Oracle and computers with zero CPUs

How do you license a computer with zero CPUs? Of course, there are no such computers but still according to Oracle’s Grid Control this is not always the case 🙂 Have a look:

These hardware inventions should not bring us any cost, shouldn’t they 🙂

It is worth asking the question are there any computers with zero IO devices and NULL CPU boards:

Looks like also that the number of CPU boards cannot be visible for some computers, not to mention that although the documentation claims that “MGMT$CSA_COLLECTIONS displays top-level information about all client configurations”, I can still see nothing from this view:

You notice that this is in Grid Control 11g? I remember similar cases in 10g as well, here is an old snapshot of mine:

When will computers run without CPUs? But it is like a person without a brain says a colleague of mine.

And finally, is Oracle wrong or did HP forget to put a ventilator in the computer 🙂

Oracle’s maths

I have seen very strange computational bugs with Oracle, well most fixed already to my knowledge, but here is something that still makes me wonder.

The indeterminate form zero on the power of zero has been discussed for almost 200 years. You can google about it and decide for yourself. Here is what Oracle gives for the expression in 11.2.0.2:

Another interesting issue is about remainders when the divisor is zero. Of course, when you divide say twenty with zero, you cannot even speak about what the remainder is, right? Here is what Oracle has to say:

I still wonder is natural logarithm of zero on the power of zero really zero 🙂

First time I noticed this was in Oracle 7, I tried again yesterday in 11gR2:

The quality of the Oracle database product

Two major things have recently caught my attention. They are more like strategic and of long term importance for the Oracle database.

1. Real online patching and database upgrades are still happening mostly on power point presentations. They should not be dependent on database types, patch type, version, replication, etc. and should be in DBA terms simple.

Top Google searches for Oracle database live upgrades relate rather to certification upgrades, not database upgrades:

Does Oracle have zero downtime maintenance, have a look:

Is Oracle Golden Gate similar to QREP in IBM’s DB2?

2. Product quality of all database components is getting worse and worse all the time.

– Look at the 10.2.0.5 bug fixes: they are just too many!
– The following three components throw too many errors and bugs: all types of replication, RAC and Grid Control
– ORA-600 pops up too often nowadays!

2010 in review

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.

Crunchy numbers

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 2,600 times in 2010. That’s about 6 full 747s.

In 2010, there were 4 new posts, not bad for the first year! There were 15 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 267kb. That’s about a picture per month.

The busiest day of the year was October 18th with 469 views. The most popular post that day was About Julian Dontcheff.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were blog.tanelpoder.com, blog.yavor.info, Google Reader, oaktable.net, and oracle-base.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for julian dontcheff, julian dontcheff blog, “julian dontcheff”, julian dontcheff,, and juliandontcheff.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

1

About Julian Dontcheff July 2010

2

Oracle teaching Oracle July 2010
1 Like on WordPress.com,

3

11g Grid Control: PL/SQL execution monitoring in SQL Monitoring September 2010

4

Grid Control 11g new features July 2010

5

Remove old Grid Control warnings July 2010