Upgrades again

I’ve just spent a couple of days in Switzerland presenting seminar material to an IT company based in Delemont (about 50 minutes drive from Basle), and during the course I picked up a number of new stories about interesting things that have gone wrong at client sites. Here’s one that might be of particular interest to people thinking of upgrading from 10g to 11g – even if you don’t hit the bug described in the blog, the fact that the new feature has been implemented may leave you wondering where all your machine resources are going during the overnight run.

Footnote: my hosts for the event gave me a couple of souvenirs of the visit – and because we were in Switzerland, one of them had to be a little Swiss Army pen-knife. Since I only travel with cabin-luggage I thought this might be a problem, but the blade was only two inches long and the rules about such things have changed over time so I decided to risk taking it to the airport. On the land-side of the security scanners I showed the pen-knife to the security guard and asked if it was okay to take it through – he said yes, so I dropped it into the little plastic box along with my toothpaste; but by the time it came out at the other end of the scanner the rules must have changed because the security guard on the air-side took it, demanded my boarding pass, disappeared for a couple of minutes, and came back with just the boarding pass. (If I don’t show up at ODTUG this year, it will probably be because the Swiss have put my name down on a list of international arms smugglers – alternatively, maybe there’s just a couple of Swiss security agents who have a side-line in second-hand Swiss Army pen-knives.)