Very busy TNSLSNR process

I encountered a problem with a listener running on a windows machine that had a 10G Oracle database and companion installed in separate ORACLE_HOMES. The ons.log file was HUGE under the companion install. And the listener was consuming the CPU. I found some posts on OTN compaining of the same. It turned out that there was a config problem with the opmn process. Changing the ports in the ons.cnfig and in opmn.xml files solved the problem.

The errrs in the ons.log file were of the form:
Date Time Local connection 0,127.0.0.1,6100 missing form factor.

Database Managed Services - 2008 Strategy for ServerSide

Over the coming year I am planning on extending my consulting services company into the area of managed services and support. More and more I am seeing companies that would like to bring these services on board to either supplement their existing staff or to bring these skills to the table for the first time. Let's face it - deep skills in database technology are both hard to come by AND expensive. Many small, medium, and even large companies would love to buy these services without having to commit to a large staff or a long term outsourcing agreement. I am in the process of drafting initial agreements for several of my current clients now and hope to extend the offer to new clients over the coming year.

If you have interest let me know.

paste

Learned something new recently while having the task of manipulating large files from a data provider. You see, I needed to gather several years of financial information for several thousand companies (at the daily level). There were about 30 attributes so this process needed to be run about 30 times with 30 resulting files. After it was done it all needed to be loaded into a database. I could have loaded the files individually, but in the end all the data needed to be joined. I actually tried loading it all into the database and let the database doe the join, however these were such large data sets that the memory required to do such a join was larger than I had. I had a "wouldn't it be great" moment wondering if there was a way to join the files together in a streaming fashion. The order of the lineswas such that line 1 of each file could be joined together in a consistent way (the all belonged to the same security and the same date)

I was able to run the follwing command after placing all cvs files in a directory:

paste -d ',' *csv > all_data.csv

After that I had one monter file ready to load to the database - pre-joined and all!

A Real Post

Thought I'd finally get a real post up here since it's almost been 6 months since the Blog was created! Just completed Christmas and back to work for the short (or is it the long) week.

I also had the honor today of submitting my estimated taxes. I'm currently working as an independent consultant under contract so I hadn't paid taxes yet this year. Letting the tax due accumulate like that let's it build to a point where you realize just how much you pay Uncle Sam over the course of the year. I just hope they put all that cash to good use. I still need to send in my Illinois taxes.