Chris Foot

In this post, we will continue our discussion on effective communication skills and the role they play in our careers. This two-part blog entry is a somewhat lighthearted look at my own life’s lessons on effective communications (or lack thereof).   In future posts, we’ll look at different mechanisms we can use to communicate and coordinate [...]

As we all know, effective verbal and written communication is critical to the success of any business activity.   The more complex the activity or the more coordination that is required to complete a given task, the more important effective communications becomes.    There are very few tasks in the DBA profession that don’t require some level of coordination between [...]

As we learned in my last post, effective measurements are required to judge the success of any activity.  The blog also contained some recommendations on questions to ask your customers in order to determine if you are delivering high quality service.     After the responses are received, the customer feedback data needs to be evaluated quickly [...]

As we learned from my last post, it takes much more than technical skills to become successful as a database administrator.  One of the key measurements DBAs can use to evaluate their performance is customer feedback.  We feel so strongly about customer feedback at Remote DBA Experts that we have created a customer feedback strategy [...]

Let’s deviate from tuning for a couple of weeks.   I’d like to turn our attention to a topic that I have lightly covered in the past.   It is the premise that it takes more than just being a great technician to keep DBA customers happy.  There are dozens of database “experts” out there that are [...]

Let’s deviate from our technical topics for a blog or two.     As database administrators, it is important for us to know what educational topics we should be spending our most precious resource on.   That resource is our time.   When it comes to tuning education, what should we be learning?    Where should we be spending our time?    [...]

We continue our discussion on the various tools that DBAs can use to identify high resource consuming SQL statements.  We started by learning that there are several data dictionary tables that we can access using SQL statements to retrieve information we need.     The next blog focused on the 10G DB Console.   We found that the 10G DB Console [...]

Now that we are ready to continue our education on access path scientific analysis, we need to begin identifying some representative queries that we can monitor and tune. There are numerous ways to identify the top resource consumers for a given instance.
We’ll learn that 10G’s DBConsole and 11G Grid are both able to provide us [...]

Now that we are ready to continue our discussion on access path scientific analysis, we need to begin identifying some representative queries that we can monitor and tune.  There are numerous ways to identify the top resource consumers for a given instance.
We’ll learn that both the10G and 11G DB Consoles are both able to quickly [...]

A few recommendations from your friendly ex-Oracle instructor on resources that will help you learn more about Oracle access paths. These resources will benefit beginners and tuning gurus alike.  We don’t need to be access path scientists just yet.  What we are attempting to do is learn the fundamentals of access paths to assist us [...]