The start ...

Is there a single sentient being in the western hemisphere who is not currently spewing their random thoughts at passers-by on the internet? Apart from my kids, that is? Maybe so, but it feels like I'm just about the last one to start.

And that's an oddity for someone who spends so much time on the internet. "And why, pray tell do you find yourself with so much time on your hands?". Well, time-on-my-hands comes and goes. I currently work from home for a large contracting corporation as an independent subcontractor, and that means I have ...

• no-one to talk about golf with for the first two hours of every day -- hey, not that I'm interested thanks very much.
• nobody popping into my cube to distract me from whatever it is that I do.
• long periods with a single task to accomplish.

And that task is to design, deliver and support elements of a financial and logistics data warehouse/decision support system for um ... shall we say an internationally recognised ... um ... entity.

So I'm running various enterprise-level software on what many would regard as a rather undersized platform, and that leads me to two rather important problems.

Firstly, how can I be sure that what I do on a home-built machine running Windows XP Professional is going to scale appropriately to a large unix server. Let me tell you, it ain't easy and it takes a lot of research and understanding of some very fundamental workings of the Oracle database.

Secondly, what do I do in the "down-time" while waiting for a couple of gig's of synthetic test data to be squirted into the appropriate tables?

The solutions to these two problems, dear reader, happily intersect. I spend a lot of time reading documentation, performing experiments (of the practical and the "thought" type), and trawling through various forums and websites in search of tidbits to solve my immediate problems and to store away for later.

Long story short, I sponge up information from wherever I can get it. and instead of treating you to details of my sons' periodic episodes of misbehaviour at daycare, or the contents of my cat's stomach as left on a carpet, or what I cooked for dinner last night, this is what I'm going to serve up in this blog -- the regurgitated remains of whatever drops of knowledge and scurrilous Oracle-related gossip I've been absorbing recently. Yes, that 's right -- sort of like a cat might do.

Except that the cat is not going to be writing the occasional article on Oracle Partitioning, or Parallel Query, or pointing out interesting or amusing Oracle-related forum postings to you, of course.

Well, ho hum back to work.

Enjoy! Or not. Please yourself.