NOTE 02/04/2013: I noticed that this page seems to get a lot of hits, but the site I created for the comic is long gone. I have decided to upload the comics I had created here so everyone can see them. Enjoy! So I was reading through some of my
Author: Steve Karam
Steve Karam, the Oracle Alchemist, is an Oracle Certified Master with over 15 years of DBA and database architecture experience with multiple RDBMS and NoSQL platforms, server and storage systems, and development frameworks.
This Bug Brought To You By The Letter “U”
One silly bug. Ah ah ah ah! Bugs come in all shapes and sizes. Big bugs, little bugs, bugs that crash your database, bugs that make a query run oddly. Some believe there are even bugs in human existence. There is a running joke that has been around forever regarding
The Sin of Band-Aids
Let’s take a trip to the past…we weren’t actually there, but we can pretend. Let’s look into a conversation between a DBA, developers, and management at some time ‘way back when.’ Management: Our system has been performing poorly for months now. Developers: We didn’t change anything. DBA: I didn’t change
Ladies and Gentlemen, Meet Hellraiser
Sometimes you just need to take a moment and appreciate the things you have in life. And while I always appreciate my lovely wife and my darling kids, this time my appreciation is for something a little more material. Hellraiser Okay, so Hellraiser is just a computer, but what a
Comments Fixed
To anyone who has tried to post comments to my blog entries, I greatly appreciate it and I am sorry that the comments did not go through! I recently updated the mod_security parameters on my server, and it appears that the new rules break some WordPress functionality. I have approved
An Oracle Schema Filesystem
I’m one of those types that always needs a project. If I run out of projects using the things I know, I take on a project that involves something I don’t know whatsoever. For instance, building a filesystem in C that connects to Oracle and uses queries in order to
Hey Guys, Does Size Matter?
Last night I was called in on an unfortunate problem. A client has an update that they must run (unfortunately) which updates ~830,000 rows, setting one column equal to the other (two column table). On their development environment this was taking roughly twenty seconds to perform. However, on their soon-to-be
Undone by Undo
It has been quite a long time since I posted here. However, all I can say is that I’ve been very busy, and I’m happy that work is so plentiful that I barely have time for blogging! Yesterday I got a call from a client that was having some trouble.
Easy Stored Procedure Output
I answered a question on a DBA Forum today and I thought it was a common enough question to warrant a blog posting. Question: I am new to the wonderful world of Oracle. I want to be able to view the results of a stored procedure in an output window,