Episodes
Thursday Dec 08, 2022
The Dom Giles Sessions - part 2
Thursday Dec 08, 2022
Thursday Dec 08, 2022
In the high energy world of modern IT, it has become commonplace to float between companies on a regular cadence, which can result in diluting your skillset across an ever broadening landscape. But occasionally you'll have the good fortune to encounter someone who has expanded their breadth of skills almost entirely within a single organisation, giving them a incredibly in-depth knowledge of the product, a strong mentoring focus, and a unique perspective on how Oracle has evolved over the years.
Dominic Giles has 30+ years of experience with Oracle, and that makes him the perfect guest to talk about the Oracle Database. In this episode, Dom and I talk about our favorite releases, how features get chosen for new releases, and how to best tackle patching your systems to keep them secure and up to date.
If you like this episode, be sure you hit the Like button and share it with your colleagues. Catch me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/connor_mc_d if you have comments or questions.
Wednesday Nov 23, 2022
The Dom Giles Sessions - part 1
Wednesday Nov 23, 2022
Wednesday Nov 23, 2022
In the high energy world of modern IT, it has become commonplace to float between companies on a regular cadence, which can result in diluting your skillset across an ever broadening landscape. But occasionally you'll have the good fortune to encounter someone who has expanded their breadth of skills almost entirely within a single organisation, giving them a incredibly in-depth knowledge of the product, a strong mentoring focus, and a unique perspective on how Oracle has evolved over the years.
Dominic Giles has 30+ years of experience with Oracle, and that makes him the perfect guest to talk about the Oracle Database. In this episode, I catch up with Dom to talk about the his origin story with Oracle, and what he's seen change over the years of his time there.
If you like this episode, be sure you hit the Like button and share it with your colleagues. Catch me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/connor_mc_d if you have comments or questions.
Monday Oct 10, 2022
Back to Basics: The highs and lows of the High Water Mark
Monday Oct 10, 2022
Monday Oct 10, 2022
Databases are incredibly sophisticated pieces of software, and hence as they mature, the algorithms and logic behind what at first glance would seem to be trivial functionality are often amazing in their cleverness and cunning. In this episode we'll explore the complexity and sophistication around what would seem to be the simplest of questions: When I want to insert a row into a table, where should the database store that row? For a database to answer that question, it needs to know which table blocks are empty, which ones are full and how to manage multiple sessions all asking for which blocks to use all at the same time. Time for some insight into the High Water Mark for a database table, and its impact on your applications.
If you like this episode, be sure you hit the Like button and share it with your colleagues. Catch me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/connor_mc_d if you have comments or questions.
Wednesday Sep 07, 2022
The next generation of Oracle Developers - part3
Wednesday Sep 07, 2022
Wednesday Sep 07, 2022
It is easy to be "too close" to things that you are familiar with, and thus become jaded and disenchanted with all of the minor frustrations one encounters over a long period of time. Frequent travellers revel in grumbling about the delayed take-off, the size of the plane seat, the annoying passenger, the slow arrival of baggage etc, at the same time losing sight of the wonder of flight. In the information technology industry, we can become similarly jaded, reduced to the cliche of "grumpy old IT folk".
Thus in this series, in my attempt to recapture the enthusiasm of youth :-), I catch up with a young woman at the very start of her IT career. Layla Massey is studying software engineering at college, and has just completed a summer internship at Oracle. To finish off this 3-part series, we discuss the challenges facing women in IT even at the college level, the role of exercise for work/life balance, how to exploit a social media presence to get ahead in the IT industry, and how to build a personal brand.
If you like this episode, be sure you hit the Like button and share it with your colleagues. Catch me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/connor_mc_d if you have comments or questions.
Monday Aug 29, 2022
The next generation of Oracle Developers - part 2
Monday Aug 29, 2022
Monday Aug 29, 2022
It is easy to be "too close" to things that you are familiar with, and thus become jaded and disenchanted with all of the minor frustrations one encounters over a long period of time. Frequent travellers revel in grumbling about the delayed take-off, the size of the plane seat, the annoying passenger, the slow arrival of baggage etc, at the same time losing sight of the wonder of flight. In the information technology industry, we can become similarly jaded, reduced to the cliche of "grumpy old IT folk".
Thus in this series, in my attempt to recapture the enthusiasm of youth :-), I catch up with a young woman at the very start of her IT career. Layla Massey is studying software engineering at college, and has just completed a summer internship at Oracle. In this episode, we explore whether the content in college database courses matches the demands of the real world IT profession, what part IT professional have to play when it comes to ethical computing, and somehow ended up on a discussion about The Wiggles and Tame Impala!
