Today I want to plug my (current) favorite email client. If you’re looking
for an alternative to Outlook for POP3 or IMAP4 email, you could do much worse
than The Bat!,
which I’ve been using for several years now. The Bat! is fast, intuitive,
multi-threaded, includes its own html viewer, handles any number of email accounts,
and, most importantly of all, it doesn’t execute your email.

Last week I spent time with my 70+ year-old aunt, helping her get set up with
The Bat!. She’d been using Outlook Express and had been hit with some
sort of worm or virus that spread by email. The bad payload arrived, Outlook
happily executed it, and next thing you know my poor aunt was faced with the
aggravating task of wiping her hard-drive, reinstalling Windows, and, well you
probably know the routine. Actually, I think it was a cousin who got stuck with
the reinstall job. It fell to me to get her email up and running again. To prevent
a recurrance of the whole affair, I convinced my aunt to buy a copy of The
Bat!.

In all the many years that I’ve been using The Bat!, and before that
the Agent Newsreader/Mail
client, I’ve never been troubled by malicious email. From at least as early
as 1997, and onwards, I’ve never had been adversely affected by an email I’ve
read using The Bat! or Agent. I regularly receive suspicious-looking
email, usually html email, that I believe would be disasterous if opened in
Outlook, but because I don’t use Outlook, such email passes harmlessly through
my inbox and into my trash folder. I’ve seen email virus alerts come and go,
watched the consternation of corporate email administrators as they frantically
sent out emails to warn users not to even read other emails, and I’ve always
been able to blissfully ignore the storms.

A year and a half ago, my wife’s computer got hit with what we now refer to
in our family as the funchina email. This was a malicious email that
set Internet Explorer’s home page to funchina.com, opened up a number
of porn sites, put some sort of sexual reference into the Internet Explorer
title bar, and I’m not sure what all else it did. Even deleting the email was
a bit of a problem, because every time she clicked on it to delete it, Outlook
would begin opening web pages. In the end, the only way I could get rid of all
traces of that email was to reformat my wife’s disk, reinstall Windows, and
then reinstall all her applications. I gave her my old copy of the Agent Newsreader/Mail
client, and she’s not had a lick of trouble since.

Could it be that one of the best ways to avoid attacksy by malicious software
is to simply use any email client other than Outlook? I believe that’s the case.
My wife and I run Norton Antivirus on all our PCs. In a Windows environment,
antivirus software seems to be one of the keys to maintain secure and stable
systems. However, equally as important, in my opinion, is our decision to use
non-Outlook solutions for all our email needs. Did I say "if you’re looking
for an alternative to Outlook" earlier? There’s no "if" about
it. My aunt’s and my wife’s experiences speak for themselves. You should be
looking.

After closing Thursday with a tease about a wrap-up, I felt I should do so, even after reading a great history and overview of the conference by David C. Kreines here. David gave a great overview and did comment on some of the things I was planning on mentioning, so be sure and read his weblog to get the whole picture.

In the Brownies With The Board, I think there were more people than I had seen before. That was partly due to the fact that the line was shorter than the lunch line, although some of us didn’t notice that there were lunches in there till we went in. Another factor was that the time was changed so that it didn’t conflict with the last technical session. Some of the information they provided was the fact that there was a large number of IOUG Live! rookies that presented this year. They reminded people that the session evaluations are very important since they help the conference committee determine which speakers are selected in future years.

I always like this session at there is an open mike question period that lets the members ask the Board questions about what’s on their mind. One question on the mind of many was the lack of a CD with the conference papers and presentations. The Board mentioned that that was not done for several reassons including the lead times required and that all the papers and presentations are available on the Live! 2003 web site. A suggestion from the audience was made that there should be a way to download everything at once instead of one paper at a time. This was meet with a strong showing of support judging from the audience applause. The Board said they were looking into options. I know that I have used past CD’s to research problems and they have been very helpful. One other topic was certification exams and the possibility of being able to take them at future conferences. The Board said they have had discussions on that subject but so far Oracle has not been willing.

There was also discussion about local user groups and the support that the IOUG gives them though the GAP (Grassroots Alliance Partner) program. This support includes a grant program and speakers bureau. There have been 6 new local groups that have started since Live! 2002. Getting involved with a local user group is a great way to acquire some of the learning that is needed to continue to grow your career with Oracle.

In the Oracles of Oracle session, there were (as usual) several Top 10 lists. I’ll spare you the details, but suffice it to say that they were probably funnier to the people at the conference. “That’s no dolphin, it’s a catfish” will mean more to anyone who’s seen the Disney Dolphin Hotel logo but was one of the top 10 things overheard at Live! 2003.

The oracles themselves were cetainly challenged on everything from platform selection to career advice, from PL/SQL to 9i RAC. My favorite question, which I think should be mandatory for all future Oracles to answer, was “What is your biggest hope for Oracle?”

- Get rid of destructive patches.

- Improve installation for 9iAS.

- Default Index Tablespace.

- Speed up Portal.

- More maturity in the Warehouse Builder tool.

