When I was a college professor I used to tell my students that “there are no stupid questions”, but that was 25 years ago, back when entry into the computer room was closely guarded. Back then, Geekdom had “barriers to entry“, and only those people who had studied for years could gain entry into the multi-million dollar mainframe and become a “Data Processing” professional.
Today, you don’t need no stinkin High School diploma to elevate yourself to the title of “IT professional”, and the dolts among us need to be constantly reminded that 30 years ago they would be selling shoes at K-Mart:
http://www.dba-oracle.com/t_narcissistic_personality_disorders.htm
We have seen many types of DBAs Database Administrators whose characteristic potential determines who they are. Those technocrats are perfect fabulous, and wise. They protect a company from ruining.
Anyway, there are many “common sense” parallels to people with personality disorders, and I’m dealing with a computer professional who has a a textbook case of narcissistic personality disorder (NPD). Other terms I hear used to describe NPD victims include “prick”, “assh*le”, and “twit”, but I’ve learned that there is a lot that a savvy computer guy can do to get along with the computer narcissist, and get them to cooperate.
Because I work exclusively with computer professionals, I’m exposed to all sorts of personality disorders, a regular DSM-V of weird behavior, but narcissism is right up there at the top of the heap.
Disclaimer: This article is only intended as a light-hearted look at the DBA profession, and it is based solely on my unscientific observations of DBA personality types. It is my hope that you will see yourself in some of these DBA personality types and that these descriptions will remind you of a fellow DBA.
Also see my fun Computer Motivational Posters and other humor articles.
Some Oracle concepts are best expressed in a visual manner.
Oracle RMAN:
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DAY 1 Introduction to RAC Tuning Analysis of Performance Issues Using Automated Memory Management (AMM) with RAC Disk Monitoring and Tuning for RAC and ASM Monitoring RAC Cluster Interconnect Performance Global Cache Service Times GCS Monitoring Monitoring and Tuning RAC using OEM Configuring the Oracle Intelligent Agent With RAC Monitoring RAC Using OEM RAC Tuning Guidelines Growth of Powerful Processors Why Parallel Processing? Opportunities for Parallelism Scalability Parallel Databases Types of Parallelism High Performance Computing Cluster Oracle RAC – High Performance and Highly Available Database DAY 2Internals of Real Application Clusters Tuning Overview of Cache Fusion Evolution of Cache Fusion Nature of Cache Fusion Benefits of Cache Fusion Concurrency and Consistency Cache Coherency Global Cache Service SGA Components and Locking SGA – System Global Area Program Global Area (PGA) Buffer Cache Management What is a Dirty Block? Multi – Version Consistency Model This is an intensive 3-day hands-on Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) tuning course. Unlike other Oracle RAC tuning classes, this course is taught by a practicing RAC expert with years of experience in tuning mission-critical RAC databases. The course focuses on RAC disk I/O tuning, SGA tuning and tuning the cache fusion cluster interconnect. The course will also include specialized Oracle RAC tuning script for monitoring all of the critical RAC performance areas. This hands-on Oracle RAC training is special because this course is taught by a veteran Oracle Certified DBA with years of full-time experience. |
RAC Lock tuning Components
Global Cache Service
Global Enqueque Service
Row-Level Locks
Global Resource Directory
RAC Processes
Resource Coordination
Synchronization
GCS Resource Modes and Roles
Concept of Past Image
Lock Modes
Block Access Modes and Buffer States
Cache Fusion Scenarios
Block transfers using Cache Fusion – Examples
Block Access, Grants, and Interrupts
Cache Fusion and Recovery tuning
Recovery Features
Recovery Methodology and Steps
Recovery Process – Re-mastering DAY 3 RAC Performance Monitoring and Tuning Analysis of Performance Issues Monitoring RAC Cluster Interconnect Performance Use of the cache_transfer Views Monitoring the GES Processes Monitoring and Tuning using OEM Configuring the Oracle Intelligent Agent with RAC Step-by-Step Setup of the Intelligent Agents on UNIX Monitoring RAC using OEM RAC Parallel Execution Overview Types of Parallelism Parallelism in Oracle Relational Database Parallel Execution Mechanism Granules for Parallelism Parallel Execution Servers Degree of Parallelism – DOP Parallel Query: SELECT Parallel DML – Update, Merge, Delete Parallel DML – Insert…Select Parallel DDL Statements Rules for Paralleling “Create Table as Select” (CTAS) SQL*LOADER – Parallel Load Other Parallel Operations Initialization Parameters at a Glance Monitoring and Diagnosing the Parallel Execution |
This is a BC Oracle training course (c) 2007-2009
The Gung-Ho DBA is generally characterized by a “can-do” attitude. They are always bright and outgoing, and they always seem to be in a hurry. They tend to be impatient (especially with stupid developer questions), and they never “suffer fools gladly.”
