Today I got and answered an Oracle RAC (Real Application Cluster) user survey.

They said they take my feedback very seriously (am I now important?!) and it will be used to help them to determine how best to invest in these products and the processes that support them …..  I hope it will!

To be honest I made a lot of different experiences using Oracle RAC and I’m happy about them looking for feedback. Not every experience was good I made and especially with one installation I had a lot of trouble last year before I headed of in my (then urgent needed) longer vacation.

But on the other hand nobody is perfect and with a look on those great variety of platforms and ports they do support someone I easily able to understand that the one or other issue will occur sooner or later.

And it is not only the product quality and stability defining the overall quality at all. Also the offered manufacturer support and the access to their Knowledge database  (in that case called Metalink)  are important factors for a generell success.

In this specific case I even made the acquaintanceship with an extraordinary friendly and supportive lady working for Oracle Egypt being responsible for my TAR - working together with me for several weeks trying to solve my issue - I’m still in contact today.

Last questions was (as usual for sure): Would you like to participate in future? Yes for sure, I would!!

After this nearly overall messed up sunday yesterday, I had promised myself a lazy day today!

Luckily it was really quiet today and all the new incoming things today were mainly business as usual. Except one real issue I was thanks god quickly able to figure out by searching the net.

So I made finally effort to accomplish all really urgent things to do today already until lunchtime. For me being able to lay back and reward myself by doing some “good will” stuff I had promised to someone recently during my afternoon.

You know such things? Something which hasn’t to get finished today and therefore gives me the chance to end looking into it whenever I should loose patience for it.

It was about some template stuff and even I ended up in mostly tweaking css (I’m really no great hero in) I was able to make fast progress. And therefore my mood was raising more and more again.

Nevertheless I would have liked to ask myself from time to time. But as for it looks like my commited helping hand in css seems to be busy actually themself, I hardly resisted in asking giving me the bonus to say: I did it all alone (at least for today that is … We will see).

This morning I got up rather early as for I had an agreement to take over a productive database from the United States. All planned in advance and agreed for their late night to minimize the downtime for them.

As for all has to be done within 2 hours as the maximum maintenance time frame and considering about a total size of 8.5 GB you might be able to understand that I did not want to waste time starting late.

So I was sitting there already at 7am our time on a sunday morning … and waited and waited for the Americans to turn up telling me they place the data on their staging server for me being able to pick them up!

Around 8am I finally called those guys and guess!!! … They told me that they had a late agreement about  to delay that move  until their morning to ensuring all of them would be around!

Unfortunately they forgot to tell me about this decission :-((     DID I SAY THAT I NEED THEM?!

Now not even my sunday morning was wasted! No, now hat means that I later have to work again finally accomplishing that move for them. Can you imagine how grumpy I am?!

Today I couldn’t resist anymore. Even my day today was already pre-filled with all kind of different tasks, with the sun coming out this morning all good intends were flushed away.

Spending the usual time in the bathroom, having breakfast and checking the conditions again were all I did this morning before I directly went for the motorbike gear. I was anyway alone this morning end therefore the discussion with myself about neglecting earlier planned tasks was rather short.

It was nearly like Suzi had awaited me alreadly. After I had turned the key and pressed the start button, the engine started right away on the first try.

Sure it wasn’t really warm at all and the few lonely sun beams of this early spring sun here this morning couldn’t really warm me nor the day in general. Our April here so far is very cold and rainy at all.

But anyway! Who cares? I decided not even to take rain gear with me … and it worked out!
A great run over shortly 2 hours and a bit about 180km without one rain drop in between, a start into a new biker season can hardly be better.

Lately I have written about a great Unix tool called SCP. Now recently I had the need to equal two Unix filesystems from which one was a remote filesystem in oversea. Now how to do that?!

Now you could just copy all the stuff from the remote system (I’m sure you know all about … tar, gzip, zip). For sure a secure way to go! But also very time and resource intensive for sure. Could that be done more elegant? ….  Someone could also have the idea to use a “better” ftp client being able to compare directories. Clever eh?

But are you aware how it stretches the needed time for it when you put a 3rd system in between? Anything better?

A few of you might now know a brilliant little helper out of the Microsoft Ressource Kit called robocopy?! Be carefully with the /MIR option …. read first and be aware what you are doing!

But I guess just only a hand full of you all here will know that this gorgeous robocopy is just the Windows equivalent of a UNIX tool called rsync.   Go for it!  rsync - Thats Tops!