Economic Recession: This is what I think?

India/US: The economic term can be described in the reduction of a country's gross domestic product (GDP) for at least two or more consecutive quarters.The term rhyme very similar to depression.

I read somewhere, a simple explanation to show the difference between both the words.A recession is when your colleague loses his job without any reason.A depression is when you are removed from the job.A recession eventually results in a depression.

I have been reading and constantly following up the economy news and how different developed and developing governments are responding.Why is everyone keen on US stimulus packages? US is one of the richest and strongest economy in the world. Is this the reason why every eye is on U.S. Absolutly not, US is the biggest consumer of the world. About 80% of the developed and developing countires do trade with U.S.Toyota and Sony are best example to name.

Its not the sudden fall of WaMu or the DSP Merrill Lynch or Lehman Brothers that caused this turmoil.The common man never realized that recession began in Dec 2007.The U.S mortgage market has just contributed to the collapse. Was the stock market only depending on these few behemoths? Absolutly not. Neither did foreign workers in a country resulted this mess.(You must admit that foreign workers also pay tax and add growth same as a citizen)

Inflation is one important factor for recession. Less spending by U.S. consumers and companies reduce demand.As corporate houses look for ways to trim costs, the GDP decline.A common man who gets smaller percentage of services with certain amount.Therefore he/she will now spend less, budget more, saving money.

Predictors of recession are significant stock market drop and unemployment rate increases. The effects of recession is well known;the absense of business expansion.

Where is the money that was with fortune 500 companies a year back? Did someone stole entire money from the banks? I believe just like SDLC, life cycle there is also a cycle of money.It the chain breaks, it affects everyone. No one stole money from anyone.It is just that he/she feels insecure with economy. It the same sentiment that in a relationship. People loose faith in investment and the fear reflects in their expendicture portfolio.

Faces turn away to loans, they don't buy new apartments, construction business gets affected. If construction is down, gradually the demand for steel, aluminium, machineries fall.Employee doesn't get bonus or pay hike. Percentage of folks who were planning a vacation or to replace his/her car changes mind. Car sale gets affected.Flight companies see a fall in revenue. People who want to upgrade television to HD plasma, buy macbook will think twice.A teenager would hesitate to buy a new ipod for his girl friend for Christmas. Demand and Supply ratio differs with a big gap (Manufactured goods gets slumped).The companies who use software to maintain their huge databases, support activities reduces. Now,folks in IT sector will be affected. New application developments halts. A mere support activities continue.Thus the companies with decrease in sales demand bail-outs,perform layoffs in order to sustain.

Its a big challenge to bring back the flow.Various approach can be taken stimulus packages (TARP) to generate, tax cuts to ignite growth again.Economists say that the only advantages with recession that it helps to curb inflation and bring the economy to be disciplined.

Apart from the normal methods, I strongly believe that the emerging eco-friendly products,advancement in technologies, new inventions/innovations would surely add and keep the interests of consumers.

To conclude, Its a myth to believe in the magic wand of new year or new president and remain idle. I guess each and every human being are equally responsible and should stand together to overcome this depression.

Working Under Pressure

Pittsburgh,PA: These words are hated by most people. I on the otherhand love to. I had been working on a recent project which is on a new technology OBIEE. The acronym of the word itself is long enough to be scary. The project started with a prototype in Oct-Nov 2007. I attended couple of presentations from Oracle, but I didnt comprehend half of the stuffs.

Prototype was approved and the project is approved targeting Go-Live in Oct 2008. It started slow as Application team had lot more work on design of DW. Chuck had already discussed architecture for organization with Oracle. Still there was some changes between project methodology from ESA to tollgates and all.

Status meeting was set for every Thursday. I had to began with HW order. I had to run between teams to understand that. Dan helped me a lot. He created a chart with costs and maintenance of servers. Project was approved but the date of Go-Live is shortened to July 31.

I was scared seeing the long project plan prepared by Kelly. I was the only person from GID attending the meeting. I noted down the requirements for the week and tried to make it done. Application team had some tasks that required our completion and it created some confusion between GID and Kelly's team on dates. The main constraint we had was resource. UX team was very thin then. Upon discussion, everything sorted out between two different sides of the coin.We reached upon agreement on dates when GID can deliver to Kelly's team.

We made the foundation on tollgate meeting. Dan and I went to downtown for this call. I enjoyed working with Dan and his team.Whenever I need any help, I can easily approach him. He even worked at 11 PM on Saturday to complete my requirements. A word of thanks isn't suffice for this cool person.

There were delay in many areas, Placing HW order, Server staging, Oracle binary dependency, Network IPs, and organization process.Meanwhile the project was getting interesting. I was learning new stuffs. Met couple of new folks Joan, Gulzar, Kevin and strengthened old ties with Arpita and Kelly. Joan and I started interacting daily. She is one awesome both at work and in person. It started slow with Gulzar as he was at offshore.Once he is here in Pittsburgh, it was just a ping away.