http://www.dba-oracle.com/articles.htm#humor1
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http://www.dba-oracle.com/training.htm
http://www.dba-oracle.com/t_visual_guide_oracle_concepts.htm
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Hi, there. I love this post! Great work! I would suggest you to continue writing more posts, this would make your blog even more interesting. Keep on the good work.
I heartily express my best wishes on the auspicious Happy New year 2010 although late , to Paresh, Shivani, aka RAJ, their well-wishers, oracle anti logic, F B I , Tweets, Topsy dot com, OracleBrainDumps,Certification,Exams, Morone, Runchhe anti-oracle, Yantra, Robert Allen, Steve Karam, Silver Bullets, OraSecure Inc, Don Burleson, MMPI, FPD ..and every visitor around the world , Nepal, Nepalese, and rest of all, for viewing, wishing, commenting, and judging the best contents from oracle com’s knowledgeable and experienced person don burleson’s articles. thanks for loving!
good day Shivani aka RAJ for teaching about Zoom magnifier technology to find mismatches
Thank You Paresh for commenting here. Your site dbazone dot in is extremely useful as it taught us the following instantly. Best of luck:
Improve performance using CURSOR_SHARING parameter
Monitoring database performance
Recover database using Flashback Tables
Published by Paresh Sarma // Comment now »
Kill Oracle process from UNIX server
Recovery Manager(RMAN) backup
Recovery Manager (RMAN) configuration
Managing Undo data-II
Killing Oracle Sessions
Difference between SQL Hard Parse and Soft Parse
Automatic Workload Repository
Zooooom to mismatch through magnifier.
RAJ
Very interested and informative.
Thanks,
Paresh
http://www.dbazone.in
I second you……….. many ways
YANTRA
I like ms sqlserver not ur oracle
u morone sad gloomy sadist , always copies, cheater. you told previously u will not capture
My name is Robert Allen, and I’m the Founder of OraSecure, Inc. With over 9 years of trial and error from painstaking research, I’m now acknowledged as a promising top expert in the field of Oracle database security.
For the past 7 years, I’ve consulted dozens of Fortune 1000 companies on all areas of Oracle Database Administration. The areas I’ve focused my most attention to are Oracle Security Features and Security Audits.
I’ve personally audited over 400 Oracle instances over the years, as well as taught and mentored more than 80 DBAs to do the same.
I think it’s great how you addressed the “Silver Bullets” issue. It’s funny, I think the people that have a problem with your “silver bullets” are those that throw common sense out the window when they read it.
“Well, it’s in the book, so I’ll run it. Oh no, it broke my database! Let’s blame Burleson! How was I supposed to know it had a ‘shutdown immediate’ in it?! I thought I could run it on prod!”
I guess it goes to show that we really are in the “Age of the Disclaimer” nowadays. Coffee is hot, scripts should be tested. Go figure, huh? So maybe some of those scripts don’t always “fix it”, and maybe some of them could make performance worse. It’s called “trial and error.” They’re silver bullets, not miracles.
It reminds me of that song from South Park – The Movie, “Blame Canada.”
“Should we blame the matches, should we blame the fire?
Or the doctors who allowed him to expire? HECK NO!
Blame Canada, blame Canada!”
We could change that to these lyrics:
“Should we blame Oracle? Should we blame the net?
Or the script I ran but haven’t tested yet? HECK NO!
Blame Burleson! Blame Burleson!”
