Monthly Archives: May 2011

OCI*ML: Minor updates

Posted on May 28, 2011 by Gaius

A few minor updates to OCI*ML: oraprefetch to set rows pre-fetched and buffered by OCI. This is set per-statement handle, with a default for newly-created handles set in .ocamlinit. oradeqtime to set the number of seconds to wait on oradequeue … Continue reading →

Posted in Ocaml, OCIML, Oracle | 3 Comments

Unix diagnostic tools for DBAs

Posted on May 27, 2011 by Gaius

When a server application I am supporting starts to misbehave, there are a few tools I reach for to perform a quick diagnosis. Some of these are little known to DBAs who usually work within the database, so here is … Continue reading →

Posted in Linux, Oracle, Shareplex | 5 Comments

OCI*ML new feature: AQ

Posted on May 26, 2011 by Gaius

Many organizations make heavy use of message-oriented middleware, such as Oracle AQ. An interesting thing about message buses is that so long as a program can participate in the sending and receiving of messages it doesn’t matter what language it … Continue reading →

Posted in Ocaml, OCIML, Oracle | 7 Comments

The Means of Production

Posted on May 20, 2011 by Gaius

In ’94 when I went to college, the Mech Eng department had recently taken delivery of a shipment of DEC Alpha workstations. These were brutally powerful machines; 64M main memory, 3D graphics cards, running OpenVMS, and 6 or maybe 8 … Continue reading →

Posted in Business, Random thoughts | Leave a comment

Raw access to C structures from OCaml

Posted on May 17, 2011 by Gaius

I read on Paul Graham’s site an article in which Lisp programmer Carl de Marcken of ITA says: Because we have about 2 gigs of static data we need rapid access to, we use C++ code to memory-map huge files … Continue reading →

Posted in Ocaml | 5 Comments

OCaml as a SQL*Plus replacement?

Posted on May 14, 2011 by Gaius

Just re-read the Jane Street article OCaml as a scripting language†, and added an interactive toplevel to OCI*ML and a first stab at a make install task, but I still have to do: $ ocimlsh -I <directory where ociml.cma and … Continue reading →

Posted in Ocaml, OCIML, Oracle | 4 Comments

Announcing: OCI*ML

Posted on May 13, 2011 by Gaius

A few months ago I expressed my frustration at the lack of actively-maintained Oracle bindings for OCaml. That didn’t stop me from using it, as this blog shows, but it was clearly not a sustainable situation, therefore I have been … Continue reading →

Posted in Ocaml, OCIML, Oracle | 2 Comments

Performance tips

Posted on May 10, 2011 by Gaius

One pretty cool new feature of Oracle 11g that DBAs may not be aware of is the client result cache. This stores the result sets of queries hinted with /*+ result_cache */ locally in-memory on the client. It’s much better … Continue reading →

Posted in Oracle, SQL Server | 2 Comments