Sometimes it's the simple things...

I just helped a friend with what she thought was going to be a "day ending" computer problem.

I got this phone call back in response to an email that I had just sent. "Kevin, I got your email... I only have a minute... I need to get on a conference call." Wow, I must be important. Not really, it seems that my friends computer was acting up. Every time she went to answer an email windows would pop-up, menus would open, beeps and bells would sound. She said that she may have a virus, so she was calling people instead of replying to emails.

Well an hour or so later, my friend called me back. No luck identifying a virus, maybe something was corrupted on her computer. She described her computer as "acting up only when she typed, it didn't matter what program, just any typing would make it go crazy!"

So I asked, is your "Alt" key stuck?

Problem Solved: People forget that keyboard shortcuts typically use "Alt" + "some key". So the next time you think it may be something complicated, just remember that it's the simple solutions that escape us.

Windows RAC and Lesssons Learned

Want to know how-to break an Oracle RAC on Windows installation?

I recently completed an implementation of 10gR2 on Windows and found two new ways to kill a RAC install.

#1 Windows allows you to customize the name of your network interface. So, my administrator named one of the interfaces "10.3". This was a good idea on the surface, but VIPCA didn't like it in the least. When attempting to run VIPCA it generated a trace file saying "Interface 10, Subnet 3" was an invalid number. It looks like the parse routine reading the interface definitions looks for a pattern of number"."number to begin parsing the interface definition.

#2 My administrator did me a favor, I wanted to bond a pair of interfaces on the computer (more speed, improved fault tolerance) . This happened overnight, and he rebooted the nodes after completing the work. When I came in the next morning, the RAC environment was up with no apparent errors on the local nodes. The problem was that no other computer would speak to the cluster managed services. ORA-12516 no suitable protocol for service. The maintenance on the network had changed the order of the interfaces in windows. Once I reset the interfaces to the correct order (Public, Private, etc...) rebooted and everything worked.

Effective Supervisory Skills

I am very fortunate to have a talented partner in my business, professional, and personal life. My wife Marybeth is CEO of 916 Resources and a fantastic business consultant and trainer. Last Thursday I had the opportunity to attend one of her Compass series courses.

Marybeth is a 360 Solutions strategic partner and distributor which means that she has access to some of the best training materials available. The Effective Supervisory Skills material is a full day course that introduces new supervisors to their valuable role in the organization.

We had a great class, the folks from Opportunity House made a great showing, with their entire management team from the Executive Director to front line supervisors in attendance. In addition I would like to thank John Young from KUIC 95.3 FM for advocating and promoting this class.

Use 11g features for a 9i to 10g upgrade!

It's 10:50PM, and you know that all us night owls are coming to life.

I just finished reviewing the Oracle white papers on Real Application Testing for 9i and 10g databases this is great technology. If you are looking to migrate your existing systems to 11g and Real Application Testing is in the budget, this is a great value proposition to sweeten the deal.

Here's the scoop: If you have an existing 11g database installation, you can use "opatch" to retrofit the workload capture functionality of the 11g Real Application Testing to an existing 9i or 10g database. After the patch is applied and the capture process enabled, it is a simple process to "replay" those transactions inside the 11g environment.

Oracle put together a great white paper (all 48 pages) on how this technology can be applied to an 9i to 10g migration. It looks like all us procrastinators who dreaded the regression testing in our future just got a lifeline.