2009 was a bit silent year for me I did not find interesting topics to write, but I read too many interesting and new topics as you follow from blogroll report posts and book reviews. I think I did a good job with blogroll reports by them. I now have a very nice indexed Oracle Blogosphere for half of 2009. Blog reached over quarter million hits (when I say 250 000 it is not looking that big 🙂 ) with average 400 visits a day. By your support, blog provided over 2500 gallons of clear water for people around the world, I want to thank you all who visited and supported the social vibe link at the bottom of the page.
From career perspective, In 2009 I mostly focused on performance tuning and backup recovery. I fully understood how Oracle Engine works in terms of performance management. I quit using TOAD and started to use sqlplus for %90 of my daily routine. I love Toad but i can’t stand slowness of it and after Tanel Poders script library plus my own scripts I find it far more easy to use sqlplus.
Because of dealing with performance, I started to be more obsessive about anything running slow and this obsessiveness made me quit Windows OS start using Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala as desktop. After 3 months of usage, I am quite happy about my decision. By Running Ubuntu on my new Quad Code CPU and 8GB ram desktop I can say that I now have my dream speed and lab. Migration was not painful as much as I expected I can do 95% + more of the things I was able to do on windows, I wish I have the same option with the laptop I am using for job but no chance.
I also quit firefox and sage rss reader and start using chrome as browser and google reader as reader with igoogle I highly recommend this combo to all of you.
For networking , I am still a bit shy when it comes to socializing at user group events. Normally I am a very social bloke, but I have a problem of introducing myself at meetings 😦 it is something i need to work on harder.
I always had a fear of giving presentation even in Turkish and to sort this problem, I got a course for presentation skills in 2009 and I learned all the tricks of a good presentation. I also did a presentation at the course and I proved to myself that I am able to do presentation in English. Now I need a good topic to prepare a presentation to test my new skills.
I think thats about it for 2009 summary, and now it is time to talk about 2010 plans.
For the blog, I am planning to share more information in this blog from the sources I follow and read and from my own researches on top of them. I want to write a tool maybe a plugin for swingbench to generate common performance problems for new DBAs to test their troubleshooting skills. I also want to write possible crash recovery scenarios series.
For Oracle knowledge, I plan to learn Streams and Analytic functions. It is a shame for me that I never really cared much about these two.
For the books, I plan to read the ones below and I hope upcoming Apple Tablet will be affordable price to be my ebook reader. I wish I will finish at least half of them.
- Practical Oracle 8i from Jonathan Lewis– I am in the middle of this book and what I discovered so far is that most of the information Jonathan shares from his blog is based on this book. I can say it is a must.
- Expert Oracle Practices Oracle Database Administration from the Oak_Table– I read two chapters so far and to be honest it is not as good as I expected but book is in alpha stage so my thoughts can still change.
- Scaling Oracle 8i by James Morle
- SQL Tuning by Dan Tow
- Relational Database Index Design and the Optimizers by Tapio Lahdenmaki and Michael Lech
- RMAN Recipes for Oracle Database 11g by Darl Kuhn , Sam R. Alapati , Arup Nanda
- Oracle Data Guard 11G Handbook by Larry Carpenter , Joseph Meeks , Charles Kim , Bill Burke , Sonya Carothers , Joydip Kundu , Mike Smith , Nitin Vengurlekar
- Linux Recipes for Oracle DBAs by Darl Kuhn, Charles Kim, Bernard Lopuz
- Secrets of the Oracle Database by Norbert Debes
- Oracle Automatic Storage Management: Under-the-Hood & Practical Deployment Guide by Nitin Vengurlekar , Murali Vallath , Rich Long
- Pro Oracle Database 10g RAC on Linux: Installation, Administration, and Performance by Julian Dyke , Steve Shaw
I never be active enough at Oracle Forums and Oracle-L and they are also on top of my to-do list this year.
For linux desktop , I need to get used to use vi for every kind of text editing and because I don’t have system admin group luxury at home, I need to learn more about managing linux as a system admin.
I will start to give internal presentations to my team mates if it works maybe you can watch a presentation of me after second half of the year.
Well these are my plans of 2010 and I hope next year on 31st of December I will still be here and telling you that all of my plans went well.
Wish you and for the ones you love, a very good year.
Coskan's Approach to Oracle 