So I've given up on the hope that I could stick with Red Hat 4 AS on my notebook. No matter how many tweaks I make I can't get away from the fact that I need a kernel (and associated infrastructure) to make best use of the technologies like ACPI and my nice hi-res screen. I've stuck it out as long as I can... I've tried to keep my notebook patched up to latest updates so as to provide as close as possible a working environment used by the customers I'm asked to help out with. But it makes no sense. My notebook is clearly not a server, never will be. It has a single processor, uses a SATA drive only has 2GB of memory and no 64 bit capabilities. So on the odd ocasion I've tried to debug a complicated problem that a customer has encountered I've failed. No surprises, I really need a proper disk array, a lot more memory and at least a dual core CPU. So I've made the decision to upgrade to a bleeding edge distro either Fedora core 5 or Ubuntu with a 2.6.16 kernel (OCFS as part of the kernel build). I'll use VMware to provide a RHEL 4/SLES 9 environment....

If Im honest the primary reason Im even considering this is notebook suspend/hibernate. I used to love this functionality in my old notebook (APM). I don't think I rebooted it in about 6 months on one occasion, no need close the lid it hibernated, opened it up it resumed, Oracle was up for most of this 6 month stint (in a suspended form). I've feel that the introduction of ACPI has set back the Linux notebook world a long way... Not thats it not an improvment, its just Linux has struggled to provide a meaningful out of the box experience... Its getting there, every kernel release moves it forward but its still away to go. Im not expecting an Apple like experience... just something close.

You should now be able to leave comments in my blog... be nice.

SQL Developer has gone production. Congratulations to the entire development team. I've been using it every day now and it feels solid and performs well and I continue to find out new tricks and features each day. If you've not given it ago, try it...

Further fixes for connection pooling and new support for the order entry schema to be build without partitioning.

I've just posted swingbench 2.3 to the downloads page. This build still needs some work but it has some genuinely useful features.

These include

• Update to frontend of "minibench"


• New simple "Stress Test" benchmark for both Oracle and TimesTen


• TimesTen support


• User defineable length of benchmark run


• Better statistics in reports output


• Benchmark comparison tool


• Improved connection pooling and fAN support (via swingconfig file only)


• Minor changes to swingconfig.xml


• Build numbers for each release


• User selectable timings i.e. measurements in seconds, centiseconds, millseconds, microseconds etc.

The new runtime functionality and bmcompare utility allow for large complex benchmark runs and comparisons between individual runs. The new minibench UI provides a richer experience for those wishing to run the swingbench environment in graphical mode but without the overhead of the full blown interface.

Documentation (online and pdf) to follow shortly.