DB2 Refrential Integrity

I was going to write a post about DB2 referential integrity, but I cannot imagine writing anything better than the very good, thorough treatment of the topic found here:
http://ibmdatamag.com/2011/01/how-well-do-you-know-the-rules/

Trouble installing oracle on Windows

So, while installing Oracle on Windows 7 (64-bit), the Oracle installer would just sort of shut down unceremoniously.

I found a log file C:\Program Files\Oracle\Inventory\logs.  It wasn't, however, very revealing.  The last message was simply "INFO: Get view named [QuickInstallUI]"

So, poking around on the internet lead me to a thread over at forums.oracle.com that discussed this issue, but the only thing that worked for me was to create another user and run the install as that user.

Crazy. But it worked.  Wanted to pass it along.

DB2 Backup Naming convention

I had a hard time finding this on the internet, so I thought I'd post after I found it in a book.

The naming convention for a DB2 file system backup will be:
Alias.Type.Instance.Node.Catalog_Node.MonthHourSecond.Sequence
Example:
MyDB.0.DB2INST.NODE00000.CATN0000.20131015131259.001
   ↑       ↑        ↑                ↑                   ↑                ↑   ↑  ↑     ↑   ↑     ↑
Alias     |    Instance          |           Catalog Node     |    |   |      |    |      |
       Backup Type       Node                              Year  |   |      |    |      |
                                                                            Mon  Day  |  Sec   Seq
                                                                                           Min

Reference:
Understanding DB2: Learning Visually with Examples Second Edition
Page 745
14.4.6 The Backup Files
Raul F. Chong (Author), Clara Liu (Author), Sylvia F. Qi (Author), Dwaine R. Snow (Author)

Christ and the Environment

http://losalamitos.patch.com/groups/weather/p/climate-change-study-permanent-unbearable-heat-expected-in-southern-california-by-2047_44f0b316

So many things are weird to me. I think this is the last thing I'll say for a while, but here's this one.

Christians are Republican. No, don't even argue that you're not, I've seen your glee over the glitches in Obamacare, which I cannot see in any other context.

But that's OK, I get that. You picked a team over an issue that was important to you, and I completely respect that. Now you want your team to win, and that's completely natural.

I guess, if I had a wish, though, it would be that you could start pressuring your team to have more Christ-like opinions on issues outside your main one.

For instance: what would Christ say about the environment?

Would Christ say, well, Bush 41 ended acid rain by creating a market for sulfur and letting his market based solution solve this problem, but that same idea is applied by that Kenyan Muslim Terrorist AntiChrist black-man in the white house, it's the most evil thing ever?

Would He say Boy, despite the opinion being held by literally all of your best scientists, there's a possibility that they're wrong, so why advance the human race by creating cleaner more renewable sources of energy that will reduce costs and improve standard of living for everyone, particularly the poor?

Would He mock the environmentalists who, whether they're right or wrong, have the best interest of His creation at heart?

Would He say, Hey, having an environment that supports human life and happiness is important, but I'd hate to see profits hurt by some sort of effort to make a change?

Would He even say, Hey, you can't put people out of work? Or would He say, man, do everything you can not to put people out of work, and if you DO put people out of work, support them, retrain them, pray for them, feed and clothe them until they're back on their feet again? And, oh, btw, develop of carbon sequestration technology, and you don't have to put people out of work?

The only way that I can understand the Christian position on a variety of issues is through the psychology of teams. Our minds are designed to make us join a team, make us love us and hate them, and blind us to obvious Truth.

BUT, we are the disciples of The One who is the Way, the TRUTH, and the life. Truth is important. Perhaps more important than anything. Wanting our team to win at the cost of Truth is a terrible, terrible shame.

My next note will be this same sort of thing, but about health care ...

It's Sad

It's sad.

I'm listening to the radio, and I hear some preacher literally preaching against big government, as if the bible says that.


After a few moments of listening in stunned silence, I turn the channel to another Christian station, where they're talking about how changes in government policies are driving out Christian heritage.


You'd swear that Christians can't worship God or follow the teachings of Christ without the approval of the state of Iowa, or that (Beware: The following is sarcasm:) Kenyan Muslim Terrorist AntiChrist in the white house.

There's a hideous idol standing in the middle of our sanctuary, and on it's head are two horns. On one is written "the culture wars", and on the other, "Republican politics".

It's a comforting idol, for sure. It allows us to exercise our basest human instincts to divide into us and them, love us, and hate them, and do it all in the name of something higher, something pure, something good. 