The range of topics and questions in this session was, I think, fairly reflective of the variety of sessions available at the conference itself. The fact that the members of this panel could identify things they would like to see improved, is a good sign that they are paying close attention to the technology and using it in ways that stretch it further and find limits.

I’ll wrap it up here. It has been fun keeping you in the loop and getting your feedback. I hope you have enjoyed reading my daily updates. I also hope you will let me know what you thought about them at s_andert@msn.com.

Awhile back I wrote about my
experience installing OpenOffice.org for my family, pointing out that it’s just
the right introduction to open source for many people. I said then that OpenOffice.org
saved my day, because it gave me an office suite I could freely install for
my children. This week OpenOffice.org saved my day again, by recovering the contents
of a corrupt, but very critical, Microsoft Word file.

It was Wednesday morning, 30 April. I was several pages into editing a chapter
written in Microsoft Word when things took a bad turn. Word got very sluggish,
and then "locked up". Windows Task Manager showed winword.exe
monopolizing 99% of my CPU. The CPU (on my Thinkpad)
got hot enough that the fan kicked in. Finally, Word died of some fatal error,
dutifully reported the error to home base in Redmond, restarted itself, and
"recovered" my file. Except Word didn’t recover my file, not really.
The problem began to repeat itself the moment I began typing again. I suspected
some sort of internal corruption with my document file.

After several of Word’s error, restart, recover cycles my heart began to sink.
I was not keen to lose the file with all the edits I’d made so far. I went to
Microsoft’s web site and spent about 45 minutes downloading and installing all
the available Microsoft Word updates, but to no avail. I tried saving to a new
filename, but the problem persisted. I created a new, blank, Word file, and
copied the chapter text from the problem file to the new file, but the corruption
was copied too. I opened and saved the file using Word 2000, which I believe
to be more stable than Word XP, but still the problem lived on.

Finally I got to thinking that perhaps Word was just too darn good at copying
it’s own files, and that I needed to pass my file through something other than
Word in order to filter out the corruption. Opening the problem file in OpenOffice.org,
I saw that the file contents looked intact, so I saved the file as an OpenOffice.org,
sxw file. Then I opened that sxw file using OpenOffice.org, and saved
the file again, this time as a Word file. With a bit of trepidation, I then
opened the new Word file using Word and began typing. Everything worked! All
my previous edits were intact. All the text was intact, including revision marks
and embedded comments. The corruption was gone. Happy, and very relieved, I
went to lunch.

I know that OpenOffice.org is not perfect—it has its own problems—but
I find it very ironic that Word couldn’t fix it’s own file, that the only way
I could find to save my Microsoft Word document was to filter it through a competing
office suite, and an open source office suite at that. And this despite the
fact that Microsoft has apparently gone to great lengths to add document recovery
features to Word. My kudos to the OpenOffice.org team for developing a product
robust enough to save my day, again.

Speaking of OpenOffice.org, I’ve been editing three books for which all the writing
and editing has been done using OpenOffice.org The first of these books, C++
In A Nutshell by Ray Lischner,
just went to print Tuesday this week. The other two OpenOffice.org-produced titles,
which are moving through the production process now, are Essential
CVS by Jennifer Vesperman, and UML Pocket Reference by Dan Pilone.

I started my morning with Kent Hinckley’s session on DBMS_STATS. I learned that the ANALYZE command has been deprecated as of version 9i, but still must be used in order to LIST CHAINED ROWS. Hopefully, someone at Oracle will add the LIST CHAINED ROWS functionality in the DBMS_STATS package before they eliminate ANALYZE completely. I also found out about the option to use block sampling instead of row sampling which Kent said provides the same results in most cases and reduces the I/O activity. This is definitly a tip I will take back to work next week.

Schemata or schemas, which is the “proper English” plural of schema? Well, I guess it depends on where you’re from. Barry Johnson had a good session about security, with a strong focus on the security at the schema level. He talked about people who are using resource manager and leaving key elements of the profile at very unsafe values. Barry also discussed the responsibility if you use public database links and public synonyms together. He covered many other areas that are very important for anyone charged with security and if you are a dba, you should be aware of these issues.

Brian Hengen gave his presentation on Online Reorganizations in 9i. He discussed some of the reasons that reorganizations are necessary, mainly to clean-up chained rows, rebuild indexes and reduce excess extents.

The last educational session that I attended was Steve Lemme’s session on fragmentation. He discussed that there are options for many types of maintenance including table and index rebuilds. Frequently, the options are to pay now in preventative, scheduled maintenance or pay later in downtime and unscheduled maintenance. He referred to the concept of PONI (Penalty Of No Investment) and that there are costs of doing nothing, whether by planning or ignorance.

The sadness of saying goodbye takes some of the fun out of the last sessions. There is a lot of talk among attendees regarding what their favorite session was and wondering if the economy will be enough better next year so that many of us will get the chance to go to Canada for the next conference.

I will be posting a wrap-up of the conference after I return home and have had a chance to summarize my thoughts and notes on the two sessions that I have not yet posted, the annual Brownies with the Board and the Oracle of Oracles session.

Till then…

Any favorite sessions?