Regular Sized Data

For as long as I’ve worked in IT at a college, my focus has been on finding ways to use technology to makes things work better and to improve existing technology investments. One presupposition is that if you can automate a process or provide an easy-to-use self-service solution, that is a positive change. Automation and self-service create efficiency, reduce the burden on IT staff, and overall make the college better. Sure, sometimes employees outside of IT may feel threatened if automation changes their job, but it allows them to focus on other higher level tasks. Like the Python book says,... [Read More]

Last time I wrote some quick, general reflections on The Phoenix Project. This time I want to get more specific and discuss ways in which The Phoenix Project applies to higher ed IT and suggests some directions for progress and improvement. [Read More]

A few weeks ago I picked up a copy of The Phoenix Project and started working through it. This is one of those books that I frequently saw popping up in discussions of IT management, and it seemed worth reading because it is such a common reference point. The first thing you’ll notice about this book is that it’s in that fun genre of “fictionalized case study” and reads like a novel. My first encounter with this genre was The Truth about Employee Engagement, which tells the story of long-time corporate manager Brian trying to turn around a struggling Tahoe... [Read More]

Over the last year, I’ve been working on planning and implementing disaster recovery capabilities from the ground up. This means developing a way to continue to run a complex ERP system if our on-prem data center blew up. This is an on-going project, but since we’ve just completed our first phase it’s a good time to step back and discuss how things are going and the challenges involved. [Read More]

The other day I was looking at a query that was inexplicably taking forever to run. After a while it began clear that the culprit was some TRIM functions on join conditions. We were working in a database with some serious datatype design issues - specifically many text columns were stored as fixed length CHAR columns with trailing white spaces. It often happened that you would need to join on two CHAR columns with different precisions. As we know, Oracle is a bit more sensitive than other database systems when it comes to trailing spaces, so to make sure the... [Read More]

The other day I was working with an application and noticed that it committed the sin of storing all its character data with the CHAR datatype in the database. This led to a brief discussion with my coworkers about the VARCHAR vs VARCHAR2 datatypes in Oracle, and I wondered when these datatypes were first introduced. It turns out that finding an answer to this question involves more research than I would have thought, and I still haven’t found it. However, looking into this question led down a rabbit hole of material from and about the early days of SQL. Here... [Read More]

One of the first things you notice if you come to Oracle from another database system like mySQL or SQL Server is that by default, Oracle is case sensitive when it comes to string comparisons. The first query returns a result but the second two do not: [Read More]