A new website www.glassdoor.com offers a peek into salaries and corporate culture. Given anonymously, users can register at this site, provide current and past salary information, along with a company review, and have access to salary and review information given by others.

This is an interesting idea and has the potential to get some real competitive salary information out into the public eye. I personally wasn’t intimidate by giving my salary information. You will have to weigh the validity of both company reviews and salary information. When looking at current salaries I basically found what I expected, salaries are higher than most salary surveys and headhunters will tell you.

Use at your own risk.

For many years DBAs have been getting low level tracing information about session through the creating and reading of Oracle generated trace files. These trace files can be generated against a full system load or individual sessions. The types of information generated by these traces in Table 1 clearly show why they have been used for many years. There just wasn’t an easy way to get this information from within Oracle’s internal views.  While Oracle 10g has provided quite a few mechanisms to trace the session by querying internal views, the generation of trace files is still around and still quite viable. In addition Oracle 10g allows us to generate trace files and analyze them with added functionality. This article will focus in on how we can generate trace files in Oracle 10g.

Read more at: Oracle Session Tracing Part V

Mark your calendar as Windows XP will no longer be available for purchase from Microsoft and OEM partners as of June 30, 2008.

Actually many OEMs are already cutting off the ability to order a new PC with XP:

• Dell - June 18
• Hewlett-Packard’s - June 10
• Lenovo’s - June 15
• Acer - June 30

Retailers such as Best Buy, Circut City have stated they will sell until inventory is exhausted. There are a couple of loopholes if you decide you just have to have Windows XP. The loopholes revolve around business licenses and downgrading a Vista license. Some PC makers will actually do the downgrade for you.

Now the question I raise is why Microsoft is pushing a new version of Windows on consumers at this time. While you an I may recognize our PCs will run just fine without an upgrade, many consumers feel the urge or think they must upgrade–incurring additional expense when not required.

Hats off to companies like Apple, and Steve Jobs, who in their wisdom realize the money crunch and bad economy we are faced with. And who actually reduced the price of the iPhone because of our current economic times.

Now I realize that both Microsoft and Apple probably priced and released their products to make the largest possible profits. But the tactics are still two totally different. One prays on the need of a consumer while the other responds to it.

In Part III we left off displaying the enabled traces and statistic gatherings we enabled through the DBMS_MONITOR package. Recall that in Part III we queried the DBA_ENABLED_AGGREGATIONS view and had a listing such as in Listing 1. Table 1 gives a breakdown of the DBA_ENABLED_AGGREGATIONS view as I have renamed some of the columns for Listing 1.

Read more at: Oracle Session Tracing Part IV

comScore Inc. reported a significant growth in the number paid clicks for Google in April.

Meanwhile the paid clicks for Yahoo and Microsoft declined.

Was Google able, through some un-known mechanism, to persuade Internet users to click on their ads instead? 

Just for background, paid clicks are those times an Internet user clicks on an advertisement on a website. You can see many of them here on this site. The goal is to get as many clicks as possible and hopefully someone will purchase a good or service. Yea, yea, yea, we know this.

But according to the WSJ, Google saw a better than expected 20% growth in clicks. Interesting to note is the fact Google reportedly stated that paid clicks were down earlier in the year they acted upon quality issues to reduce the number of accidental clicks. This is a fine line as you can imagine. Google doesn’t want to pay someone for a click that was done on accident.

COME ON NOW! Do you really think, when the goal is to GET someone to click on an advertisement, they will do something to reduce the clicks? I didn’t think so. Maybe there should be a target area on clicks that give a percentage of a click. Regardless, the fact that Google paid clicks are up again makes me question if they fixed the quality issues or just limited them to get the numbers up again.

Along with these possibly new session identifiers, there has always been three session environment variables that get set from when a user connects to the database and are important when talking about tracing a particular session or group of sessions. These would be the SID, SERIAL#, and SERVICE_NAME. These have been around Oracle sessions for quite some time but are presented in Table 1 with the three new variables presented in Parts I & II of this series to provide for a quick refresher. This set of six session variables now gives us the ability to activate tracing for the session in a variety of ways.

Read more at: Oracle Session Tracing Part III

In Part I of this Session Tracing Series we learned how to set the CLIENT_IDENTIFIER session variable and how we could query it from the V$SESSION view. We also looked at how to look at the resources consumed in real-time for that CLIENT_IDENTIFER so that we could determine if large amounts of resources were attributed to a unique or group of client connections. If you remember from Part I, we invoked a logon trigger whenever a session connected and then queried the V$SESSION view. This gave us output similar to that of Listing 1. From this output you can see a CLIENT_IDENTIFIER that is being set, I changed the logon trigger to put in host name instead of IP address in this example, and you can see that the module name did get populated for the applications I used to connect from (SQL*Plus and Oracle Administrative Assistant). Also note that the action field is blank. Also notice that the there are two connections using SQL*Plus from host FINE-ALE and one connection from host PAULANER.

Read more at: Oracle Session Tracing Part II

The goal of this series is to inform DBAs on how to track and trace connected sessions so that they can properly determine where sessions are experiencing performance problems. This article presents the very important concept of assigning a client identifier to a session. This client identifier will be used in future articles as this will be one way to initiate traces. This article first presents the issue of why we should use the client identifier and then how we can utilize it when looking at sessions as they are connected in real time.

Read more at: Oracle Session Tracing Part I

Revision3 Corp.,is an Internet TV company that "gets it, born from the Internet, on-demand generation. Unlike aggregators, mash-ups, and user-generated video sites, Revision3 is an actual TV network for the web, creating and producing its own original, broadcast quality shows." 

MediaDefender Inc.,is an Internet service provider of "anti-piracy solutions in the emerging Internet-Piracy-Prevention (IPP) industry.  We provide services that stop the spread of illegally traded copyrighted material over the Internet and Peer-to-Peer networks."

The world was good, Revision3 was providing free programs on the Internet and MediaDefender was happy. But a change in business, Revision3 opened the doors for subscribers to share non-Revision3 files lead MediaDefender to spoof the Revision3 network. The sending of blank files and data noise brought the Revision3 network to its knees.

Now I ask, Is the Internet so open that we can have judge, jury, and executioner all in a single entity? You may or may not agree with some of the P2P uses, I certainly don’t agree with pirated material, but can MediaDefender really shut down another company without a true investigation? I see nowhere on their website that gives them the jurisdiction.

Did you know that the number of homes in the United States that have a broadband Internet connection has decreased so much that the US is now ranked 15 among 30 of the so-called developed nations of the world. This is huge considering the US was ranked 4^th only seven years ago.

So what the heck has happened. The WSJ gives no indication of how these percentages were calculated. I mean, what is considered a household, does dial-up or wireless count, or does getting your fill from connections at work count. I personally could be using my AT&T wireless card instead of paying for broadband in the house. We see this in the way mobile phones are used as there are many homes without a land line because they just you their mobile phone.

Because of this, the FCC, as stated by Chairman Kevin Martin gave his endorsement for providing subsidies to build more broadband network construction, along with waving cellphone contract termination fees.

Does this sound good to you? Read a little further and it’s only for a two week period after getting their first bill, probably a 7 week trial period. This is supposed to help consumers remedy those unforeseen charges that a salesperson might not tell a consumer about. How about just getting the telecoms to just provide a sample bill at signing? Seems like that would stop the miss-communication. I personally don’t think the mobile phone providers should eat the bill for services a consumer agreed upon. Let’s just hope it doesn’t give the consumer the right to return phone and all mobile services without some transfers of monies.