Joys and Nightmares of a Tech Editor

Obviously, there was a lot of interesting things I did during all of those years since I more or less abandoned this blog. And filling in all holes would be more or less useless (since time had definitely changed). But there are some exceptions (as usual :-) ) - and one of those exceptions is that in 2019 I was pulled back to the book-publishing process! I am still to lazy to write something on my own (although, I have a couple of good drafts, so, well, "never say never") - but I don't mind looking over somebody's shoulder, especially if I care about the topic.

Frankly speaking, over the years I had mixed experiences - people are different, and not all authors take comments/critique in a friendly manner. But this time I lucked out - up to the point that I feel proud that I participated in the first book by Joh Heller (I bet, you may recognize this name from various extremely useful posts on StackOverflow)

But why I decided to write a post about my experience... Because working as a tech editor in Oracle technology space is a very tricky job, and lessons that I learned may be useful to other people. Let's do bullet points (prepping up for conferences!):

1. Anybody who've spent at least some time with Oracle tech stack knows that the most common answer on any question - "It depends!" I.e. there are different answers that could be valid within specific ranges of applicability. So, one of the main tasks for the tech editor is to keep the author from providing "universal" answers - only answers+conditions. 

2. Tech editor must always remember that it is not his book! The author has full rights to have his/her own opinion/style/favorites. As long as they are not factually incorrect, it is OK to not agree with the author - your role is to keep the author honest in front of the audience. I.e. you can point that something doesn't add up (or in some cases there are other approaches), but whether to follow this route - not your choice!

3. Even the best authors are sometimes very sensitive. So, treat them the same way you would talk to your teenagers :) - no direct orders, no harsh comments! Only suggestions, only very polite hints that this-and-that could be better. 

4. As you all know, teenagers can be VERY irritating from time to time - in that case you speak directly with the publisher (luckily, in this project I didn't have to use that "big hammer", but I had different experience too). Tech editors are hired by the publishing house, not by the author - so, your role is to be a safety check against bad quality books with technical errors.

Anyways, that was definitely fun - and here is a link on the current edition (yes, it is a hint :) ) 

Jon Heller, Pro Oracle SQL Development: Best Practices for Writing Advanced Queries

Return of a blogger (plus a bit of ORA-7445 [LpxMemFree()+200] )

Considering that "conference life" is picking up (two in-person events in June!), it is time to start writing something meaningful (yes, I am back to blogging after years of ignorance)! 

To cover event previews I need a bit more prep time, while today I would like to share a small story (narrow, but very practical!)

At Dulcian we have a couple of systems still on Oracle 11g (yeah, I understand that it is outdated). And today one of my support people started to complain about ORA-07445. To be precise - ORA-7445  [LpxMemFree()+200]. And you know how much fun is to sort out those errors, especially considering my gut feeling ("I bet, XMLtype is misbehaving!")

Obviously, first two steps were obvious: Google and MOS. 

Oook... Google gave me a direct hit - and I indeed was right, it was XML parsing issue - Doc ID 2220757.1 

And in case you don't have MOS access - here is a code snippet to replicate (it should blow up with "end of communication channel" plus corresponding trace file):

 declare
  lv_text varchar2(6000);
  lv_temp_xml xmltype;
  lv_len number := 0;
begin
  lv_text := '<LPCNotes Subject="Comments for LPC " Text="'
  || to_char(sysdate, 'dd-Mon-yy hh24:mi')
  || ' '
  ||lpad('A',4033,'A')
  || '" />';
  lv_len := length(lv_text);
  dbms_output.put_line('Length of the 3rd run is '||lv_len);
  lv_temp_xml := sys.xmltype(lv_text);
 end;

The proposed solution was to enable some kind of "old parser" - you can do it on either session of system level. Considering that everything else in our system worked fine, I added it via Dynamic SQL just before the problematic code, so it will be less overall system impact:

 declare
  lv_text varchar2(6000);
  lv_temp_xml xmltype;
  lv_len number := 0;
begin
  execute immediate 'alter session set events ''31156 trace name context forever, level 1024''';
  lv_text := '<LPCNotes Subject="Comments for LPC " Text="'
  || to_char(sysdate, 'dd-Mon-yy hh24:mi')
  || ' '
  ||lpad('A',4033,'A')
  || '" />';
  lv_len := length(lv_text);
  dbms_output.put_line('Length of the 3rd run is '||lv_len);
  lv_temp_xml := sys.xmltype(lv_text);
 end;

And the whole problem was gone! After a bit more digging I found that this kind of approach could help with a number of other similar ORA-07445 errors if you still on 11.2.0.4 (here is a doc from MOS: Bug 14822091)

Hope, it helps!

P.s. Footprint: in the doc they use hexadecimal level 0x400, but I prefer to use decimals (1024) for readability. What is funny, in the bug description whoever wrote it also used decimal - so, don't worry, it is the same stuff written differently.

RMOUG-2021 Day#4

My today's presentation - "Managing Unstructured Data: Lobs in the World of JSON"
https://www.slideshare.net/MishaRosenblum/managing-unstructured-data-lobs-in-the-world-of-json

RMOUG-2021 Day #2

 If anybody needs - here is my most recent presentation: "Hidden Gems of Performance Tuning":

https://www.slideshare.net/MishaRosenblum/hidden-gems-of-performance-tuning-hierarchical-profiler-and-dml-trigger-optimization

P.s. It was a pleasure to get back to RMOUG  - even virtually!

Collaborate'17: Slides are available

For some reasons, slides from one of my presentations are not available via the conference agenda tool. No problem, here is a direct link:
https://www.slideshare.net/MishaRosenblum/developers-approach-to-code-management

More thoughts/comments about the conference are coming! To be continued...

Collaborate'16: Slides are available

First, of all, I would like to thank everybody who came to my presentations on Collab'16! It was a pleasure talking FOR you :-) A lot of nice questions/comments/follow-ups.

Second, some SlideShare uploads (as promised):
- my talk about user-defined functions - that's where I was talking a lot about execution counts and the impact of Cost-Based Optimizer on them:
http://www.slideshare.net/MishaRosenblum/plsql-userdefined-functions-in-the-read-world

- updated version of my "Printing without Printers" talk. As usual, I was reminded that "the best live demo is dead demo". Now you've got everything covered explicitly:
http://www.slideshare.net/MishaRosenblum/printing-without-printers

Collaborate'15 A New View of Database Views

Thanks to everybody who visited my presentation! Here is a link to view and/or download the slide set: http://www.slideshare.net/MishaRosenblum/2015-458-rosenblumpptfinal

Feel free to ask questions!