Steve Karam, OCM, Oracle ACE
Don Burleson says How to be a successful computer professional: There’s always room at the top
Be Obsessive
I was always rewarded for following-through with tough challenges and I’m the first to admit that once I locked-in to a task, I let nothing stop me. I firmly believe that the only thing to be ashamed of is not giving 100% to every task you undertake.
I learned that I was not going to be stopped by people telling me that something cannot be done, and I worked relentlessly on every ask I undertook. There is an old saying “If you want to get something done, give it to the obsessive guy”. When I was teaching graduate school at the University of New Mexico, I would give students difficult problems that other experts said “could not be done”.
Have a real work ethic
I have always had contempt for self-entitled people, and I hate those annoying TV commercials offering to give people “the cash that you deserve”.
Who the hell says that you deserve anything?
You get paid exactly what the market demands, and not a penny more. My strong work ethic was because I grew-up poor (my Dad was a Disabled Veteran), because I had high-standards imposed by my parents and because I was orphaned as a teen. I’m also very conscious of providing value for my clients and all of my consultants share a real desire to be as productive as possible.
Get Real-World Experience
The “Catch 22” argument is a common theme with many aspiring DBA’s. I get e-mail saying “I need experience to get a DBA job, but I can’t get a job without experience”. If you have this problem, do what I did.
I worked for free for my professors and took my first job at a place with very low-pay, just to get the experience. I later did database work for charities to sharpen my skills, and there are loads of charitable organizations who want volunteers with database expertise.
The USA is a true bastion of upward mobility and anyone who wants to be successful can get there with hard work and dedication.
Be Creative
Thinking outside-the-box is the hallmark of American Ingenuity and you should always foster your creativity by exploring new uses for technology. Being hindered by proctologic thinking is a serious deficiency for any computer professional. Creative people commonly face objection from experts who say that because something has never been done, ergo, it cannot be done. Me and my wife Janet faced this when we were attempting to housebreak horses and we were told by experts that it was impossible. We faced even more ridicule from experts who assured us that horses could never be trained to safely guide the blind. The experts said it couldn’t be done, so we went ahead and did it. Today there are four full-time guide horse teams in America. We also saved a horse with a broken leg by questioning experts who told us that it couldn’t be fixed.
Don’t trust any expert who say “It’s never been done, so it must be impossible”.
Also beware of turgid experts who oppose novel uses of technology solutions. For example, American drug researchers discovered that the anti-depressant Wellbutrin reduced nicotine cravings, and today this drug has helped millions of people quit smoking.
When Oracle expert Robin Schumacher discovered that using Oracle multiple blocksizes improved I/O throughput, some experts said “You can’t do that! Multiple blocksizes were made for transportable tablespaces, not for I/O segregation.”
Don’t trust any experts who say “Do can’t do that. It was made for another purpose”.
Possess Courage
It takes guts to put your reputation on-the-line and to invest your savings into new endeavors. Starting a consulting business requires money, lots of friends and connections, but most of all, courage and a firm belief in your abilities.
My father spent years in a Veterans hospital when I was a kid, and I spent hundreds of hours chatting with “real heroes” in the hallowed halls of the V.A. wards. I know courage and I know cowardice, and I believe that there are many courageous people in the USA and it’s my job to find them for my staff.
Right is right, wrong is wrong, and I have the strength of my convictions to guide me. I recently went to great lengths to expose an Oracle scammer, and I have the guts to fight for what is just and right, no matter the personal cost.
So, there it is, everything you need to know. Like my Grandpa always said “There’s always room at the top”. It’s true, you know. . . .
The FBI teaches this all-important skill, and cameras are now used in airports, hooked to software that analyzes facial expressions of passengers:
“In an attempt to prevent terrorists from boarding commercial planes, scientists are developing a device that can detect and record facial expressions that show fear and other emotions.”
But it’s not just the F.B.I. and law enforcement
“You’re so-o ambitious, aren’t you? You know what you look like to me, with your good bag and your cheap shoes? You look like a rube. A well-scrubbed, hustling rube, with a little taste.
Good nutrition’s given you some length of bone, but you’re not more than one generation from poor white trash, are you, Agent Starling? And that accent you’ve tried so desperately to shed – pure West Virginia. What does your father do? Is he a coal miner? Does he stink of the lamp?
