Oracle Performance and Engineering

I was going through this post - where Don tries to launch a subtle attack on Tom Kyte.

I was most particularly offended by Don's comment -

"Hi Mike,
Is it just me, or does it seem like the vast majority of these "script kiddies" come from outside the USA? Why is it that with the overwhelming majority of Oracle users in the United States, there is such a disproportional amount of this nonsense from foreign lands?"

This is very offensive. It's not only offensive. It's ultra-racist. I was born outside US and it's annoying. And I thought Nazis are gone!

It was subsequently deleted, but can be found in Jonathan Lewis' well-worded article in reply.

Happened to come across a (bit dated) list of Oracle Certified Masters with their email and phone numbers!! Recruiters, attack :)

Well, as for the debate - what works and what doesn't - I have a very "open" policy. I keep my mind open. When I face a technical challenge - I try to attack with a 'free' mind with two things. Namely, (a) basic truth (as in tables contain rows, databases work and should not in always throw "ORA-600" errors by design etc.) and (b) the set of options I have (say, hash-partitoned index, clustering, using DECODE replacing a bitmap index etc etc). I try to totally forget about precepts - as in index rebuild is good, or index rebuild is bad - preached by "gurus".

To me, the world has become smaller. But number of dimensions of every problem has many folded. Earlier assumptions don't work now. New and more complicated facets make the problem description totally different. Yes, attacking each new problem in its merit may sometimes be more time-consuming than it would have had I tried to make each fall within a bucket. But in the long run - for really challenging issues - I found the 'open approach' works the best and leads me to a solution. I would continue with that.

Many many years back, when I started to read detective novels - the first thing I used to do after the murder was to suspect just everyone and work with the author from there to digest the truth. It was and is such a cool method!