• Oracle Session Statistic Watcher © 2013-
  A tool to watch all Oracle sessions for a given statistic.
  
• Old work
  • topio for Solaris, Windows, HP-UX, and Linux © 2002-2011
    UNIX top command sorts processes by CPU or memory usage, but not by I/O. My topio program fills the gap.
    
  • Windows oerr for Oracle © 2000-2009,2013
    Windows version of the well-known oerr program previously only available in UNIX
  • pstats for Windows © 2004
    Windows Task Manager process list cannot list processes on a remote computer. My pstats program makes up for this shortcoming.
  • HPL and HCPL © 1998-2008
    Helps you track books checked out of Houston Public Library and Harris County Public Library
  • ckweb © 2000-2004
    Checks web site availability, unique in that it allows you to easily extend its functionality to the limit of your understanding of HTTP protocol, as long as you know the Expect programming language
  • DOSCSR © 1996
    Enables use of mouse in DOS, written in assembly when most people were still using Windows3.1 or DOS
  • Script archive

• Miscellaneous Oracle Notes © 1999-
• Quick Tips on Linux HugePages © 2015-
  How to quickly setup Linux HugePages and check its usage. PDF version as published in IOUG's 2015 Tips & Best Practices Booklet.
Oracle Function Call List © 2015-
Enter an internal function to see the events it calls, or an event to see the functions calling it.
• Oracle Executables © 2002-
  List of executable programs under $ORACLE_HOME/bin directory with descriptions and comments.
• Managing Shared Database Environment © 2012
  Tips on managing a database that hosts data for many disparate applications. Slightly modified version published in IOUG's SELECT Journal. [Update 2013-07] Oracle 12c multitenancy has addressed many issues discussed in this article.
• Shared Pool Purging © 2012
  Various methods of purging objects from shared pool. Also published by All China Oracle User Group.
• Uncommon Sense About Common Objects © 2009
  Published in IOUG's SELECT Journal. Review of DBA_OBJECTS and other views, with significant expansion of what's already published.
• Parameter Dependency and the STATISTICS_LEVEL Parameter (PDF version) © 2008
  Published in IOUG's SELECT Journal. Dependency between initialization parameters, and statistics_level as an example.
• Oracle Viewed from OS © 2008
  Presentation given at M. D. Anderson Cancer Center UNIX Users Group and at Houston Oracle Users Group. Currently, OS'es are Linux and Solaris.
• Perfmon: performance monitoring tool © 2008-
  Process-, not system-, level performance monitoring is more useful in troubleshooting.
• Oracle X$ Tables © 2000-
  
• Old work
  • Oracle Regular Expressions © 2003,2006,2009
    How to use regular expressions before 10g.
  • Oracle Q&As © 2002,2003
    My answers to questions posted to comp.databases.oracle.server newsgroup, which I like to browse in spare time. If a message archived here differs from the one posted to the group, trust this one instead. Newer messages are not archived.
  • Oracle Idiosyncrasies © 2000-2009
    Some of Oracle's strange but generally harmless behaviors. Mostly short items. Long items are separate articles, such as
    • Big 32-bit SGA Without Relocating sgabeg
    • Disk Read Unit
    • Oracle Null
    • Oracle Misnomers
  • Oracle on Windows, strace.exe and Process Explorer © 2004
    Trying to understand the Windows system service calls made by oracle.exe.
  • Oracle Process: Tracing and /proc © 2001,2002
    Same thing, but on UNIX.
  • Delayed Logging Block Cleanout © 2002
    There's too much confusion about this Oracle 7.3 - 8.0.6 initialization parameter.
  • Oracle and Perl © 2001,2002
    Actually not limited to Perl, this article discusses two methodologies for a programming language to access the Oracle database.
  • How to Get Sequence Next or "Current" Value Without Side Effect? © 2001,2005
    Want to know the next value of a sequence but don't want to increment it?
  • How Oracle Stores Integers © 2000
    A number 123 is not stored as 123 in the datafile; instead it's c2 2 18. This article tells you how to interpret this part of your datafile dump and its practical implication.
  • Semantically Dependent Attributes © 2000
    A.k.a Arc Relationship. Discusses several strategies to implement this design.
  • Two Types of Oracle Deadlocks © 1999-2010
    Description of two types of Oracle deadlocks and how to resolve them.
  • First Normal Form Compliant Bad Design © 1999
    A verbose, possibly useless, pure academic talk about a common misconception of First Normal Form.
  • Which Count Is Faster? © 2000
    Which runs faster? Count(*), count(1), count(PK) or count(rowid)?

• Tracing a process in software troubleshooting: A Linux/UNIX tradition © Jun 2026 Also published on Medium
• My Web scraping projects: Book renewal notice, Dow Jones index alert, ...; Side projects may benefit others and yourself © May 2026
• Your computer is slow or hangs? Reduce memory usage!: Tips to improve efficiency at work © Mar 2026
• How to better manage emails © Mar 2026
• Almost misguided by AI: A simple MySQL question © Feb 2026
• Build a knowledge base at workplace © Dec 2025
• What is a deadlock? © Oct 2025
• Use AI to interpret Oracle SQL execution plan and runtime stats © Jun 2025
• Performance Monitor for MySQL Database © 2025 Correlates high CPU threads with MySQL sessions
• Does AI not have this basic intelligence? © 2025 What a simple Linux command tells us
• I wrote the topio program; it was fun and may have helped me find jobs © 2024 Also published on Medium
• Cron jobs: Best practice and troubleshooting © 2013- First published in IOUG Tips & Best Practices Booklet, 2013 ed.
• Old work
  • Multipath © 2013
    How to read multipath -l; script to check failed paths and alert
  • Running Process Environment © 2005,2006
    A general software troubleshooting tip.
  • Solaris adb and crash Command Examples © 2002-2004
    Command examples from other sources (plus a script to print adb macros that don't need symbols). Only through these examples will you learn to do Solaris system debugging. I have no plan to study mdb dcmds. Sorry.
  • Tips on Handling Log Files © 2002,2010
    A new way to get notification on errors in server log files; tips on handling large log files.
  • Some Perl Benchmark Results © 1999
    Do you know substr is much faster than split?...etc
  • "URL is Password" Security Strategy © 1999
    A fair review of this common Web security strategy.
  • HTML character entities 1-3680 © 1997,2003
    This character entity chart shows how your browser displays HTML character entities, i.e. &#some_number;.
  • OS notes

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