You know how quickly the boys found you. All those tedious, sticky fumblings in the back seats of cars, while you could only dream of getting out. Getting anywhere, getting all the way to the F…B…I.”
Personality Assessment Tests
Mental health professionals are trained at person assessment, and a well-trainer personality evaluator can often seem frightening and magical. The Minnesota Multiphasic personality Inventory (MMPI). The MMPI test is a set of 500 true/false questions that accesses personality with remarkable validity, and it’s results are accepted in all U.S. courts. Their test-base consists of hundreds of thousands of subjects,. with a pre-diagnosed mental disorder (see DSM IV). By comparing their responses to seemingly innocuous questions (e.g. “I read the editorials in the newspaper every day”) a proven predictive model was created (Federal courts have affirmed the MMPI as a scientifically valid) and accepted procedure for personality assessment.
For example, the subjects preference to take showers vs. baths is an extremely reliable measure of self-esteem, and other scales such as the “Mach” scale that measures how manipulative you are (based on the bestselling book “The Prince” by Machiavelli. Here is an excellent overview of the MMPI scales and how they access your personality with eerie accuracy.
Additional MMPI scales include Hypochondriasis (Hs), Depression (D), Hysteria (Hy), Psychopathic Deviate (Pd), Masculinity-Femininity (Mf), Paranoia (Pa), Psychasthenia (Pt), Schizophrenia (Sc), Hypomania (Ma), Social Introversion (Si), and the important “lie scale (that measures if the subject is trying to manipulate their test results). These MMPI scales are all valuable for “getting inside” someone’s personality, and the results are often used as evidence in criminal and civil (especially child custody) cases.
If you practice personality evaluation ardently it can almost seem to others like you have psychic ability. Formally, a snap judgment is call a “Cold Reading”, and you can infer amazing things about people with simple observation skills. Scientists have now taken-up and formalized this skill and confirmed that facial expressions can be reliably interpreted to tell when someone is lying, and noted that most people don’t have this skill:
“People don’t seem to be very good at spotting deception signals. On average, over hundreds of laboratory studies, participants distinguish correctly between truths and lies only about 55 percent of the time.”
Snap judgment is not an easy skill to learn unless you practice. As youngsters most of us are taught that it’s not nice to size-up people. Putting classes of people into broad-buckets is naughty, we are told, because categorization leads to stereotyping, and it’s not fair to make assumptions about people based on your “profile” of them.
I am narcissistic. “Flamer Personality Disorder” (FPD), more here:
Reality distortion and Inability to See and Hear — The child sees situations through his own sense of woundedness and neediness. . .
Mood Switching –The child’s fractured self is caught in mood swings. She may go back and forth between “I’ll be good” and pouting or outrage because she isn’t getting what she wants. . .
Poor Impulse Control and Frustration Tolerance — The child is highly reactive to outside stimuli that seem to threaten his sense of self and cannot delay gratification. He wants things NOW! . . .
Poor Ego Boundaries and Need for Control — The child cannot view things from any other perspective other than his own. He is so caught in his own neediness that he cannot feel empathy for others.
Denial of Uncomfortable Feelings –The child keeps the focus on what he wants not how he feels. His constant demanding keeps him from feeling the pain inside.
Frequent Anger and Rage –The child substitutes anger and tantrums as a way of keeping her uncomfortable feelings from being experienced. She becomes a master of rationalization and justification of her explosive actions . . .
Need for Admiration –The child erroneously believes that he is special and should be given special privileges. . .
Grandiosity and Fantasy –The child spins grandiose fantasies to cover up the internal wounds of his fractured self. He sets up elaborate fantasy schemes of winning, becoming powerful or gaining revenge for injustice. Daydreams of becoming rich and famous without talent or hard work are common.
Idealization and Devaluation of Teachers or Therapists –The child will make you feel that you are wonderful and special as long as you humor her. “As long as you give me what I want, you are the ideal person for me” . . .
Externalization of Blame –The child cannot allow the bad feelings of being at fault for anything. He/she/they/YOU are the problem! He avoids feeling vulnerable by blaming others.