October 2017

The development teams often see the database as a ‘persistence layer’ only. And sometimes it is mentioned that the database is always the cause of the problems, especially when implementing continuous integration and trying to be agile. Then cames the idea to have this ‘persistence layer’ in an isolated environment, such as a docker container, with the database for each developer. However, this overlooks the real cause of the problems, which is not the persistence function of the database, but the fact that it is shared. And when you share something, in a multi-user environment, you reach another level of complexity. And if you are not prepared for that, you perceive it as a problem.

This philosophical blog post contains some cool words which, in my opinion, must be carefully considered when dealing database: agile, persistence, stateless, docker, microservices, stateless, NoSQL, containers, lake, cloud,…

Recently I was triggered about the ‘automatic big table caching’ feature introduced in Oracle version 12.1.0.2 with Roger Macnicol’s blogpost about Oracle database IO and caching or not caching (https://blogs.oracle.com/smartscan-deep-dive/when-bloggers-get-it-wrong-part-1 https://blogs.oracle.com/smartscan-deep-dive/when-bloggers-get-it-wrong-part-2). If you want to read something about the feature in general, search for the feature name, you’ll find several blogposts about it.

This blog post is part of a series that discusses how to get optimal performance from PeopleSoft nVision reporting as used in General Ledger.

In this post, I examine the effect of different settings for the tree performance options on how the SQL is generated.  It is common, to see different performance options in use on different trees in the same SQL query.  It is important to be able to look at a piece of SQL generated by nVision and to be able to work out which performance options have been set on which trees.

Many of you know what a “Smart-Arse” is. For those who do not…

A “Smart-arse” a person who is irritating because they behave as if they know everything or try to catch you out by misleading you.

A smart person will look at your problem and say something like “have you tried checking the array size?” and, 8 times out of 10, their input will help you solve your problem. It may not be THE answer but it makes you think about root causes.

A Smart-arse will say something more like “well, I would never have your problem as I would not have joined a company full of Java Nerds!!!”. Yeah, maybe that would have avoided my specific problem #1, but it is of no practical worth right now. .