I like postgres, but I've never used Oracle (or any proprietary DB engine, to be honest), so I was wondering: is there any advantage in using a proprietary database vs using postgres?
The things to consider are beyond what developers see a RDBMS for, but they include things like DR, management tools, and support (I assume developers see RDBMS as nothing more than a "persistence layer," and if that's offensive to you, then it's not directed at you). If you're paying Oracle (or MS, or IBM, etc) for licenses, its because of the value of the data they're storing is worth the cost of the licenses & support. For what it costs, Postgres is amazingly functional.
Operating system independence? I get that it may not be important TO YOU, but you're going to have a hard time downloading those SQL Server binaries for any Linux distro.
Oracle is free up to 10GB as well. You just don't get any of the patches or support, but who needs em? Relational data isn't all that valuable anyhow.
I'm a little surprised that nobody has mentioned using a decent NAS instead of a PC for your hardware already. A 4 bay NAS from QNAP or Synology would store your media and serve it up via Plex or some other DNLA server. The footprint is small enough that all of the good points about not putting expensive electronics in a crawlspace become moot.
HTH
Frankly, with all of the job experience on the OP's resume, a degree mill is not a bad way to get a legitimate line on the resume. I had an associates degree, went to the local branch of the state university, and realized I'd be graduating with my kids if I stuck with that route. I sucked it up, plunked down the money to buy my degree in 15 months worth of classes, and now HR departments everywhere will pass that portion of the resume filter.
As far as the original requirements - fast, cheap, accredited, you may pick any 2.
One way you can lighten the financial burden is to get hired full time by a company that offers tuition reimbursement.
As a prelude to this they've been buying up both ships and ship plans from Western navies. I think their plan is to use these to learn how to build and operate carriers before they start making them at home.
They do this with watches too, but in my experience, they break the day after you buy them.
I can imagine that autistic kids would be less likely to ignore a piece of hardware strapped to them.
It would be difficult/impossible to ignore, so a different strategy is in order.
My credentials:
My autistic son has something similar - http://www.projectlifesaver.org/ - and the trick was to get him to look forward to having it on. A week or so before we received the bracelet, we started talking about how he was getting a special watch. He shows it off to basically anybody who will talk to him now, which may be a bit annoying, but is worth the peace of mind should he ever wander off.
Here's the reality of the situation: we do not know the effect of mankind on the climate and the ecology. However, we do know that certain activities *have* an impact.
Is that a positive or a negative impact? If we don't know the effect, then how can we possibly say whether it is for our benefit or to our detriment?
Do not mess with the ecology of the planet without understanding the consequences.
Yes. Let's roll back the last 10,000 years or so of agriculture, as it "messes" with ecology. I'm not so sure the ~7 billion people on Earth today would be sustained by this, but it's more ecologically sound not to farm, so let's do it. Those whose childrens' children who manage to survive will thank us for our sacrifice.
Don't get me wrong - I'm all for not taking more than what I need in the interest of sustainability for others or eating fish without toxic levels of mercury, but inconvenient half-truths deserve to be called out as such.
Ecology is about the relationship of organisms to the environment. Do humans have an effect? Of course, so do koala bears. My point is that it's impossible not to mess with the ecosystem in which you live. Living implies having an impact on said ecosystem. Understanding that impact won't prevent it. It is a cold, hard fact that a population cannot outgrow its food supply.
It's probably safe to say we're headed towards a mass extinction event, and none of the previous ones (generally believed to be 5 of them, AFAIK) weren't caused by humans, as humans hadn't existed yet. That leaves external stimuli, such as the Sun as a strong potential contributor to climate change. Forgetting that humans have never caused a mass extinction before, let's entertain the idea that we have the ability to cause one. How long can the current rate of consumption of resources & population growth continue before something bad happens? Do we have levers that can effectively extend that time? What if Canada and Siberia warm up enough to support even MORE farming than we can today? Perhaps the food supply can grow enough that the population explosion can be supported.
I'm not sure about the consequences. We've seen/heard of FBI raids against DDOS participants when the target is Western financial services, but does law enforcement care at all when Anons mess with Iranian or other rogue states' sites? I'd imagine that the legality is the same in either instance, so it's really the response that I'm concerned with.
You are assuming without lack of new stimuli in the closed environment of a space craft that humans would still evolve. There have been reports that humans are no longer evolving even here on earth, since at least the last few thousand years.
