A Year Older, Any Wiser? 2

November 30, 2011

(Back to the Previous Post in the Series)

Today marks the second anniversary of this blog.  With just 372 articles posted in the last two years, the rate at which new articles are posted has decreased rather dramatically from the 1+ article per day average that was established shortly after the launch of the blog.  To celebrate the second anniversary, I thought that I would post a couple of statistics and bits of information about this blog:

• On October 21, 2011 there were 1,020 views of the articles on this blog, the most in any one day.  Yet on that day one of the most simple blog articles was posted.
• On a typical day search engines generate roughly half of the page views on this blog (this percentage increased in the last couple of months).  I periodically wonder if those people searching for Charles Hooper (currently the most common search keyword) are in search of something else (that link is safe to view at work, although it does recall a certain article by Richard Foote that was posted March 31, 2008).
• No article on this blog has ever resulted in an unintentional distributed denial of service attack (I am not explicitly pointing the finger at this article: http://jonathanlewis.wordpress.com/2011/11/28/oracle-core/ ).  😉
• The most viewed article since this blog went online (currently with roughly 7,530 views) was written roughly 23 months ago and describes a deadlock that can be triggered in Oracle Database 11.1.0.6 and greater, where the same sample code does not trigger a deadlock in Oracle Database 10.2.0.1 through 10.2.0.5 (earlier release versions not tested).
• The second most viewed article since this blog went online (at roughly 5,500 views) was written just 5.5 months ago and has more of a mathematics focus than an Oracle Database slant – more so than any other article on this blog.
• The third most viewed article since this blog went online (at roughly 4,200 views) describes a case where I made an error in testing Oracle Database 10.2.0.1 in 2006, and accidentally confused a partially related cause with an effect.  In the article I then tried to determine the coincidental cause and effect.  Interestingly, there is an odd association with the contents of that blog article with the false DMCA claim that was filed against one of my articles earlier this year.
• One Oracle Database book review article on this blog extended to roughly 18 typewritten (single spaced) pages in length, and I read that book twice from cover to cover.
• One Oracle Database book review article on this blog extended to roughly 24 typewritten (single spaced) pages in length, and that review covered ONLY the first 230 or so pages of the 1100+ page book plus a couple of other pages later in the book.
• One Oracle Database book review article on this blog extended to a record shattering 35.5 typewritten (single spaced) pages in length that excluded two of the book’s chapters, and due to the length of the review had to be divided into two separate blog articles.
• The blog category name Quiz – Whose Answer is it Anyway? is derived from the name of the TV show “Whose Line is it Anyway?” – a TV show where the actors improvise the show content in reaction to the behavior of other actors.  The articles in this category (58 articles by the latest count) demonstrate cases where unwitting actors (uh, authors) improvise their story of how Oracle Database works and how it does not work.
• Some of the blog articles have titles with double or triple meanings.  I sometimes accidentally embed humor in some of the articles – sometimes I don’t recognize the humor for days.
• It is occasionally difficult to develop unique blog article content that is not already better described in five blogs authored by other members of the Oracle community.  I monitor a couple of different discussion forums (OTN, Usenet, Oracle-L, and a forum operated for commercial purposes) to find interesting problems that might appeal to a wider audience.  I am still trying to determine if there is anything somewhat interesting about this article – how hard must the developer work to hide information from the query optimizer? 
• Some of the articles are posted in an incomplete form, knowing that helpful readers will often fill in the missing details… or the missing link.  If I could remember everything that I have forgotten about Oracle Database, I would have to forget something else – so thanks for the gentle reminders that I receive on occasion.
• I probably should have created a couple of more blog article categories: Documentation Errors; Test Cases; Ouch, that’s Not Supposed to Happen; and Where Did You get that Idea?.
• I pay a yearly fee to WordPress that allows my articles to stretch across your widescreen monitor, rather than being confined to the narrow width of the title banner at the top of this page.  I also pay a yearly fee to WordPress so that unwanted advertisements do not clutter the page for visitors not logged into a WordPress account.

Looking forward, I can only predict that there is a better than 50% chance that there will be a part three to this blog article series in 12 months.  I managed to purchase four books from Apress during their cyber Monday sale (in between the distributed denial of service attacks) a couple of days ago, including a book that I recently received in paperback form from Amazon.  I think that this might be a hint that there will be more Oracle Database book reviews posted to this blog in the future.