You probably know the feeling. Its Monday and you know what you have to do that week. On Friday you realize that the whole package shifted to the next week because you did got to it… That is what happened to me the last two weeks. Instead of cleaning up some duties, I was presented with such an amount of extra work that I didn’t come to it.
I wanted to write a decent post on the AMIS technology blog about how to “equipartition XML data making use of nested tables“. A feature that will see the light in 11.1.0.7.0, the first patch for Oracle 11g. Although my test scripting has finished, I just didn’t come to it. I wanted to do some research on the presented XMLTable Index introduced by one of Mark Drake’s presentation during Oracle Open World 2007. It had to wait as well. I had to do some work regarding setting up standards for AMIS concerning OFA complaint database VMware project environments and VMware Oracle Application Server environments. Alas…
Instead I did upgrades, 5 in total. I did a lot of talking with customers and had to intervene and take immediate action on a customer system with serious performance problems. Anjo Kolk helped with that last one and took care releasing some of the pressure on that issue. After 3 1/2 months some French network technology bureaucrat finally saw the light regarding setting up a simple VPN tunnel. A VPN tunnel I needed for remote database administration of a customer database, via Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control. I have never had such stupid conversations, while trying to educate a guy, on the other end of a telephone line. If it was wartime I would have let him released from his position, but alas, we aren’t, so he could play all his cards in frustrating the process. A lot of “urgent” stuff came in between, being pushed by Project Managers, to the front edge of my “to do list”. Duh.
In those two weeks, nevertheless, some unintentionally nice issues came around as well. A presentation of mine was put on the alternate list for Kaleidoscope 2008. Also two things came up on which I hope can let you in when the time arrives. One concerned an invite from Oracle and other regarding a possible upcoming DBA event / conference that will be held in The Netherlands on which I will be allowed to present, when everything comes to order.
Thank God. It’s weekend. Let’s see what I can get rid off, from my “to do list”, next week.
Why is it sometimes so hard to plan in advance…