The project was getting aggressive but shaping good. I had another responsibility of 10g OAPS upgrade. I led the initial 2-3 clones and setup. There comes a warning alarm - an escalation. Nidrita made Manish the lead and it was good for me.I was glad that now I can learn more of OBIEE and DW.

Oracle folks came for QA server setup. They recommended change in architecture by saying now Oracle recommends this way in 2008 and we were following old recommendation. It also created confusion about BI clustering.

Joan kept everyday morning issues meeting at 10 AM. She IMs me if I need to join. I was feeling full freedom and like a family. I got memorized the phone no# of Joan and Gulzar by the no# of times we called each other. Joan used to remind me about the list of things I need to do and I would never forget then. I never interacted much with Kelly until, I saw a friendly message about a password -googlybear. Gulzar once asked me if Joan is my friend or client. Its funny but true that Joan and me became good friends. She talks so well and make me feel better while she herself dedicate like 12 hrs a day. Kelly with her kids works so hard. I was amazed by determination and management of project. She really managed the project plan and I just keep the link for ASAT. I sometimes miss replying to follow-up email.

A lot of hurdles were waiting, Prod Server build, Code review,FGA,Performance issues. Oracle folks were here for Performance, he was good with DW But not with soo many tasks in less amount of time. I really appreciate patience, support and effort from Kelly, Joan, Gulzar, Kevin and Arpita. Chowdary facilitated the project with his thoughts on performance issues. Vijay did support from offshore. Sunil relieved us with server side performance and IP issues. Arun contributed with monitoring scripts at the right time. I always disturb him with even small stuffs. With so much tight schedule, this guy helped me.

The one finale issue we had was space management of tablespaces. The correct space management parameter hasn't been set. It was my mistake. DW team couldn't proceed with data load. I was expecting a big escalation from Kelly and her team. I was surprised, She patiently supported to make things go smoother. Support folks - Peter and Priyanka assisted us with migration and space management issues. Jamie, Nidrita backed me whenever I needed.

Joan and Gulzar were my phone's top callers in last 3 weeks of Go-Live. I lost my mind sometimes. I owe Joan for everything. Finally we were in good shape by July 15. Now the funniest part, We all were set and the Go-Live communication was delayed by almost 10 days. Its first time in my career that Project Go-live is delayed for sending out message. Its not a joke ..

Now the project has calm down and I just realized that I did m things more efficiently when I work under pressure. It adds stress but I enjoyed it. I also had time to know teammates professionally and personally. Thanks to all for the beautiful time I had.

Oracle RDBMS: Pinning of Database Objects

This is one way to improve performance for a program that uses large packages. To understand the concept, Lets ask ourselves why pin is used in our daily life? To have a small note of important points like phone numbers or syntaxes to be recollected often or to get noticed soon. The same applies here in database. The process of placing the database packages in the Shared Global Area (SGA) is called Pinning.

SGA consists of shared pool,buffer cache, large pool, java pool, log buffer, streams pool etc. We are concerned only about shared pool now. In 10g, we can use sga_target init parameter instead of specifying size of each and every SGA components in the init.ora. This parameter will set automatic shared pool management. shared pool works on continuous memory chunks called granules.Shared pool works on LRU algorithm.

Using multiple large PL/SQL objects in the database can be hazardous job. The database has to search for free space for the object. If it cannot get enough contiguous space, it will free many small objects to satisfy the request. To search for small objects causes high CPU resources. Because of this we pin the large objects to shared pool during start up.Objects are 'kept' in the shared pool using the dbms_shared_pool package that is defined in the dbmspool.sql file.

Syntax:

execute dbms_shared_pool.keep('owner.object');

To view a list of all objects that are kept in the shared pool, one can query the v$db_object_cache :

select owner,name,type,sharable_mem from v$db_object_cache where kept='YES';

In Oracle Applications :

The $AD_TOP/sql/ADXGNPIN.sql script is provided to pin the packages in Oracle Applications. This script pins all Oracle Applications objects, which is generally not completely necessary or advisable.

This method is very useful in data warehousing environment, where we can pin the most used objects with the memory.

Oracle RDBMS: Locks, Latches

Performance is a pure dictionary word. This word has a great value in today's world.The word is added to any stuff you see around. It has different units with various objects. Well, I am concerned about computers.A computerized organization completes with hardware,software and network. There are hundreds of vendors in the market competing each other.

Let me ask you a question, What is Data and What is information? In simple words, Data is a collection of facts from which conclusions may be drawn. Information is processed data. We make many software to tackle the data and to extract information. Database is the concept of storing data.There are many vendors with various products; Oracle is the most popular one, IBM DB2, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, MySQL.Well I work in Oracle so I would like to talk about it.

