Wednesday, April 27, 2005
Two semi-related things to talk about this morning.
The first is a new policy for Burleson Consulting. [blockquote]We are under no obligation whatsoever to provide reproducible evidence or test-cases to beginners and it is our readers trust in our judgment and real-world experience that counts. Resist the temptation to fall-in to the “prove it” trap.[/blockquote]
I really don't know what to say other that this is a hugely different attitude than mine, now this is partly because I don't trust my own judgement enough to do stuff without proving it first - I used to and got burned. And partly because real-world experience teaches you that things change making previously good judgements poor and previous experience invalid.
I guess my summary would be, if you want to rely on someone who states on the web that they have lots of experience and excellent judgement then you know where to go. If you want to be sceptical about things, evaluate peoples credibility for yourself and so on - there are plenty of other places to go (its one of the things that my recommended sites have in common but there are plenty of others).
The second thing can be illustrated in Tom Kyte's blog. It isn't so much the mishap itself, but the fact that however much you have new and clever means of getting out of a hole - flashback query - a standby that is n hours old or whatever - you won't notice the problem until just after you've replicated it to all your standby sites and lost the quick recovery functionality
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The first is a new policy for Burleson Consulting. [blockquote]We are under no obligation whatsoever to provide reproducible evidence or test-cases to beginners and it is our readers trust in our judgment and real-world experience that counts. Resist the temptation to fall-in to the “prove it” trap.[/blockquote]
I really don't know what to say other that this is a hugely different attitude than mine, now this is partly because I don't trust my own judgement enough to do stuff without proving it first - I used to and got burned. And partly because real-world experience teaches you that things change making previously good judgements poor and previous experience invalid.
I guess my summary would be, if you want to rely on someone who states on the web that they have lots of experience and excellent judgement then you know where to go. If you want to be sceptical about things, evaluate peoples credibility for yourself and so on - there are plenty of other places to go (its one of the things that my recommended sites have in common but there are plenty of others).
The second thing can be illustrated in Tom Kyte's blog. It isn't so much the mishap itself, but the fact that however much you have new and clever means of getting out of a hole - flashback query - a standby that is n hours old or whatever - you won't notice the problem until just after you've replicated it to all your standby sites and lost the quick recovery functionality
1 Comments:
Niall,
Excellent post. I was reading the latest from Mr. Burleson this morning and shaking my head in amazement. Personally, I don't trust anyone who can't show me how they arrived at the conclusion they propose. I want to learn how to do this stuff for myself as well as find things out, and if you can't show me how can I learn? Which is why your blog, amongst other sites, is on my "visit every day" list. Thanks for taking the time to post!
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Excellent post. I was reading the latest from Mr. Burleson this morning and shaking my head in amazement. Personally, I don't trust anyone who can't show me how they arrived at the conclusion they propose. I want to learn how to do this stuff for myself as well as find things out, and if you can't show me how can I learn? Which is why your blog, amongst other sites, is on my "visit every day" list. Thanks for taking the time to post!
