Carlisms

As open world approaches, I'm reminded it's the last time I saw Carl. He will be very much missed this year. Here's a few random quotes going through my IM logs over the years.

yeah doesn't everybody know i'm overqualified for html???


damn you are lazy and i say that with all respect


me: hi
carlback: hello
me: howdy
carlback: cool thanks
me: you are on my dang list now 4 times: carl carlback carlbacktest carlback@gmail
carlback: i have some people to add but for some reason not working in yahoo so going to have them use google talk
carlback: sheeeeeeet, thats cause i have alot to say ;)
me: yeah but no one wants to listen
carlback: luckly i like the sound of my own voice



carlbacktest: last 15% is freakn nightmare


kris rice: I found your freeze issue. I'll have a build in ~5 minute with it fixed
carlbacktest: nice
carlbacktest: what was it
kris rice: It was trying to highlight errors and since you code is perfect there weren't any ;)
carlbacktest: doh


carlbacktest: I mean giant robots!

In Memoriam - Carl

Together with Dom Lindars, I had the great pleasure to help hire Carl into Oracle 6 years ago and have worked with him ever since. How we found him he wrote about last year which for Oracle was very non-typical. Carl turned to be anything but typical, I would have never guessed what a great friend we had found that day. He is on my instant messenger list with no less than 5 different accounts. We worked together in the same office for a little over a year. We could always count on Carl for a story ranging from collecting salamanders as a student job to using his geo/mapping background helping design with the Presido of San Francisco wild life preserve to growing up in southern California in an orange grove. Whenever my son would come to the office he would always make time to talk with him.

Then he and I both joined this "marvel" team. We talked the move over for a long time if it made sense for us to do. He was a little unsure about this plsql based app versus the svg coding he was doing for the sales group. I think anyone reading this knows how well it turned out.

He always made time to chat with my son on everything from games to giant robots to godzilla movies. Shortly after joining this team marvel we had an offsite in DC, again he made time to talk "shop" with my son. After he moved to vegas my son called him a traitor for switching from Playstation to XBOX for a choice of gaming console. However, he didn't switch before my son beat him playing over the internet ! At one team outing my family accompanied me and again Carl sat beside my son and made sure to talk with him throughout the boring dinner.


His Bio on twitter sums it up best "Super Cool Guy".

Carl will be missed by all in my home. He was a great person.

My family's condolences to his daughter, his fiance and the rest of his family.

Sqldev talk in St. Louis

In case anyone reads this is in St. Louis there's a user group meeting Friday at Ameren details are here:

http://www.missourioracle.com/

Clob read speeds over jdbc

Thought I'd pass on some findings on clob read speed over jdbc.

In sqldeveloper , when you select #clob# from #table# the tool shows the first ~80 chars of the clob. I spent part of the last 2 days timing the fastest way to read clobs from the db. I mostly work on remote databases so I notice when network latency start getting high. In looking at java.sql.Clob there's a few way to get the text. I figured I'd test them and see if one was quicker than the other. I wrote a loop that walks all the tables which have clobs in the flow_xxx schema and timed 2 of then methods .getSubString and .getCharacterStream.read().

Here's the crux of my test:

// method one
int read = 80; // only need the first 80 to show
start = System.currentTimeMillis();
s = lob.getSubString(1, read);
long s1 = System.currentTimeMillis() - start;

// method two
start = System.currentTimeMillis();
char[] cbuf = new char[read];
lob.getCharacterStream().read(cbuf);
long s2 = System.currentTimeMillis() - start;

Outcome:

Total Rows Processed : 44850

Lobs ranged in size from null to 17k with the average working out to 114

Not surprisingly, when the LAN speeds were averaged out it was 0 and 0

However, over the slower connection .getSubString's average was 102ms and the read was 197ms.

Who needs to store a password.

In sqldeveloper 1.5, if you don't want to have the option of saving the password for a connection try this:

Edit the sqldeveloper/bin/sqldeveloper.conf and add this:

AddVMOption -Dsqldev.savepasswd=false

Adding this will remove the checkbox to have the ability to save the password. I added this a while back and forgot until a recent post on the forums reminded me. A customer needed to for some complicity they had to meet.

Sorta off topic

This is only Oracle in that it's at HQ in the lobby of the 500 building. I've been loading my pictures to flickr and found this one that I had forgotten about.

Which tnsnames?

It seems to come up often that some people are unsure where the list of connections get picked up from. So, if your not sure which tnsnames file sqldev is using try this:

1) Open any worksheet

Sqldev just needs someplace to process the next command and doesn't actually use the connection for anything.

2) Enter : setloglevel oracle.dbtools.raptor.utils INFO

This sets the java logging level on for this package so you can avoid putting the entire tool into debug and being inundated withe log messages. setloglevel is something I put in to help debugging using the same method I had blogged on before.

3) open the new connection dialog

The tnsnames are read everytime the dialog opens. This is handy for testing changes to the tns files.

4) check the log

You should end up with something like this. The log will show where it's checking for the tnsnames.

not it..

I was wondering if I would get out of this since I only blog about once every couple months.

Here goes 8 things.

1. First pay back to Carl for tagging me... My son beat Carl at Burnout ( my son was 6 at the time )

2. Made one of these a couple weeks ago with my son.

3. I've jumped out of planes and helicopters
4. I'm a ham , N1JLX. My first post to the internet shows that.

5. I ride a Honda Valkyrie.

6. I drive a mini cooper

7. Served as president of our water company for 1.5 years.

8. Currently playing warhawk So if you see klrice running around that's me.

Now to spread the fun to the sqldev team and tag Barry , Sue and Vadim .