Unfortunately, books don’t really help much. The missing ingredient is the ability (or willingness) to say “I don’t understand this, what am I missing”, followed by a second reading to find the missing bit.

On the other hand, books can help because of their physical presence – if you don’t understand the page on the screen you just hit “back” and the next link on the google list of results. If you’re holding a book you might read the page again.

Your response would be perfectly reasonable if we were talking about someone asking questions about (say) the way in which a rollback generates redo. The manuals often tell you some basic mechanics, but omit important variations, get things wrong, and assume the reader already knows the basic answer.

But there is a point where you should ask yourself questions first, and think about what you are reading before you ask someone else to give you (yet another) pre-digested solution. I won’t repeat the reply I made to Joel above.

The point comes where it’s very hard to invent excuses for people – and as my post points out, this chap knew enough to query v$session_wait and v$dba_data_files.

Even if he was told nothing but “.. select distinct p1 ..”, shouldn’t he have done a describe on these these views at some point ? If he won’t do that little extra thinking what hope is there ?

If he’s managed to search for an article that starts with: “… reference note for the wait event …”, how come he can’t ask himself what a wait event is, and if there are different types of wait event, and why v$session_wait might, in some way, be recording a thing called an “event” rather than a “wait”. Again, without any sense of curiosity or ability to extrapolate, there is no hope.

The online community needs, in some cases, an attitude adjustment on the part of those interrogating those of us who take their free time and volunteer to help in these forums/newsgroups. We shouldn’t be spending time regurgitating the manuals for those too lazy to look up the information on their own; rather we’re here to help those who have read the manuals, made the attempts at understanding and are still confused.

When I see ‘partial’ questions asked I ask the OP to provide a more complete description of the task/problem; this should make them think through the issue so

1 – they have a better understanding of what they are trying to do

and

2 — they understand it enough to provide a usable explanation of the problem so others may assist them

Many times this fails and the poster moves on to other groups to litter them with the same partial interrogatory which does nothing more than irritate the regulars of these groups who ask the same question I did and receive the same ‘response’. Trolling for a ‘friendly’ face in the online community (someone who will simply dish out an answer without asking further questions) is annoying and if that friendly face is found the ‘answer’ provided may be horribly wrong for the situation at hand simply because the poster can’t word his question clearly and the ‘source’ simply spits out a response that, while technically correct, addresses none of the posters concerns because he or she can’t divine them from the question offered. A good tutorial on how to ask technical questions can be found here:

http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

Reading the above may curtail the plethora of incomplete questions and those whose answers are readily avaiable via any decent search engine.

Hope springs eternal.

hahhaa…that was super !!!

We lead horses to water, and we make them drink.