Except that it's not any of those things. It boils with the wretchedness of racism that the perpetrator can't even see,much less acknowledge. It drips bile towards those who have legitimate differences in opinion. It intoxicates decent, generous, kind people into demonizing the very people to whom you should be reaching out, convinced that they are the enemy of your "Christian nation".

And hidden behind this abomination is the cross of Christ, quietly calling you to the real, difficult, demoralizing, frustrating work against nature; the remaking of yourself in Christ's image. The Cross of Christ calling you to deny yourself, to deny these basal, tribal instincts, to put aside the psychology of teams, and to begin the journey of a genuine disciple of Christ.

Wake up.

I've been reading a lot about suffering lately.  It's not that I sought them out, but rather that they sort of came to me unbidden.  This makes me take notice, moreso than I normally would.

CS Lewis:

Unfortunately, I'm having trouble finding it and am out of time, but the gist was that we fear a thing, and we shrink from what we fear. What, the, if that thing we fear turns out to be good?

Paramahansa Yogananda in Autobiography of a Yogi, chapter: Law of Miracles ...

A dazzling play of light filled the whole horizon. A soft rumbling vibration formed itself into words:

"What has life or death to do with Light? In the image of My Light I have made you. The relativities of life and death belong to the cosmic dream. Behold your dreamless being! Awake, my child, awake!"
 

and later in the same chapter, after a horrifying vision of the European battlefields of WW1:

 My heart was still not comforted. The divine voice went on: "Creation is light and shadow both, else no picture is possible. The good and evil of maya must ever alternate in supremacy. If joy were ceaseless here in this world, would man ever seek another? Without suffering he scarcely cares to recall that he has forsaken his eternal home. Pain is a prod to remembrance. The way of escape is through wisdom! The tragedy of death is unreal; those who shudder at it are like an ignorant actor who dies of fright on the stage when nothing more is fired at him than a blank cartridge. My sons are the children of light; they will not sleep forever in delusion."

A guy on a facebook group I'm on (Translated from Greek, so forgive some of the imperfections. I decided to leave them):

There will never flew ...

The cocoon of the Butterfly (instructive history) Someone, sometime, he found the cocoon of a butterfly.
One day, there was a small opening in the cocoon. The man sat and observed the butterfly for several hours as she was struggling to pass her body through the small hole. Sometime it seemed anympori to proceed.
So the man decided to help the butterfly. With a pair of scissors, cut the remaining piece of the cocoon. The butterfly made easily, but had a swollen body and wings are withered. The man continued to observe the butterfly because he expected that the wings will be raised and we were stretching to prop up her body, which will slowly xeprizotan.
Something, however, was not.
In contrast, the butterfly spent the rest of her life by dragging her swollen body and having withered wings. Never been able to fly.
This man, with kindness and haste, did not understand was that the fight to get the butterfly from the opening, it was the way in which God carried the fluid from her body toward the wings so that they are ready to fly once freed from the cocoon.
Sometimes, the difficulty is exactly what we need in our lives. If God allowed us to cross the life without obstacles, will not have the power to bestow.

There will never flew ...

It has been postulated that suffereing and fear and loss are all animal emotions; that the soul perceives live as a gleeful adventure.  I don't know. I do think that pain makes us care. It drives us to our knees to seek a closer relationship with a creator that we'll never quite know.  It prods us to remember those we love, both here and gone.

I suppose we should be thankful, but that knowledge is little consolation when we are in the midst of that pain. There is, I think, nothing to do but to greive with those who greive, give ourselves that time and space to be a human and not a machine at a job or even in our family, and be OK with the grieving, knowing that it is as unavoidable as sun-rise, and that like the sun-set, it's will, eventually, abate.

 

When we all experience pain, a little courage helps

more (Lewis observes) than much knowledge, a little

human sympathy more than much courage, and the

least tincture of the love of God more than all.
- CS Lewis, The Problem of Pain

Nothing Ever Always

Sometimes I get really frustrated by the things I used to know, but somehow forgot.
For instance, I USED to know that, in a relational database, nothing is ever always true.
Huh?

Perhaps an example will be illuminating.

Indexes - we are told that they help reads and hurt writes.  I suppose that's true, on some level, because of the processing the RDBMS has to do in order to perform the actual operation of writing to the table, and updating the indexes.

However, I had a situation today wherein I found myself creating an index to DRAMATICALLY speed up a write operation.

Both for a delete where and an update where, adding the index cut the execution (in DB2, measured in timerons) by 60 - 80 %.  Wow. 

Honestly, I should have known this.  I've been doing this for a while. I get used to pat ideas and the looking at a problem in a very particular way, or on a small set of data.

Bottom line, in relational databases, nothing ever always.