5 years

I’ve joined Pythian exactly 5 years ago. Back then I was a performance guy, with no real DBA and operational support experience. I knew enough about technologies though. Still getting up to speed with common admin tasks took me almost a year. At some point later it became a bit boring: dealing with out of space issues and other noise during on-call can’t be appealing for long. After ~2 years I had an opportunity to join a big project which required experience in things I was familiar with. It lasted for almost a year, and it was a useful experience.

Then I got back to normal DBA work for a short period of time, after which I’ve joined another big project. This one was tricky at the beginning, and continues to be one of a kind for almost 2 years. Initially I was tasked to help with performance issues in an application I’ve never seen before, running on top of application server I’ve never touched. It took me few weeks to figure out unknown bits and pieces, and a few months to get stuff fixed (as it usually happens, negotiations how to make necessary changes take time).

After the app was fixed, I joined another part of a big project which is dealing with Oracle eBS. The work I did there was mostly operational support, helping with whatever things I can handle: almost anything but installation/patching/cloning which are things that seems to be high priority in eBS world. I did performance troubleshooting tasks as well, and it happened so that now I do performance work mostly for more than half a year. I really like it: I use my top skills to get to the bottom of issues, then fix it, get feedback pretty quick, and learn something along the way sometimes.

Such a long time on a dedicated project led me to a move to eBS team within Pythian.
Again, I need to catch up on stuff I know partially … same as 5 years ago 😉 I think it should be fun!
Several Pythian eBS folks are located in Riga, and I’m going to meet them at Riga Dev Days 2018 in about a week. Looking forward to it!

Information exchange

This is a short note on the topic of information exchange. I use OraNA.info to get up-to-date technology news. This is a blog aggregator I’ve tried first and have been using it since then, which is 3-4 years I guess. It’s great 🙂 and I’d like to use this opportunity to say Thank You to Eddie Awad for a great blogs collection!
If you still don’t use blog aggregators and rely on your own blog collection in Google Reader or something else, then consider using one entry point instead of multiple, it’s much easier. Also I’d like to suggest using contact form on the OraNA to suggest new blogs if you know some which are not aggregated. I use it regularly when I find something interesting; I have contributed about a dozen of new blogs to OraNA so far. You can [should] do the same.

I’m back

Long time no post… I post nothing for more than two months and there were reasons: I was on-site in Canada for 5 weeks in June/July, doing some stuff which I don’t do often in the back office – and most of the time quite busy; after that I spent two extremely hot and smoked weeks in Moscow either in a cold bath or under the air-conditioner in the office – and my brain refused to think about anything; finally two weeks of vacation (I’m totally a geek but prefer spending vacation offline) – and I’m here. All that made me almost forget what it is to write some technical stuff, so this quick note is just a warm-up for my fingers (almost forget how to type quickly…) and also to do an introduction to a big event happened a week ago that I missed. It’s sooo cool that I’ll make a separate post in couple of minutes 🙂

Content thief

Do you happen to know Guenadi N Jilevski? If yes, then please tell him that stealing content is a bad idea.
See:
Select for update – unintended consequences – this is Mark Bobak’s Unintended Consequences
Timing improvements in Oracle 11GR2 trace – this one is Alex Fatkulin’s Timing improvements in Oracle 11GR2 trace
Oracle 11gR2 Grid Infrastructure — Memory Footprint – this is once again Alex Fatkulin’s Alex Gorbachev’s Oracle 11gR2 Grid Infrastructure — Memory Footprint

Update. As of Jun, 9 blog posts mentioned here (and in the comments section) are removed from the Guenadi’s blog.
Update #2. I made a mistake in the original post – the “Oracle 11gR2 Grid Infrastructure — Memory Footprint” is authored by Alex Gorbachev, not Alex Fatkulin. Now corrected.
Update #3. In the time of writing I was sure that one day or another these posts will be removed. So I saved screen shots – just in case. Here they are:
Update #4. Tim Hall supplied a useful link in one of his comments.

Off-topic

Jonathan Lewis has added me to his blog roll – an amazing event. Thank you, Jonathan!

Hello and welcome to my blog all new visitors 🙂