Lack of new stimuli? How about an entire society living in microgravity for a couple of hundred millenia? Assuming members of the million mile high club can reproduce successfully, competitive advantages are going to be significantly different. Have you seen WALL-E? If reproduction doesn't work, or we want to be fit to inhabit a planet where gravity exists, we'll probably be stuck with trusting HAL9000.
I thought I read somewhere that Osama was killed a week ago, not on Sunday. They were waiting for official confirmation before releasing the information that he was killed....
I think the confusion here is that the operation was authorized a week ago. It didn't happen immediately. I believe I saw/heard a report that there was a rehearsal done by the team before the actual op.
You do realize that you are asking the SAME legislative body that than passed the DMCA, and COPA to write a law regulating the internet?
I think you're giving Congress a bit more credit than they deserve. Lobbyists write the laws, and members of Congress add riders to the laws appropriating money for some project in their district in order to get reelected by a populace that they failed to represent when they introduced the lobbyists' handiwork.
It's working perfectly, just like the Framers intended.
Yep. Everywhere else they are entirely unregulated, and they will definitely want it to stay that way for as long as they can get away with it.
Well, not exactly unregulated, but unless you're specific about what sort of regulations you feel are missing, the rest of this is purely pedantic. It's much more of a clusterfuck than that. For instance, I count 42 states (well, 41 + a District) here. As a former employee of PayPal's AML Compliance department, I can tell you that paypal is regulated (AML/CTF - not consumer protection regulations which is probably what you're bitching about) in the US (FinCEN), Canada (FinTRAC), Australia (AusTRAC), China (HK Police) the EU (CSSF) and anywhere outside of that in Singapore (MAS). A year ago when I left, there was talk of adding legal entities in 4 or 5 other countries, primarily in Asia and Latin America.
To the GP's point about why PayPal is not a bank (in the US anyhow), is that US banks issue credit and US money service businesses merely move money. I would certainly concede that the Bill Me Later unit of PayPal is operates purely on the technicality of the laws and/or regulations that separate banks from MSBs (BML makes a decision on whether to extend credit, then a bank issues the credit with the understanding that BML will buy the debt a few days later). There was often talk of becoming a bank, or at least chartering a subsidiary bank in order to allow the credit issuing to move completely in house. Ebay divesting Skype was supposedly a part of that plan, although I never understood why, nor can I say whether PayPal is any closer to becoming (or more likely starting) a bank. More of what PayPal does falls under the EU's legal definition of a bank, so PayPal is a bank there.
I'm also going to say, the whole "RF/Secretgovernment testing/out to destroy us all" conspiracy theories have once again proven to what they are. Bullshit.
Are you kidding? This so-called "paper" was "co-written" by some Army chemists. If anything, it PROVES the conspiracy theories!
*adds yet another layer of tinfoil to an already heavy hat*
That said, I'd like to have a bluetooth remote for my (future) HTPC... Can you get anything like it, I searched a bit but didn't find anything. Most seems to be infra-red and using a cellphone isn't ideal.
Check out the snapstream firefly . It's RF (not bluetooth), but if avoiding line of sight is your objective, then it will fit the bill. Works quite well with MythTV, and I've messed about with it on Windows (but not MCE) as well. My one complaint (and a fundamental one that I should have considered first) is that I can't control my tv with it. Next time, I'll get a single, converged remote.
If the OP had mentioned Oracle, then I would have recommend the whole book. Nonetheless, the first chapter might prove a beneficial read.
Absolutely. Excellent suggestion to check out chapter 1 for free.
I'm an avid Tom Kyte reader, and I probably should have attributed my post as a paraphrase of that chapter. I sidestepped it simply because Oracle was not on the list of technologies the OP is interested in. I sincerely hope there are analogous books for other RDBMS's. That book sits on my desk, yet gathers very little dust.
"The best method" is probably a really vague concept.
I disagree completely. The "best" method varies widely, because it is specific to the RDBMS you're using.
OP says he understands how databases work, but it seems to be limited to how to put data in & get data out. A database is (or can be) more than a bit bucket. If it's taking too long to fetch records from a 10 million record table, there are some serious performance issues here. It could be any combination of bad data modeling, improper indexing, underpowered hardware, poorly configured concurrency/consistency controls, inefficient I/O subsystem, OLTP workload on a system configured for OLAP etc...
