TheBonsai's Blog

Recently I hacked a on-demand-export for a user. After his (small) data loading, an export is triggered to have his data in a backupable and tranmsportable file. The total amount of all tables was about 7MB only.

The export routines were done with datapump export. I watched a manual run and…

• datapump started and connected to a database server process: 3 seconds
• datapump estimated and analyzed the data to export: 36 minutes
• datapump exported the relevant tables: 4 seconds

Do you see what I see? Yes? Right, datapump played with itself. Over 36 minutes of runtime, where 99% of the time not one bit of data was moved. Reproducable 100%. A datapump TRACE=480300 generated trace set revealed a huge delay in the worker process when calling DBMS_METADATA.FETCH_XML_CLOB (exactly my 36 minutes).

The solution was a patch for bug

• 7710931: DATAPUMP EXPORT IS EXTREMELY SLOW WHEN EXTRACTING SCHEMA

Now datapump does what it’s designed for: Pumping data without playing with itself!

We all wonder about the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything. Maybe in october we’ll get it as clear as it can be:

$ echo $((2#$(date -d '10 oct 2010' +"%d%m%y")))
42

Be prepared!

Hi there DNS guys!

On IRC or mailinglists I frequently see people not understanding the idea and concepts behind glue records. Many have no clue about it. It’s always the same, some people don’t get it and thus make their sites unavailable – when you explain it, they don’t understand.

Hence, I suggest a name change, just name them

The clue records