Today, my blog turned 18 years old!
I published my first blog entry on June 18, 2007 and have since published over 300 posts.
The first blog entry, like most of my others, was about systematic troubleshooting and performance optimization of various (Oracle) database workloads and especially their touchpoint with underlying Unix/Linux operating systems, storage and network I/O. The articles covering interactions between multiple layers of your application stack and how to navigate troubleshooting across all the layers and moving parts have been the most interesting ones for me to write.
But also, publishing simple scripts and tools that make some 5-minute manual data collection task into a 10-second one (a’la Oracle Session Snapper and later Linux Process Snapper) has been rewarding. Both because I’ve just greatly optimized my own workflow and now others can easily do it too.
I had been active in the Usenet newsgroups (like comp.databases.oracle.server) since 1998 and later in the Oracle-L mailing list too. At some point I wanted a more permanent home for my writings and especially all the open source tools, like my Oracle TPT scripts that I’ve been maintaining and growing for 25 years.
And now my blog is all grown up!
To celebrate this anniversary, I’ll announce here that I’ll be publishing a number of articles next, summarizing my personal approach and understanding of how to do systematic troubleshooting & performance optimization right:
- Method > Data Sources > Tools
- To Optimize Performance, Measure What’s Taking the Most of Your Response Time and Do It Less!
- A Database is Just a Bunch of Sessions (Connections)
- Every System is Just a Bunch of Threads, Including Distributed Systems
Don’t read too much into these future article titles right now, these are just single-sentence headlines so far, wait until the actual articles are out and then we can discuss :-)