Understanding concepts like transactions, locking mechanisms, disaster recovery, table structure (heap vs clustered), index structure, temp tables, stored procedures/packages/functions, data types, etc. is important, but it's equally important to understand how your chosen RDBMS implements these so that you can fully exploit them. Armed with this knowledge and the needs of your business, you'll be able to refactor your data and/or applications appropriately
I think you can get at the concepts through practice - particularly since you're working with more than 1 RDBMS, but "getting" databases in general won't get you what you're looking for. Depending on the urgency here, you may find yourself hiring a gun to help sort out your situation, as the amount of research & testing required to get the knowledge you need to do this may not be practicable for an IT Director.
SELECT * FROM Foods WHERE type = "hamburger"
It'd have to be
SELECT * FROM Foods WHERE type = "$1"
PARAM1 = "hamburger"
This functionality you propose is available today, although not required (at least in Oracle where I'm familiar). Look into bind variables. in fact, let me google it for anybody reading this who wants to know how to prevent sql injection. http://www.lmgtfy.com/?q=bind+variables
The positive side effect (again in Oracle) is that use of bind variables reduces the CPU cost of parsing SQL statements, so not only should you use bind variables, you should REALLY use bind variables.
My experience was similar, and in the same timeframe. I was following a [THE] howto related to installing on Fedora, and got it mostly working. Then I traded in all the nerd cred I had earned & went with a prepackaged distro (MythDora, as my familiarity is with redhat/fedora).
3 years later, it's still running. The only issues I've had have been hardware related (a fan died in the power supply). WAF is so high that when that happened funds were immediately allocated to replace the PSU & get the dvr working again.
The pain of setup is having to know how to make ALL the components & drivers work. That's still available for masochists who want to set up everything from scratch, but with Mythdora & Mythbuntu available, I'll happily use that & spend the extra time with my family (or killing aliens).
Slashdot Mirror
Question:
I like postgres, but I've never used Oracle (or any proprietary DB engine, to be honest), so I was wondering: is there any advantage in using a proprietary database vs using postgres?
The things to consider are beyond what developers see a RDBMS for, but they include things like DR, management tools, and support (I assume developers see RDBMS as nothing more than a "persistence layer," and if that's offensive to you, then it's not directed at you). If you're paying Oracle (or MS, or IBM, etc) for licenses, its because of the value of the data they're storing is worth the cost of the licenses & support. For what it costs, Postgres is amazingly functional.
Operating system independence? I get that it may not be important TO YOU, but you're going to have a hard time downloading those SQL Server binaries for any Linux distro.
Oracle is free up to 10GB as well. You just don't get any of the patches or support, but who needs em? Relational data isn't all that valuable anyhow.
I'm a little surprised that nobody has mentioned using a decent NAS instead of a PC for your hardware already. A 4 bay NAS from QNAP or Synology would store your media and serve it up via Plex or some other DNLA server. The footprint is small enough that all of the good points about not putting expensive electronics in a crawlspace become moot. HTH
Frankly, with all of the job experience on the OP's resume, a degree mill is not a bad way to get a legitimate line on the resume. I had an associates degree, went to the local branch of the state university, and realized I'd be graduating with my kids if I stuck with that route. I sucked it up, plunked down the money to buy my degree in 15 months worth of classes, and now HR departments everywhere will pass that portion of the resume filter.
As far as the original requirements - fast, cheap, accredited, you may pick any 2.
One way you can lighten the financial burden is to get hired full time by a company that offers tuition reimbursement.
As a prelude to this they've been buying up both ships and ship plans from Western navies. I think their plan is to use these to learn how to build and operate carriers before they start making them at home.
They do this with watches too, but in my experience, they break the day after you buy them.
I can imagine that autistic kids would be less likely to ignore a piece of hardware strapped to them.
It would be difficult/impossible to ignore, so a different strategy is in order.
My credentials:
My autistic son has something similar - http://www.projectlifesaver.org/ - and the trick was to get him to look forward to having it on. A week or so before we received the bracelet, we started talking about how he was getting a special watch. He shows it off to basically anybody who will talk to him now, which may be a bit annoying, but is worth the peace of mind should he ever wander off.
I can make the same argument for my luggage.
Wait - is the combination 1, 2, 3, 4, 5?
Here's the reality of the situation: we do not know the effect of mankind on the climate and the ecology. However, we do know that certain activities *have* an impact.
Is that a positive or a negative impact? If we don't know the effect, then how can we possibly say whether it is for our benefit or to our detriment?
Do not mess with the ecology of the planet without understanding the consequences.
