Ever look at a screen’s output and get that puckered feeling in the pit of your stomach? If you have been working in this profession for any amount of time, you know the feeling I’m talking about. The feeling that makes you think you would rather be living in Montana making woodcarvings at a roadside [...]

The Foot Rule of Thumb The Foot Rule of Thumb is pretty simple. You need to experiment and create your own rules of thumb. A while back I wrote a series of interview questions for an online magazine. The questions were the basis for a podcast interview with Jonathan Lewis. What impressed me the most [...]

Setting up a Successful Test System in Oracle This meeting is held as soon as the application developers are ready to begin the actual coding process. The ultimate goal of this meeting is for application developers to have a firm understanding of what is required to create and maintain a successful Oracle test environment. Discussions [...]

Let’s continue our discussion on the Art of Being a Successful DBA. The intent of this blog is to help administrators design and standardize on a formalized design review process. The goal of the design review process is to identify and address application design, process flow, program logic and SQL statement problems early in the [...]

I absolutely and firmly believe that Data Administrators are the unsung heroes of the Information Technology profession. This blog will be shorter than most of the upcoming blogs you will see from me.  As a writer, I’m not noted for “keeping it brief”.   I used to be an Oracle instructor and I like to pack [...]

Ever fumble around at 2 AM looking for that SQL statement you wrote a while back? You know, that one special script that will give you just the information you need to solve the problem and go back to bed? I must admit, I have done my fair share of moonlight script hunting. This blog [...]

Let’s start our series on Art of Being a Successful DBA by covering the art of good documentation.   Although the importance of a well thought out and detailed documentation library is blatanly obvious, creating documentation is the task most often postponed by an overworked DBA unit. Documenting processes, procedures and best practices is a task [...]

One of the benefits of my 20-year career (I think) is that most of the jobs I have held can be described as somewhat “unforgiving”, shall we say… What these jobs taught me is that I needed more than just technical expertise to become successful in my chosen profession. I quickly learned that becoming proficient [...]