Overshoot day

Today, 23/09 is Earth Overshoot Day. That is the day we have used up more natural resources then the Earth can regenerate in one year.
Currently we are using 1.4 planets to support our lifestyle, resulting in a decrease of our supply of natural resources.

Maybe it’s not a bad idea to make a simular calculation for the resource usage on our databases and present the results to developers   :)

Wordle

Karen Morton has written a post about a site which takes for example an rss feed and turns it into a word-cloud.
I just had to try it out, so here is the word cloud generated from the rss feed from my blog:

I like the fact that “backup” has such a prominent place…

bottle water

This weekend I saw a documentary on television about the sense or nonsense of bottle water.
In this documentary is was pointed out that in mosts part of the world, tap water is perfectly save to drink (in Belgium it is actually more strictlty regulated then bottle water), that tap water is cheaper and that bottle water has a high impact on the environment (mainly because of transportation and the plastic bottles, even when they are recycled).

They also zoomed in to some of the more extreme forms of bottle water: Appereantly there exists something that is called “cloud juice” which can be ordered in the more fancier restaurants and is nothing more then rain water from King Island, Australia. Another example was water from Fiji, an area where lots of people don’t have access to clean water!

I must admit that I had not given it much thought until today, and in spite of the fact that I always have drunk tap water at my parents, I’m drinking bottled water today.
But after having seen this documentary my wife and I decided to switch to tap water. No more heavy lifting of bottles of water (except for little Gunnar who still requires water with a low level of minerals).

Ok, to be honest I’m drinking bottle water as I’m writing this. A special kind even: fire water aka a 14 year old anConoc single malt :)

Gunnar

Hello World,

My name is Gunnar D’Hooge, and I’m Freek and Edda’s son.
I just dropped by to inform you all of my birth on 14, Februari.
Yes, I’m feeling well, thank you.

I’m looking forward to start working with Oracle, but my dad told me I will still have to wait a couple of years before I can start working on a pc.
I was really sad when I heard this, so dad bought me a special lamp. It has the shape of a penguin. Not sure what this means, but I’m sure it is important.

Anyway, here you have a picture of me. Ain’t I cute?

Teaching

Part of my job is to occasionally give oracle trainings to customers.
Although this has never been my favorite part of my job, I find it most times an interesting experience. It forces you to realy take a good look into the material you are teaching and by explaining something to others, you ofter gain a better insight yourself.

The downsize of these kind of trainings is that you don’t have much time to actually learn the students something. I mean, you can guide them through the course material and learn them the facts, but that still is something different then giving a real understanding of things. You know, the level of understanding that you have reached when you are able to reason why something works a certain way.

A good example of this is the question (I’m currently giving a 9i backup and recovery course) : “do I have to backup my undo tablespace?”
The simple answer is that yes, you should backup your undo tablespace, but if you understand how oracle processes data changes and how oracle performs recovery (with the roll-forward and roll-back phases) then you just know that the undo tablespace has to be backed-up.

However, as I said, it takes time to gain understanding and I am afraid that a 4 days of training are only enough to scratch the surface. Therefore I find that these training courses are only suited as a kind of starting point and that you have to learn the details afterwards on yourself.
One way to do this is by organizing regular internal workshops or hand-on trainings, in which each time a fellow dba explains one specific part of oracle. Another option can be to hire somebody for a couple of days per week to coach the internal dba team.

I want to end this blog entry with a couple of questions: How did you learn oracle? Are there regular internal workshops at your company? What are your feelings about oracle courses? Do you find them usefull or not?

8 trivial things about me

Looks like, thanks to Chen Shapira, the tagging storm has hit me as well:

1. I was born on December 27, 1978 in Lokeren, Belgium and have 1 younger brother. He has also studied computer science and is currenlty working as a sysadmin.
   As you can imagine we had some animated discussions at the dinner table that where hard to follow by our parents.

1. My father is a lifeguard in a swimming pool ( I could swim before I could walk ) and my mother is a laboratory technician (yes, we had petri dishes stored in our fridge).

1. I got maried in 2003, and we are expecting our first child in about 6 weeks.

1. Every August I spend 10 days working as a barkeeper at a music festival ( lokerse feesten ).

1. I have the bad habbit of always arriving late. So if the baby looks like me, he/she will be born in about 8 weeks :)

1. I drive a Toyota Prius, but I would really need to use my bike more often.

1. My favorit beer is Hoegaarden (an unfiltered white beer) and I also like to drink whisky (single malt, that is).

1. I like reading, mostly fiction (sci-fi, thrillers, detectives, that kind of stuff). When I’m reading I tend to forget about time and other duties and keep on reading until late at night, which explains a bit the late arrivings.

My time to tag.
Hmm, I tag Geert De Paep, Arul Ramachandran and Howard Rogers (call it a flaw in my character)

Any ideas of how I would sell this to my significant other?

http://blag.xkcd.com/2007/11/19/growing-up/