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RE: New oracle myths?

From: "Cary Millsap" <cary.millsap@xxxxxxxxxx>
To: <oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 1 Sep 2004 11:20:22 -0500
Exactly! What irritates me is the waste that goes into costly evaluations of
things that the answer most certainly does NOT depend on.

Easy example: If a user task takes 3,600 seconds, and only 10 seconds of
that time is I/O related, then the performance of (that is, time consumed
by) the task does NOT depend upon cache performance.

On the other hand, if 3,590 seconds of that time had been I/O related, then
the task's performance certainly depends upon almost nothing else! The
important step is to acquire some reliable evidence before assuming.

I think our shared aggravation occurs when people insist upon spending time
on a solution before doing an adequate job of calculating its relevance.


Cary Millsap
Hotsos Enterprises, Ltd.
http://www.hotsos.com
* Nullius in verba *

Upcoming events:
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Toronto
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-----Original Message-----
From: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]
On Behalf Of Niall Litchfield
Sent: Wednesday, September 01, 2004 9:06 AM
To: oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: New oracle myths?

On Tue, 31 Aug 2004 17:36:35 -0400, Goulet, Dick <dgoulet@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I'd say "lightly referenced" as being more correct.  Don has the smarts =
> not to call anyone out by name. 

Sometimes it is appropriate to reference by name, sometimes it is
inappropriate. I'm in 2 minds here. ISTM that a number of different
authors were probably in Don's mind when he wrote the article. In this
case I think that I am more confused by the lack of references than
not. For example it is entirely possible in the Old Myths section that
Don was referring to my Myths document. It is equally possible that he
was referring elsewhere.


> But I will agree with his one =
> statement, and I quote:
> 
>        The standard answer to almost every Oracle question is, "It
Depends."

I'm beginning to hate this answer because it is nearly always only the
first half of an answer that should read "It depends on .....". For
example in another place someone asked "how do I perform a recovery
from a cold backup in archive log mode" To which the answer is "It
depends" but here it depends on what was lost, what you want to do and
what you have available. What I don't like is "It depends" being used
as a euphemism for lets try a variety of things and see what happens.




-- 
Niall Litchfield
Oracle DBA
http://www.niall.litchfield.dial.pipex.com
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Re: New oracle myths?
From: Niall Litchfield
RE: New oracle myths?

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