Session Celebrating 10 years of failure, because you won’t succeed from the start.

Sarah Kobus, University of Amsterdam

I thought this looked interesting, not least because I have recently realised that getting everything perfect all the time is not a realistic or desirable goal. As if to demonstrate the truth of what she was saying, her co-presenter was ill, so Sarah had to present the session alone!

How good are we at learning from failures?

Everyone encounters failure. As an illustration Sarah spoke about replacing their Student Information System. The core issue encountered was not investing enough in changing the business processes to work well with the new system.

I went to HEUG EMEA 2019 last week at the University of Amsterdam. I enjoyed it. It was good to meet some other people who work in education and use Oracle technologies. I haven’t been to HEUG before. The HEUG was smaller and I feel more friendly than the UKOUG. There were fewer exhibitors, and they seemed less desperate to sell, and happier to just have a chat about the conference and travel, which actually makes them more approachable, but I am not sure they sold any more!

This is a post which was sitting in my drafts since the start of last year, but it still seems useful to me.

It’s been a while since I have had a file that was deleted. What course to take depends on context - what do you want to achieve? In this case I wanted to remove the tablespace. I offlined all the files in the tablespace and deleted it. It is pretty easy really. The other thing I could have done is recovered the datafiles from the redo logs. Maybe I should try that another time.

SQL Tuning

As a DBA I find that people think I know about how to tune SQL. They present me with a query that looks simple, but on inspection has views on views on complex views, and has an explain plan of over 100 lines! It is difficult to know where to start, particularly when you don’t know what the SQL is supposed to be doing, or understand the structure of the data within the database.

Some Useful Ansible tricks

Including a playbook

I am working on extending my automation to do some new things. We refresh test environments from production. Previously we used to copy all the code from production back to development. Now we build the VMs from scratch, so we don’t need to do this any more, but it would be convenient to call the VM build in the middle of the refresh.

Often configuring a system involves running scripts and passing passwords as a parameter. If all goes well, this is fine, Ansible just reports the task has changed. If not, the password is logged, which is bad if the output is being sent to people who shouldn’t know it. Here are some thoughts on how to get round that.

Setup

Start with the following playbook for demonstration purposes:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9

---
 -  hosts: 127.0.0.1
    connection: local
    tasks:
    - name: This works
      command: "echo This is my secret password"

    - name: This fails
      shell: "echo This is my secret password && false"

And run it:

Moving

My hosting at the University of Cambridge: people.ds.cam.ac.uk/psh35 is being discontinued. I am therefore moving this blog to Netlify:

Please update your bookmarks or feed reader to: https://curiousdba.netlify.app/

Netlify

This wasn’t as hard as it might have been. I took the opportunity to upgrade the theme, because GitHub complained about the security of some of the components. This caused the site not to build. The new version of the theme requires Hugo pipeline, which means it needs a recent version of Hugo extended. This won’t run (easily) on RHEL7 due to glibcxx being too old. However, Netlify does supply Hugo extended, and allows the user to pick a version. I needed to upgrade because of a conflict with the theme and the default Hugo version. I picked the latest and my blog built!

Here is a possible way to use git on Windows to work on a git repository in GitLab. The nice thing about GitLab is it uses git, so any Windows git client can be used. I prefer command line myself, but there are GUI options including the git supplied one which I will be using.

Installing software

I suggest using chocolatey to manage software. Follow the installation instructions on the chocolatey website to do this.