Tuesday, October 05, 2010

Ex-this, Ex-that and Ex-the other

No, I didn't go to OpenWorld. It's just too far away from me, and registration/flights/accommodation and all that just make it all too expensive.

While I would have enjoyed meeting people, I'm not sure I missed much else. All this Exadata and Exalogic is very nice if you've got a few million lying around, but my set of Tarot cards isn't seeing any of that in my near future.

But in the 'Ex-other' category, Bradley D. Brown revealed that there is some life in the Express Edition, with the 11g version in the works. Looks like they'll leave ApEx as a separate installable. Wonder if they will reconsider including the JVM in the database. By not removing it, they'll keep the core software closer to the mainstream code-line.

Incidentally, my Oracle Express install is the only item that consistently shows up in my Secunia PSI as being insecure. There's plenty of stuff (mostly .Net framework and Flash) that pops in and out as it becomes insecure and is then patched. When I first installed it, it pointed out a whole bunch of stuff that was dead, dying or lying in wait, prompting a fairly major cleanout and upgrade. This is the 'family' machine, so it has all manner of stuff installed and Secunia makes it a lot simpler to keep the bits up-to-date.

My little netbook got hit by a drive-by-download a couple of weeks back. One web-site I visited had briefly got itself exploited. Not vandalised (which implies something visual), or hacked (which implies information leakage) but probably some XSS attack which threw some nasty trojan through my Chrome browser but which (fortunately for me) got caught by Microsoft Security Essentials.

I did just have a week up at Port Stephens though. Away from Oracle, computers, twitter and all that. I did drop out of the plsqlchallenge rankings so haven't made the playoff this quarter. Maybe next time. With eight players from Australia in the playoff against just five from the UK, can I just say, "Aussie, Aussie, Aussie...Oi, Oi, Oi". Maybe we'll have to ceremoniously burn an Oracle manual, and use the ashes as a trophy.
Sandboarding on Stockton Dunes

I do have a few more days off, and I've got a couple more posts planned for this week.

2 comments:

Niall said...

feeling that confident about the Ashes then :(. I'm not so sure about plsqlchallenge. I'm a DBA type, I've done precisely 18 challenges. Last week (somewhat stressful week for me for personal reasons) I ranked 29. This should not happen.

SydOracle said...

I'm not confident in Australia winning the cricket. They are not the force they once were.

I've managed a wildcard into the PL/SQL Challenge, so now I'll have to back up some of my bluster.