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20040719 Monday July 19, 2004

Good news for bad databases...

I just closed a long running escalation whereby old oracle connections would appear to hang, and new ones could not be established. A truss of a new sqlplus session showed that the oracle process was sleeping on a semop system call. 
sqlplus/1:      read(10, 0x10024FF66, 2064)     (sleeping...)^M
oracle/1:       semop(1245185, 0xFFFFFFFF7FFFAF9C, 1) (sleeping...)^M
sqlplus/1:      556.9328            Received signal #2, SIGINT, in read() 

^^^Here we see the process is eventually killed with CTRL-C
Anyhow the fix was to apply Oracle update 9.2.0.5 (9205) which according to my Oracle contacts contains around 1,100 fixes. 9.2.0.4 contained in the region of 800 compared to 9.2.0.3 Cor blimey, what a whopper . ( Jul 19 2004, 04:12:07 PM BST ) Permalink

I was a teenage raver...

But that was a long time ago, these days things are a bit more sedate. However, I did manage to get along to a gig of sorts this weekend. Ruth won two tickets to see Pavarotti at Leeds Castle which is in Kent, England. The prize included a hotel stay, hospitality (drinks and small portions of food) excellent seats ( we sat just behind John Simpson and he works for the BBC you know) and dinner.

Anyhow regarding the concert itself, I was totally unprepared for the awsome sound of the full orchestra on stage. I now think that one of the reasons I have never really appreciated orchestral music is down to the fact that it is very hard to reproduce on a home Hi-Fi. So I now have an excuse to save up for the Linn kit I've always wanted. Of course being a commoner doesnt help either, but I cant change that.

Anyhow after the gig/concert we got to eat in the castle itself. Apparently the room we ate in was used by no less than King Henry VIII.

Heres a picture of the castle:-

And the dining room, featuring pictures of some of his adoring wives...some of which he decided to kill.

The music was great but I dont think Im about to become an opera fan anytime soon, though I'd like to check out some more orchestral/classical pieces and you cant beat being outdoors whilst your at it. If you ever get the chance, give it a try. ( Jul 19 2004, 10:26:45 AM BST ) Permalink