OTN Appreciation Day: A database that is reliable

As suggested by Tim Hall, aka Oracle-Base.com,  this post is about my favourite feature in the Oracle world. My favourite product is the good old database, and my favourite feature is simply the fact that I don't lose data!

Never once have I lost data due to software errors, and after many hard landings the database always manages to come back online after wading through the redo logs and make sure the data remains consistent.

I have been working as a DBA at sites where some decided to do maintenance on their UPS, the SAN, the network, or whatever in peak hours, resulting in hard landings that many databases won't recover from.  The worst nightmare for a DBA is to lose data. Yes, we have backups, and we spend time learning disaster recovery. But nothing beats the relief when you initiate "startup" after a crash and Oracle after a little while responds with "Database opened". You may say I've been lucky; software errors that corrupt data do exists, but after thousands of databases and many years with Oracle Database administration, not losing data remains my favourite feature.

My second favourite is all the instrumentation in there, the ability to figure out what is going on when someone complains. The database instrumentation is frequently a good starting place, even when the fault is outside somewhere, like in a badly designed application in another layer.

Thank you, OTN, for the support, information, articles, easy downloads, the ACE program, events, and much more. Have a great Appreciation Day!

Database triggers are evil

If you have a lousy database model, you can get around it with triggers. If you need to hide some business logic from everybody else, you can do it with triggers. If you need a mechanism that bypass the consistency in the database, you can do it with triggers. They live a life on their own, seemingly autonomous from everything else and one easily forgets they exist. That is why I hate them. What matters if you do an database export in consistent mode if some active triggers make the data inconsistent during import? Triggers are like secret police, they are threat to the democracy if they take over.

Oh, just a rant.

Note to myself: next time import fails with ORA-1 or ORA-2298, check for evil triggers.