Yes. Let's roll back the last 10,000 years or so of agriculture, as it "messes" with ecology. I'm not so sure the ~7 billion people on Earth today would be sustained by this, but it's more ecologically sound not to farm, so let's do it. Those whose childrens' children who manage to survive will thank us for our sacrifice.
Don't get me wrong - I'm all for not taking more than what I need in the interest of sustainability for others or eating fish without toxic levels of mercury, but inconvenient half-truths deserve to be called out as such.
Ecology is about the relationship of organisms to the environment. Do humans have an effect? Of course, so do koala bears. My point is that it's impossible not to mess with the ecosystem in which you live. Living implies having an impact on said ecosystem. Understanding that impact won't prevent it. It is a cold, hard fact that a population cannot outgrow its food supply.
It's probably safe to say we're headed towards a mass extinction event, and none of the previous ones (generally believed to be 5 of them, AFAIK) weren't caused by humans, as humans hadn't existed yet. That leaves external stimuli, such as the Sun as a strong potential contributor to climate change. Forgetting that humans have never caused a mass extinction before, let's entertain the idea that we have the ability to cause one. How long can the current rate of consumption of resources & population growth continue before something bad happens? Do we have levers that can effectively extend that time? What if Canada and Siberia warm up enough to support even MORE farming than we can today? Perhaps the food supply can grow enough that the population explosion can be supported.
I'm not sure about the consequences. We've seen/heard of FBI raids against DDOS participants when the target is Western financial services, but does law enforcement care at all when Anons mess with Iranian or other rogue states' sites? I'd imagine that the legality is the same in either instance, so it's really the response that I'm concerned with.
RTFM. Matthew 24:36.
Even if the world does happen to end tomorrow, it's not because this kook knew it.
We would have been on Mars if we never wasted all that money on these useless shuttles.
Useless?
Hubble
ISS
30 years of research
You are assuming without lack of new stimuli in the closed environment of a space craft that humans would still evolve. There have been reports that humans are no longer evolving even here on earth, since at least the last few thousand years.
Lack of new stimuli? How about an entire society living in microgravity for a couple of hundred millenia? Assuming members of the million mile high club can reproduce successfully, competitive advantages are going to be significantly different. Have you seen WALL-E? If reproduction doesn't work, or we want to be fit to inhabit a planet where gravity exists, we'll probably be stuck with trusting HAL9000.
I thought I read somewhere that Osama was killed a week ago, not on Sunday. They were waiting for official confirmation before releasing the information that he was killed....
I think the confusion here is that the operation was authorized a week ago. It didn't happen immediately. I believe I saw/heard a report that there was a rehearsal done by the team before the actual op.
You do realize that you are asking the SAME legislative body that than passed the DMCA, and COPA to write a law regulating the internet?
I think you're giving Congress a bit more credit than they deserve. Lobbyists write the laws, and members of Congress add riders to the laws appropriating money for some project in their district in order to get reelected by a populace that they failed to represent when they introduced the lobbyists' handiwork.
It's working perfectly, just like the Framers intended.
Yep. Everywhere else they are entirely unregulated, and they will definitely want it to stay that way for as long as they can get away with it.
Well, not exactly unregulated, but unless you're specific about what sort of regulations you feel are missing, the rest of this is purely pedantic. It's much more of a clusterfuck than that. For instance, I count 42 states (well, 41 + a District) here. As a former employee of PayPal's AML Compliance department, I can tell you that paypal is regulated (AML/CTF - not consumer protection regulations which is probably what you're bitching about) in the US (FinCEN), Canada (FinTRAC), Australia (AusTRAC), China (HK Police) the EU (CSSF) and anywhere outside of that in Singapore (MAS). A year ago when I left, there was talk of adding legal entities in 4 or 5 other countries, primarily in Asia and Latin America.
To the GP's point about why PayPal is not a bank (in the US anyhow), is that US banks issue credit and US money service businesses merely move money. I would certainly concede that the Bill Me Later unit of PayPal is operates purely on the technicality of the laws and/or regulations that separate banks from MSBs (BML makes a decision on whether to extend credit, then a bank issues the credit with the understanding that BML will buy the debt a few days later). There was often talk of becoming a bank, or at least chartering a subsidiary bank in order to allow the credit issuing to move completely in house. Ebay divesting Skype was supposedly a part of that plan, although I never understood why, nor can I say whether PayPal is any closer to becoming (or more likely starting) a bank. More of what PayPal does falls under the EU's legal definition of a bank, so PayPal is a bank there.
