Summary for 2009, Plans for 2010

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.