Well, we had our Christmas pictures taken last week and just got them back yesterday. That means that I’ll be sending out Christmas cards shortly. In the meantime, here’s a preview of the pics…
In October, Jonathan Lewis offered a free one hour lecture on one SQL statement. Jonathan Lewis is one of the world’s foremost Oracle experts and Oracle Magazine’s 2006 “Oracle Author of the Year.” He is a member of the prestigious Oak Table Network, a network for Oracle Scientists, and has been an independent design and troubleshooting consultant for more than 12 years.
Here, he examines a single SQL statement several different ways and shows that the optimum execution path depends on a good understanding of the data. In his lecture, we are going to examine variations of a single query, involving a couple of subqueries, to help us understand the what Oracle can do with a query, what it can’t do, and how we can determine what we want it to do. Continue reading
Over the past week, my site has been down several days. Worse, I haven’t had any e-mail get to me since Tuesday. So, I finally bit the bullet and transferred my site to a new web hosting provider. Got everything set up this afternoon but it will still take the rest of the weekend for the DNS entries to update and everything to settle out. If you’ve e-mailed this past week, I apologize for not getting back with you. Hopefully, we’ll be back up and running by Monday.
A friend once warned me after the dissolution of his seven year marriage, “If you want to stay married, don’t buy a minivan. The moment you buy a minivan, you’ve signed your divorce decree.”
I thought that this was a funny line, and remembered it over the years. Sadly, I didn’t truly appreciate the wisdom of his statement until it happened to me.
In my defense, I didn’t know that I had bought a minivan. The salesperson confused me with words like ‘crossover vehicle’ and ’sports tourer’. Plus, he talked about the Cowboys and working out next to Valley Ranch in the 90’s. Surely such a person wouldn’t steer me wrong. I came in looking at Mazda 6 sedans and left with a Mazda 5.
Afterwards, I made all sorts of rationalizations. “It seats 6.”, “I could put a rocking sound system in back.”, “Maybe, I could trick it out with a spoiler and some pinstrips.” Sadly, everyone else thought it was a minivan too.
Buying a minivan is like castrating yourself and giving your balls to your wife for safekeeping. Because at that point, you’ve given up any interest in keeping up appearances.
When was the last time you saw an attractive, hip group of people hop out of a minivan outside a nightclub and had the crowd react excitedly about the vehicle? You haven’t because it has never happened. Not in the history of clubs, or automobiles, or groups.
If buying a sleek BMW convertible means that someone is overcompensating, then the buyer of a minivan is on the other side of the spectrum. He has surrendered himself completely to his lot in life – which leads us to the inevitable divorce.
Surrender can be a good thing in meditation or massage therapy, but surrendering oneself isn’t a great idea. At some point between the first and second child seat, I stopped being Chris, rugged adventurer with steely green eyes, and became Lincoln’s dad or Cassaundra’s husband or Oscar’s owner.
If you know of someone in an unhappy marriage or have a son-in-law that you’d like to show the door, leave a comment below. I have a minivan for you.