An expert view on the Oracle (tm) database engine
Contents
| The Book (in association with
Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk). 600+
pages, available Early Dec.
|
 |
To
order it from Amazon US |
| To
order it from Amazon UK |
| Comments from reviewers |
| Health
Warning and Disclaimer |
JL Computer
Consultancy is the trading name of Jonathan Lewis, an
independent consultant with a great understanding of how
the Oracle (tm) database engine can be used to best
effect. These pages are a small
sample demonstrating the wealth of experience I have and
the depth to which I have studied Oracle.
I can be hired, usually at very short notice,
to handle strategy, design, implementation,
trouble-shooting, dba cover, remote monitoring, and
training.
My daily rate is very reasonable for the
quality of service offered.
|
| Index of Topics
|
| Description
of these pages |
| Biographical
Information |
| Contact
Information |
Health Warning and Disclaimer
Every book I have ever read about Oracle has been out of date,
incomplete, ambiguous, misleading or wrong - some much less so
than others but the average time taken to finding the first
'error' has never been more than 5 minutes.
I cannot claim that I will do any better than the rest, so be
warned that my words of wisdom might not be appropriate to your
current situation..
Over the years I have found that, despite days of
experimentation and testing, when I start writing about some
interesting feature of Oracle the first person to review it says
something like "it didn't do that for me" and the
reason is eventually down to:
The information on these pages is as accurate as I can make
it. However I cannot guarantee that things which worked for me
will do the same for you. As a general rule, most of the items
you see have been tested most thoroughly only on HP9000 hardware,
HP-UX 10.20, and Oracle 7.3.3 or 8.0.4. Some items are hang-overs
from 7.2.3 and 8.0.3, a couple of items are specific to7.3.4 or
8.0.5. With effect from June 2000, most of the new material will
be tested only against Oracle 8.1.5 or 8.1.6 running on HP-UX
11.00.
P.S. I have a lot of sympathy for Oracle Support - it's very
hard to diagnose someone else's problems remotely when there are
so many unknowns at the end of the telephone line.
Index of Topics
These pages have been organised to reduce loading times. The
main page now lists a number of topics. Each topic page provides
a list of relevant articles only, listed in reverse order of the
date I put them onto the Web. Recent changes in the index below
will be highlighted.
You will find that many of the articles will be referenced
from several pages - for example a cunningly crafted monitoring
package appears under the topic 'Monitoring and Tuning' and under
the 'PL/SQL' topic.
So that you can avoid redundant visits to topic pages, each
topic entry below is given a datestamp. To keep up to date you
probably only need to visit pages where the datestamp is more
recent than your last visit.
Currently the Miscellaneous page
points to EVERY article - but this may change in the future.
What is on this site
Every week or so I hope to put a few more bits and pieces on
to this site that may be of use to DBAs, developers, or other
Oracle users. These will range from handy little SQL scripts for
database monitoring to 'white papers' on how to use various
features of the database engine.
You are invited to participate in these web pages by emailing
questions, comments, or criticisms. Some of the opinions I tout
on these pages are likely to be contentious since I often
disagree with the oral traditions (a.k.a. old wives' tales) on
how to handle Oracle - if you want to argue a point I'll be
delighted to hear from you at jonathan@jlcomp.demon.co.uk.
I only get a couple of spare hours per week for checking and
writing up some of my notes, and I had over 220 items to prepare
at the last count: I've listed some of the ones I intend to post
in the near future, so if you would like to affect the order they
appear the same thing applies - send me an email and I'll see
what I can do.
I don't plan to make these pages very pretty - if you are
interested in making Oracle work better you probably don't need
pictures to keep you entertained, you're just keen to get the
right information. Most of the pages that I put up will be fairly
flat texts but from time to time I may upload Word documents or
Powerpoint presentations for you to download.
Biographical Information
My name is Jonathan Lewis and I am based in the UK.
I have been using Oracle for more than 15 years and have been
acting as an independent design and trouble-shooting consultant
for more than 10 years. Much of the work I do is very short-term,
often just a couple of days to investigate and comment on a
troublesome system. The systems I have worked on range from a
single NT up to 128-node Pyramid RM1000, databases have ranged in
size from 50 Mb to 4 Tb with transaction rates between 60 per day
and 4M per hour, and the locations have varied from 80W (New
York) to 120E (Hong Kong).
I have given a number of presentations to the UK Oracle User Group, both
at the annual conferences and at meetings of the UNIX-related
SIG. I also write regularly for the UK user group magazine:
recent articles have covered the parallel query option, partition
views in Oracle 7, partition tables in Oracle 8, and bitmap
indexes. For a while, I stood in as the chairman of the UNIX SIG
, but resigned from that post when I was made a director of the
User Group.
I specialise in knowing how the database engine works. If you
need to know which features of Oracle may be useful for your
specific application I will be able to tell you because I spend a
lot of my time investigating how well new features work and how
easy it is to break them. If you need to make your system run
faster, I can tell you what can be done, and what is most likely
to be a cost-effective approach.
I also run on-site training courses for small groups - the
size is limited only by the facilities at your site. Currently I
offer 4 different 2-day courses: How to develop effective SQL,
How to program using PL/SQL, How to be a DBA (for which I'll even
bring in an HP-9000 so you can practise crashing and recovering
in safety), and an introduction to the features and usage of
Oracle 8.1 (which I also ran at the European Oracle User Group
Annual Conference 2000 in Madrid).
Electronic mail address
jonathan@jlcomp.demon.co.uk
Web address
http://www.jlcomp.demon.co.uk
Office phone
(44) 07973 188785
Last revised: December 21, 2000.