Just to clarify (my initial response may have been misleading), I did not write all of the contents of the two chapters, and Randolf did not just act behind the scenes. Randolf’s knowledge of 10053 trace files (yes he wrote that section), parallel queries, partitioning, and for many other subtopics exceeds my knowledge of those subtopics. Randolf worked behind the scenes on the portions of the chapters that I wrote, and I did the same for the sections of the chapters that he wrote. I had a couple of weeks (maybe a month) of a head start on the writing compared to Randolf because of the demands placed on his time by his employer, so he had the fun of reading through about 40-70 pages of material before I had a chance to even start proofreading. Once all of the sections were written, I went through the chapters with Randolf’s assistance to standardize the writing style, and make certain that the chapters were written using formal English, rather than the casual English style writing that you see in our blogs.

I am very happy that our chapters are in your top 5 list. I am looking forward to your review of the book.

You are correct that I did not provide a method to disable the 10046 trace in the script – that was intentional. The great thing about the scripts that I have provided is that if you follow the pattern and logic of the scripts, you can easily extend the scripts for other tasks, such as adding another button to disable the 10046 trace, removing the hardcoded username and password, etc. Someone else took my automated DBMS_XPLAN tool and added a logon window to remove the hardcoded username and password.

For the above script I could not find anything about disabling the trace in the code, I wonder if forgot to put it or did not put it on purpose. If it is on purpose I would really appreciate, if you can share the idea behind it

By the way I have changed the code to get the hardcoded values as parameters for ease of use.

I call the script like

script.vbs USERNAME PWD TNSNAME ITERATION INTERVAL

The link is below

http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0ARz3zF3bexacZGd6NnpuZm5fMjJkaDU4eDdkeA&hl=en

Thanks for stopping by and offering a compliment to me regarding the blog. I was concerned that when I started the blog on November 30, 2009 that I would have little or nothing that is useful to offer to visitors of the blog. In the 97 days that have elapsed since the start of the blog, there are 154 published blog articles with 2 more that are just about ready to appear on Monday and Tuesday – that means I have averaged 1.6 blog articles per day. But I have been slowing down lately, as you mention, to just 5 blog articles per week because I am running out of what I consider to be interesting topics. There are so many great Oracle blogs on the Internet, and that makes it difficult to find topics that have not already been written much better than any blog article that I could put together (the blogs of Jonathan Lewis and Richard Foote immediately come to mind).

Yes, I have been a permanent employee for the last 10 years at my current employer. DBA work is just one component (seemingly small in the big picture) of my responsibilities at the company. The days are typically quite long, but I try to set aside time each day to learn something new, or try to remember something that I once knew and have since forgotten. Participating in the forums helps quite a bit to keep me from forgetting too much, as does maintaining this blog. Writing the two chapters for the book with Randolf also helped a lot to keep from forgetting things and to learn new things – Randolf caught a lot of silly mistakes and faulty reasoning in the chapters before I had a chance to analyze the technical details of the chapters. Without Randolf’s contributions in the chapters (some days he worked as late as 2 AM on the chapters), the technical quality of the chapters would not have met, much less exceeded, my expectations.

There are some very technical discussions on the OakTable mailing list. When I was offered membership in 2008 my name was added to a list with 61 other people’s names – I suspected that all 61 of the other people knew more about Oracle’s inner workings than I did. Nearly two years later my name is still on the list, now with about 80 other names – now I am certain that all 80+ of the other people on the list know more about Oracle’s inner workings than I do, but at least that recognition serves as an incentive to continue learning, and hopefully reduce the rate at which I forget things.

Thank you very much for this script and your contributions Charles. you are definitely the most fruitful blogger since you started