How much does performance affect with database?
We require proper and complete information when we need. We don't want to loose a customer or business by late data reports. Well let me begin with some terms:

Locks - This is a mechanism to regulate concurrent access to a shared resource, at the same time providing data integrity and consistency.It is not necessary unless multiple users tries to change same line of data.

Blocking - As the literal meaning refers to, when a session holds a lock on a resource that another session is requesting. The session will be kind of hang state until lock on the resource is released. DMLs that can block are INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, MERGE and SELECT FOR UPDATE.

Deadlocks - It is like two sessions, each of them holding a resource that other wants.

Types of Locks:
1. DML Locks
2. DDL Locks
3. Internal locks and latches

TX (Transaction Locks) : When a transaction initiates its first change and is held until the change performs a COMMIT or ROLLBACK. The session requesting the lock will be queued up waiting for that transaction to complete.

TM (DML Enqueue locks): This ensure the structure of the able remains the while modification os its contents occurs. we get as many TM locks as the objects are modified.But the total number of TM locks allowed in system is configurable.

DDL Locks - These are automactic events on objects during a DDL operation, to prevent chanes by any other sessions.The different types of DDL locks are Exclusive DDL locks, Share DDL locks, and Breakable parse locks.

Data Dictionary Views:
1. v$lock
2. v$transaction
3. v$session
4. dba_ddl_locks

v$lock has the following common modes:
0 - None
2 - Row shared (DML locks)
4 - For TX locks
6 - Exclusive for row level

If there are enqueue, you can see from
select * from v$lock where request > 0;

To view the current status of current system, query v$lock, v$session, v$latchholder, v$open_cursor and v$session_wait.

Latches - These are locks degined to hold resources for extremely short period of time.Latches are lightweight serialization devices used to coordinate multiuser access to shared data structures,objects and files. Latches are used to protect certain memory structures like db block buffer cache,library cache in shared pool.

I hope we have a notion of all these oracle terms. Lets discuss more in next posts. Performance analysis of today is big zero without wait interfaces. lets rush to modern terminologies..

DCH Story

Trichy,In : It was my fifth sem, when one of the most youthful films from Bollywood hit the screen.True, am talking about Farhan Akthar's debut "Dil Chahta Hai". A story of three friends but have a great variety and reality in the movie.

Our sem had come to an end.All the hostelers had carried bag full of books n references home for the study holls. I, Jithu and Sandeep didnt had any notes. Dunno even know where to start for the "Compiler Design" "and the subject made by crazy psychos "Digital Signal Processing"(DSP). Sandeep will still manage some way.Being a lazy bum it was worse for me. I therefore decided to go home a week and return early to hostel to study. I really had fun and bugged every others who are from Kochi.. specially Alson. For me it was like vacation.. movies, outings, junk food. For the name sake every morning I opened a book n by end of the day, the fan would have turned the pages to next.

I rang my guru Devi Sujatha to help me out with DSP. Devi is a sweet person, who always had a mind to help. let me give a better intro of my pal Devi. After the first year, the real IT class was formed. Gals all studious and guys the reciprocal. I started talking to her, seeking her lab observation. Electronics dept. was the worst in the entire coll. With rusted meters, circuit diagrams and CROs, I never got any output. I copied Devi's output and get my record signed. Soon she became my best friend. Whenever we were given assignments, I would ask her to complete it as soon as possible. She made it sure that she complete her work and hand it over to me atleast 2 days before so that I can do mine comfortably.She said that she would come to coll and teach me DSP.

I returned back to college and after 10 days Jithu and Sandeep came to know that I had reached hostel. I had utilised all the days once I was back.Jithu, Sandeep joined back in the hostel. we had gained confidence that we will clear the papers.We learned 4 units from all subjects except DSP and Compiler Design.

It was one friday evening, we discussed about the characters of DCH. I had already seen the movie. Jithu was named Aamir(AKASH) of DCH who dont believe in love or sentiments.He is a kinda rebel. Whatever we said good or bad, he would oppose. Sandeep was like Akshaye Khanna, who liked to make friendship with older females. Sandeep became SIDH. Finally all have to turn to me, and ping me as SAM. We 3 decided to go for the second show. Jithu suggested he wanted to ask Arun L Menon,(a MCA guy who stayed very near to my house at Kochi) if he could join us. Jithu assured that he will be back in 10 minutes with Arun's Yes or No.

Myself and Sandeep waited for 1 hour or more for Jithu to return. It seems Jithu's ten minutes wasn't 10x60 secs.Sandeep decided, to start for DCH. I enjoyed the movie again, so did Sandeep. No news of our dear Jithu. Movie got over and we two were waiting for bus at central by 12:30 AM. We saw two familiar faces walking towards us. There comes Mr. Jithu and Arun. Jithu who went to invite Arun for DCH had gone for some english movie.

Sandeep and myself teased Jithu like anything about his 10 minutes excuse. It became a talk among all of us. Now we three are in different parts of the world, any time DCH is screened on television, we have a memorble stuff to laugh at.