This is my other picture from the weekend. There were a couple hundred people from all over the place in Houston for this weekend dance camp. It was pretty much amazing! My favorite part was definitely the social dances. (I’m much more into that than the competitive side.)

Here’s a bit of what my weekend looked like:

Yep… a crazy and yet amazing weekend!

I took this picture this morning during the 10 minute window of decent weather. So far it’s been cloudy all week and right now (5pm) it’s raining. Thank goodness for the catacombs under Houston… or the “tunnels” as everyone here calls them. I can walk to dozens of buildings and restaurants - and almost all the way to my hotel - without going outside.

So I’ll be in Houston until the end of next week teaching two one-week classes downtown about the Oracle 10g database. I’m staying for the weekend and Aris and Kaylyn are flying down here to meet me Thursday night… and we’re doing Southwest Lindyfest over the weekend. Can’t wait!! Might even get out and do some dancing tonight…

I’m sure that this topic will be irrelevant to most people. Usually, when your organization needs you to develop a new application they say to take as long as you want. Rarely do we actually have timelines or due dates. But I guess there might be one or two people out there who need to build and deploy a basic app quickly. I’m sure you’re already familiar with RAD (Rapid Application Development) philosophies and you’ve already examined the usual CASE (Computer Aided Software Engineering) tools. You probably already know that typically it’s possible to use these tools to quickly slam together a workable app by sacrificing some scalability and features.

Actually this website was a little bit like that when I put it together. I didn’t have a lot of time but wanted to get something up quickly. In fact I’m quite happy with how it turned out and I took a few notes about lessons that I learned in the process. And as I’ve been thinking about these things I’ve started thinking that these probably apply to general RAD too.
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Came up with this demo for a class last week and I think that it’s useful.

The demo illustrates one of the most important foundational concepts in an Oracle database: how Oracle provides isolation and consistency. For my favorite technical illustration of undo and redo check out slide #22 of the Redo Internals presentation on Julian Dyke’s website. (A picture is worth… you know!) For a very good description of isolation and consistency read Tom Kyte’s column in Oracle Magazine from Nov 2005.

The database engine must guarantee that the results of your queries are consistent. (The “C” in the “ACID” transactional database model.) Some SQL statements take a long time to run. It is also possible to put a transaction into a read-only or serializable mode. In both of these situations, regardless of how many transaction commit and how much data changes, your statement or transaction must always see the database as if everything happened at the very instant you started it. You need to ignore committed data. If oracle is constantly changing the data in tables and committing this data then how can your statement see the old data? The key is undo (or rollback segments) and multiversioning.
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Decided to just drive the strip after I finished the first day of class. Traffic was absolutely aweful but the strip is amazing. Made me realize just how amazing Las Vegas is when it comes to entertainment. Just the scale of everything is absolutely astounding.

Driving down Las Vegas Blvd, just leaving downtown. It’s a beautiful day - sunny and warm. Don’t miss the snow one bit. :)

Welcome to Las Vegas! I’m sitting in the airport waiting for my luggage to arrive. Honestly it’s almost a work of God that I even made my flight… after leaving late, not finding a taxi immediately for the first time ever, and hitting traffic… I arrived at Midway with 25 minutes until lift-off — and still somehow made it onto the plane! But unfortunately my luggage didn’t. Luckily it did make the next plane about an hour later so I don’t have to wait too long.

So I’m looking forward to the week even though it will be short; only a few days and I’ll probably be pretty focused on the class I’m teaching. But the flight over here did give me opportunity to think about a conversation I had Saturday afternoon with an older, wiser guy I know from church.

At one point he told me a story about a very well-known Christian pastor. This pastor was at one point the president of the SBC, a very large and prestigious organization. When it came to the end of the term he had an opportunity to give a closing speech before the vote for the new president, and he was being followed by one of the candidates (his favorite). Now Leroy told me, in good clean politics you don’t name your successor. So Leroy (who was at this convention) was wondering what this well known pastor would say. Sure enough, at the end of his speech, he said “I want to introduce the man who I think that all of you should vote for to be the new president of the SBC.” Now Leroy didn’t saying that this pastor was an aweful, horrible, wretched person. He just said that he’s learned something from this. It takes a lot of integrity not to abuse influence that you have. It would have been very admirable if this pastor had chosen not to influence the next election. Integrity is a hard game.

After you hear people say “what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas” for the millionth time it starts to permeate your thinking. Even if you’re not planning to do anything you shouldn’t, you still keep thinking a lot about the things you’re going to have to try hard *not* to do. It just gets ingrained into your head. So that got me thinking while I was on the plane. Integrity is a hard game.

However I’m still playing to win. Not that I always do, always will, or always have. But I still believe in this. I still want to be a person of integrity. Even if nobody ever finds out, I just want to know - when my life reaches its end - that I have lived it well. That even when noone was looking I did the right thing. This is who I want to be.

You don’t have to settle for any less either. Step up.

I had a hard time paying attention at the meeting today… people just rambled on and on, and didn’t ever get to the point. I eventually ended up reading my Oracle magazine and half-listening because I got so bored. It’s the one thing that annoys me the most about democracy… it can be *so* inefficient. KT and Joel were sitting behind me and kept me awake for the meeting. See, here they are in the pic keeping me awake. If you look carefully you can see Cassie sleeping in the background. Heh… caught you!

Aris, my roommate, just now left for work. He’s working a full day even though it’s a Saturday. He just reminded me that this is another reason he’s not paid enough…

Here’s a snippet of the conversation we had right before he walked out the door:

Jeremy: Why are you renaming your windows domain? That’s a lot of work, and complicated… reconfiguring all the clients and servers…

Aris: The thing is, our domain is messed up: your domain is supposed to match an internet domain that exists and that you own. Our domain is set to thecompany.net which doesn’t exist; so we need to change it to thecompany.com.

Jeremy: Why don’t you just buy thecompany.net?

Aris: Um… because… *no answer*

Jeremy: Because we’re not decision-makers and we just do what we’re told… I would do the same thing I guess.

Aris: This is why we should start our own company. To do things that make sense. I don’t think that’s so much to ask.

Dovetails nicely into a conversation I had with my good friend Joel over lunch yesterday. He is the a lead software engineer for a UPS company and is the technical lead on a major project to provide a complete power management solution for a new airport that’s being built. Sadly, due to the organization of his company, somehow the regional sales force of the parent company has authority to make technical and architectural decisions. That’s just asking for trouble.

Apparently the client originally wanted “redundant servers”… so when he flew out there and did the initial implementation he setup two servers in parallel. He also added a little code into the software itself so that the servers were aware of each other and kept their configurations in sync. Now it turns out that they expected “clustering” which to them apparently means a single IP address. Now “clustering” is a sexy word that makes you sound very sophisticated and technologically savvy. However the sales team apparently doesn’t quite understand how “active-passive” is a step down from two servers essentially running “active-active”. *sigh*

Funny how working in the field of technology affords so many opportunities to pour your best into doing something that doesn’t make sense at all. :) ‘Tis the pedestrian and mundane reality of life.

Well back to class prep now… I’m rewriting a DBA class for a customer in Las Vegas so that I can teach their developers a bit about Oracle. Hopefully I can teach these guys to do a few things that DO make sense! (And hopefully I can finish up soon because I plan to go listen to some awesome live Chicago blues and do a little swing dancing tonight!)