So, Welcome Back Dizwell!

Hurrah for Howard.

Welcome back, and more power to your elbow.

I am not a Great Man, but you might be.

I’m half-disappointed and half-indifferent, if such a thing be possible, to discover that I lack some of the 32 main features that distinguish a Buddha from a lesser mortal.

Resume Stuff

Quick question: Do you think it presumptious/irritating/unprofessional to title one’s resume “Oracle Data Warehousing Guru” on job boards? Or is it instead an example of eye-catching marketing?

Discuss.

So, Farewell Then Dizwell

I’m sorry to hear that Howard Rogers has decided to shut down his Dizwell Informatics website, citing the workload of managing it and the number of people raising issues with articles when they plainly were not following the directions. Personally I used nearly all of Howard’s install articles and found every one of them to be of the highest quality. They saved me a lot of time and trouble over the past year or so.

I’m just guessing, but I expect that starting a new job and the need to move back into the Big City doesn’t help with the workload either, and I can certainly sympathise with that — I have a backlog of six or seven technical articles floating around in draft form at the moment but with an impending move, search for “new opportunities”, and three kids to find schools and daycares for I haven’t much hope of getting to grips with them at the moment.

Anyhoo, I hope that Howard will continue to make a public contribution through other sites, and maybe consider sending those handy articles on to a new online home.

A List: Ten Reasons Not To Use An External ETL Tool

It has been a while since we had a nice list, so here is one on a subject I rarely touch — Extraction, Transformation and Load technology.

More on Partition Key Statistics, and an Oddly Harmful Constraint

As a followup to my previous post on the importance of gathering partition-level statistics on partition key columns it occured to me that if a table is list partitioned with a single value per partition then Oracle theoretically does not need statistics on that column to infer that only a single value is present.

Another Silly Website

With a move to Virginia expected in the new year I attempted to register for an account at the Air Force Crossroads website, which has a lot of handy base information on it and forums, questions for the asking of.

Past, Present and Future

Yesterday my “Big Four-Oh” passed without incident or existentialist angst, and with much food, drink, presents and hugs from the kids — an excessive amount of the latter, I feel.

The Importance Of Partition Key Statistics

A partitioning-related performance problem came my way last week that had me scratching my head, until a 10053 trace illuminated the path to a solution.

“Thank you for registering — welcome to the 19th century”*

My wife just registered through Bank of America to get online access to her government credit card …