August 24, 2011
100 X 60 - Completed!
You probably know about my electric bike, and the fact that I ride it to work nearly every day of the year. I've done this for about the past 8 years or so. A few months ago I "built" a new ebike with a 36v 10ah lithium LiFePO4 battery - a very nice commuter bike.
Upon completing the new ebike, I decided to set a life goal for myself to ride this bike 100 miles (a Century ride) in one day. To this end I have been making quite a few 20-30 mile rides to learn about the battery performance, and how much of my own energy is required.
Well, last Saturday beginning at 6:00 am, ending at 4:30 pm, I did manage to ride the 100 miles. The 100 x 60 means 100 miles by age 60 (coming up shortly for me). That is a looooooooooong way to ride a bike in one day.
But now it is done!
Posted by rossm at 11:43 AM | Comments (0)
August 12, 2011
Montana Vacation Coming Up - WooHoo!
Bill OK'ed my vacation request for the week following Labor Day. So, the annual Montana fishing trip is being planned. This year it is a lot different since neither my Dad nor my son are going to make the trip. Our fishing buddy Mark has moved to the Missoula area and built a beautiful house near the Bitterroot, so that is new, too. We have always gone to Rock Creek and camped in the woods, but this year it looks like we're taking Mark's 5th wheel and doing some "gentleman" camping! Whatever, I'm thankful to have the chance to go again this year!
Posted by rossm at 11:03 AM | Comments (0)
July 13, 2011
Vacation is Over, Time for Summer Projects
Last week I got to take off and head for Iowa and Missouri to visit family. Missouri allows you to buy/shoot off fireworks so of course we had to do that. It was a lot of fun. We also rented a boat for a day on Lake of the Ozarks, and I went golfing for the first time in oh, three years or so. That was also fun. It is hot there!
Following vacation, I'm ready for some new action here at work. This Summer I plan to tackle these projects:
- Write two (2) blogs per week ;-)
- Upgrade production db to 11gR2
- Upgrade Astra 7.3 to 7.4 - move toward implementation of Astra 7 across campus
- Prepare RecTrac for Fall student load
- Assist with AssetWorks implementation - Physical Plant
- Investigate Oracle Data Vault
Should keep me off the streets!
Posted by rossm at 8:49 AM | Comments (0)
April 6, 2009
Coming Back to the Blog
How did it get to be April already?? As a once-faithful blogger, I thought it was about time to get back into blogging form. It's an easy habit to acquire, and an easy habit to "unacquire".
Well, a lot has been happening here at Western Oregon Univerisity with regard to our Oracle databases. We have spent a good deal of time attempting to get the CBORD residential and food service application upgrade running on Oracle. To say it has been frustrating would be a gross understatement. The Windows server where the application resides upgraded just fine. We created a special database just for CBORD - they require either version 10.2.0.2 or 10.2.0.3 - NOT 10.2.0.4... Well, of course nobody has one of those just sitting around, so we created one. The CBORD queries, however, don't like version 10.2.0.3 - each of their queries takes an unbelievable amount of time to complete. Their SQL queries have a lot of joins and are written in a way with which we are unfamiliar here.
Here's an example of a query that returns 8 records, 13 columns per record. Running time: 122 seconds.
SELECT ft.FacilityType_SK as FacilityType_Key , ft.Name , ft.Icon , ft.Listing_Order , ft.Active , ft.IDStartPosition ,
ft.IDLength , ft.IDPrefix , ft.IDIncludeInChildren , ft.Is_Space_Level as IsSpaceLevel ,
(CASE WHEN EXISTS (Select 1 FROM HMSp_FacilityTree ftr JOIN av_hms_db_Assignments a
ON(ftr.Facility_SK_FK = a.Facility_SK) WHERE ftr.EndDate is Null and ftr.FacilityType_SK_FK = ft.FacilityType_SK )
THEN 1 ELSE 0 END) As OnContract , (CASE WHEN EXISTS (Select 1 FROM HMSp_FacilityTree ftr
JOIN av_hms_db_ContractEl_Facility a ON(ftr.Facility_SK_FK = a.Facility_SK_FK_SpaceLink)
WHERE ftr.EndDate is Null and ftr.FacilityType_SK_FK = ft.FacilityType_SK ) THEN 1 ELSE 0 END) As IsLinked ,
ft."ROWID" FROM hmsp_FacilityType ft
ORDER By ft.Listing_Order
We do a lot better with PL/SQL, PHP, that sort of thing. Anyway, after much tweaking on our part, and their part, we were forced to have them roll back the upgrade so that we would at least have our old version to use.
They suggest that it's our Solaris 10 operating system on the db's server that is the source of the slowness. We, of course, have a hard time accepting this since we have literally hundreds of applications which run just fine on our production databases. Also, we feel that Solaris is a much more efficient OS than Windows. Plus, how would their application even know what OS it was calling to? The application is only requesting data from the db. So, back and forth we go.
I have done some investigation into the Solaris OS parameters that Oracle uses to run efficiently. Dave and I worked on a different way of setting those parameters (OK, so Dave did it all and I just watched) in Solaris 10. This seemed to make the db run the CBORD queries using much less CPU time. Unfortunately, it still took the same length of time to finish the query.
We are continuing an investigation into the Optimizer parameters, and maybe there is a magic button out there that will make these queries run in an acceptable amount of time. Also, Michael is going to set up some db's on different OSes and see what differences he might discover.
Well, that's enough for today. It feels good to blog again!
Posted by rossm at 3:56 PM | Comments (0)
February 23, 2007
Hawaii Calls
I have to go to Hawaii for the week of Feb. 26th - Mar 2nd. They are going to make me sit in the sun and go snorkeling and diving. The blogging will resume when and if I come back on March 5th.
For help, please call the UCS Help Desk at 88925.
Aloha!
Posted by rossm at 11:01 AM | Comments (0)