I'm also going to say, the whole "RF/Secretgovernment testing/out to destroy us all" conspiracy theories have once again proven to what they are. Bullshit.
Are you kidding? This so-called "paper" was "co-written" by some Army chemists. If anything, it PROVES the conspiracy theories!
*adds yet another layer of tinfoil to an already heavy hat*
That said, I'd like to have a bluetooth remote for my (future) HTPC... Can you get anything like it, I searched a bit but didn't find anything. Most seems to be infra-red and using a cellphone isn't ideal.
Check out the snapstream firefly . It's RF (not bluetooth), but if avoiding line of sight is your objective, then it will fit the bill. Works quite well with MythTV, and I've messed about with it on Windows (but not MCE) as well. My one complaint (and a fundamental one that I should have considered first) is that I can't control my tv with it. Next time, I'll get a single, converged remote.
I fear we taxpayers have simply bought a technology that has existed since the 1960's, except now it caries more crew and fewer LEMs.
Boeing's Crew Space Transportation (CST)-100 can hold seven crew and will be bigger than Apollo
I guess it's sort of nice that they can stick this nose cone on different rockets, but as far as American innovation goes...yawn.
If the OP had mentioned Oracle, then I would have recommend the whole book. Nonetheless, the first chapter might prove a beneficial read.
Absolutely. Excellent suggestion to check out chapter 1 for free.
I'm an avid Tom Kyte reader, and I probably should have attributed my post as a paraphrase of that chapter. I sidestepped it simply because Oracle was not on the list of technologies the OP is interested in. I sincerely hope there are analogous books for other RDBMS's. That book sits on my desk, yet gathers very little dust.
"The best method" is probably a really vague concept.
I disagree completely. The "best" method varies widely, because it is specific to the RDBMS you're using.
OP says he understands how databases work, but it seems to be limited to how to put data in & get data out. A database is (or can be) more than a bit bucket. If it's taking too long to fetch records from a 10 million record table, there are some serious performance issues here. It could be any combination of bad data modeling, improper indexing, underpowered hardware, poorly configured concurrency/consistency controls, inefficient I/O subsystem, OLTP workload on a system configured for OLAP etc...
Understanding concepts like transactions, locking mechanisms, disaster recovery, table structure (heap vs clustered), index structure, temp tables, stored procedures/packages/functions, data types, etc. is important, but it's equally important to understand how your chosen RDBMS implements these so that you can fully exploit them. Armed with this knowledge and the needs of your business, you'll be able to refactor your data and/or applications appropriately
I think you can get at the concepts through practice - particularly since you're working with more than 1 RDBMS, but "getting" databases in general won't get you what you're looking for. Depending on the urgency here, you may find yourself hiring a gun to help sort out your situation, as the amount of research & testing required to get the knowledge you need to do this may not be practicable for an IT Director.
I hope this helps!
bullshit marketing
Seriously? I think it's brilliant marketing. Who wouldn't want to throw a WORM into their card reader?
I'll have 2, thank you.
SELECT * FROM Foods WHERE type = "hamburger" It'd have to be SELECT * FROM Foods WHERE type = "$1" PARAM1 = "hamburger"
This functionality you propose is available today, although not required (at least in Oracle where I'm familiar). Look into bind variables. in fact, let me google it for anybody reading this who wants to know how to prevent sql injection. http://www.lmgtfy.com/?q=bind+variables The positive side effect (again in Oracle) is that use of bind variables reduces the CPU cost of parsing SQL statements, so not only should you use bind variables, you should REALLY use bind variables.
adult male sexual dysfunction
I heard Slashdot causes this too.
Correlation != causation. You must be new here (said the guy with an orders of magnitude higher UID).
My experience was similar, and in the same timeframe. I was following a [THE] howto related to installing on Fedora, and got it mostly working. Then I traded in all the nerd cred I had earned & went with a prepackaged distro (MythDora, as my familiarity is with redhat/fedora).
3 years later, it's still running. The only issues I've had have been hardware related (a fan died in the power supply). WAF is so high that when that happened funds were immediately allocated to replace the PSU & get the dvr working again.
The pain of setup is having to know how to make ALL the components & drivers work. That's still available for masochists who want to set up everything from scratch, but with Mythdora & Mythbuntu available, I'll happily use that & spend the extra time with my family (or killing aliens).
last i checked power wasn't measured in meters/second.
I'm pretty sure you're right, but I think it's talking about ocean (well, tidal) current, not electrical current.