Record-Breakers

Browsing around the internet recently I came across this result:

“During February, 2010, jonathanlewis.wordpress.com was positioned by Compete.com as the 33 most visited website in the United States. In order to be ranked in traffic in number 33, jonathanlewis.wordpress.com had 25,165,482 visits.”

Pretty impressive, isn’t it.

On the other hand, WordPress tells me that I got just 45,000 visits in Feb – so which one do I want to believe ? And how did the other one get a result that was so far out ?

Something Changed

I’ve been a bit busy over the last few days and haven’t had much time to do any new postings or catch up with comments; but I’ve just got a few moments to let you know about a client I visited a few weeks ago who didn’t give me the usual “nothing’s changed” story.

“We’ve only changed two things,” he said, “the hardware and the software.”***

Mind you, I wasn’t sure whether the change in the network infrastructure should have counted as a third thing.

*** I think he’d read the earlier blog item.

Performance myths

How legends are born: http://www.simple-talk.com/content/article.aspx?article=931

But it won’t always work: http://blogs.sun.com/brendan/entry/unusual_disk_latency

First Principles

I just had to start the new year with a little humour.

Real World

Who says that the scientific method can’t be applied to real-world problems ?

http://blag.xkcd.com/2009/09/02/urinal-protocol-vulnerability/

Update – in keeping with the recent “Friday night is quiz  night” pattern, here’s a quiz on the same topic. Apologies to any who feel excluded for cultural or gender reasons:

http://www.crazyhill.com/hung/other_game/urinal.swf

Motivation

There are many things that people do to Oracle systems to try to improve performance – adding hardware, tweaking parameters, adding indexes, changing block sizes, tuning the SQL.

When all else fails, you might even consider shouting at it – but don’t, it won’t work, as demonstrated in this video clip.

Thanks to Oak Table member Mario Broodbakker for sending me the link.

Root Cause

There are a few expressions in the industry that irritate me - not necessarily for good reason but simply because they sound like the extremes of pretentiousness and marketing put together.  (Pretentious, moi !)

Humour

Tom Kyte and Pete Finnigan are both well known for talking about the need to use bind variables and the dangers of SQL Injection. This cartoon must have been written just for them.

Humour (possibly)

This may not translate well because of the colloquialisms, but it seems appropriate for the current time of year (early January) in the UK.

You may have noticed that I spend quite a lot of my time explaining why something is a bad idea and should be treated with caution. Occasionally this has resulted in complaints that I keep pouring cold water on everything. The best response to this comment is one I first heard many years ago:

“Cold water is the natural result of hot air meeting thin ice”.