur. If they do, it is easy to look the performance guru/hero. Nailing a database which won't scale, convincing the developer(s) that the comm logic is flawed and a better solution exists and the grand-daddy, showing where an extra table will remove redundancy and dodgy self-joins (Design) are much more fun.

More later.

Have Fun

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.

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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.

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

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.

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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
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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.

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