If you like this episode, be sure you hit the Like button and share it with your colleagues. Catch me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/connor_mc_d if you have comments or questions.
Tuesday Aug 23, 2022
The next generation of Oracle Developers - part 1
Tuesday Aug 23, 2022
Tuesday Aug 23, 2022
It is easy to be "too close" to things that you are familiar with, and thus become jaded and disenchanted with all of the minor frustrations one encounters over a long period of time. Frequent travellers revel in grumbling about the delayed take-off, the size of the plane seat, the annoying passenger, the slow arrival of baggage etc, at the same time losing sight of the wonder of flight. In the information technology industry, we can become similarly jaded, reduced to the cliche of "grumpy old IT folk".
Thus in this series, in my attempt to recapture the enthusiasm of youth :-), I catch up with a young woman at the very start of her IT career. Layla Massey is studying software engineering at college, and has just completed a summer internship at Oracle. In this first episode, we chat about how she scored the internship (and the cool merch that came with it!), how her interest in IT commenced, the Oracle volunteer program, and her first experiments with social media.
If you like this episode, be sure you hit the Like button and share it with your colleagues. Catch me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/connor_mc_d if you have comments or questions.
Monday Jul 04, 2022
A conversation with Jackie McIlroy
Monday Jul 04, 2022
Monday Jul 04, 2022
I first met Jackie McIlroy a few years back where she was an attendee at a pre-covid conference. Since then she has gone from strength to strength in the Oracle community, being a much-sought after speaker, an Oracle Ace, ODTUG committee member and chair for the Kscope APEX program. I caught up with her at the Kscope22 conference in Dallas Texas to chat about the impact of APEX and Community on her career.
If you like this episode, be sure you hit the Like button and share it with your colleagues. Catch me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/connor_mc_d if you have comments or questions.
Tuesday May 10, 2022
Back to Basics: MVCC - Why databases are magic!
Tuesday May 10, 2022
Tuesday May 10, 2022
Databases are incredibly complex pieces of software, which can come as a surprise given that anyone can throw together a few lines of C code to read and write data from a file. What differentiates a database from simple file read/write is how databases handle concurrent access to the data. For many years, the feature that has set Oracle Database apart from all others is its "read consistency" implementation or Multi Version Concurrent Control (MVCC). We've all heard the mantra: readers don't block writers; writers don't block readers. In this episode we'll explore why the feature is so cool, but also see what such flexibility could also lead a developer down the wrong path to corrupted data.
If you like this episode, be sure you hit the Like button and share it with your colleagues. Catch me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/connor_mc_d if you have comments or questions.
Friday Mar 11, 2022
Back to basics: SQL Parsing - the silent database killer
Friday Mar 11, 2022
Friday Mar 11, 2022
Parsing is the act of preparing to execute a SQL statement on your database. It would seem to be a necessary activity - after all, that is what databases are designed to do - execute SQL. But the topic of parsing requires a more nuanced look, because a high transaction frequency database typically succeeds or fails based the amount of SQL parsing it does.
In this episode, I'll take you on a trip down memory lane on how slow servers used to be "Get Out Of Jail Free" card for IT practitioners, but how hardware advancements have shifted the responsibility for successful applications squarely back on the shoulders of developers. The way you handle parsing on the Oracle database could open the door to the incredible firepower of modern servers...or leave you scratching your head wondering why your CPUs are running hot but no work is getting done.
And believe it or not...if you have used a public restroom, you are well on the way to understanding how parsing relates to building scalable applications :-)
If you like this episode, be sure you hit the Like button and share it with your colleagues. Catch me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/connor_mc_d if you have comments or questions.
Friday Feb 18, 2022
The Oracle Optimizer - A conversation with Nigel Bayliss - Part 4
Friday Feb 18, 2022
Friday Feb 18, 2022
No topic quite gets emotions rolling as much as the Oracle Query Optimizer. Thus you might expect that one of the least enviable jobs in the database world would be being the public face of the database optimizer. But since 2014, Nigel Bayliss has regularly fronted the community and shared the depth and breadth of his optimizer knowledge, whilst entertaining us with his sardonic wit on the challenges of databases and database optimizers.
In this episode, I ambush Nigel with some questions that came in from Twitter from the Oracle community. In particular, how to optimize queries that contain TABLE functions, and what is best way for developers to quickly and efficiently tackle SQL tuning.
Keep updated with the optimizer at https://blogs.oracle.com/optimizer. If you like this episode, be sure you hit the Like button and share it with your colleagues. Catch me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/connor_mc_d if you have comments or questions.