A New Look

A New Start…

Quite a lot has changed since I last posted on this website. I had just left Oracle to join Google… A year and a half later I returned to Oracle. I had loads of fun at Google, but I’m glad I’ve been given the opportunity to return to Oracle and work on a database that I’ve spent my entire working life using and contributing to.

So now I’m back at Oracle and had some time to settle back in, I decided to improve a few things. One was my website dominicgiles.com. It had got a little tired and I struggled with the tool I used to create it. Somewhat annoyingly, it has corrupted the website’s source and that meant I could no longer make any changes. Not a big deal; I had been planning to look at other solutions. The corruption spurred me on, forcing me to look at alternatives. The old web site, even when I could update it, had a number of problems. It was built for viewing on a desktop and not a mobile device. Publishing content was also more complex than it needed to be as I had to convert content written in Markdown back into the format used the old tool. The rendering of example code, particularly XML, was problematic. So a change was needed but what?

I spent some time looking at tools that simplify the management and creation of static websites. I looked at WordPress and thought it was a massive overkill over what I needed. What I wanted was something that allowed me to work in Markdown and leveraged Git. After I had settled on those two criteria, the decision was simple. After some friendly nudging from my friend and colleague Jeff Smith I started looking at the static web site generation tool Jekyll. I’ve been pleasantly surprised with its simplicity and obvious mode of operation. At least to me. The move to Jekyll has resulted in a new website that makes it simpler for me to update and publish content in a fashion that I feel comfortable with.

You should be reading this blog on the new website. I’ll be pushing out some new content (and old updated content) in the coming days, including a couple of blogs I’ve been working on. I’ll try and keep as much of the old content available as possible but it’s likely that some of it is no longer relevant of just will be to hard to migrate. So stick with me as the transition takes place.

So that’s it. I’m back working for Oracle, and as the saying goes. “The more it changes, the more it stays the same.”

2023

New functionality for swingbench…

4 minute read

A small but significant set of changes Last weekend I updated swingbench to add a few features that I’ve had frequent requests for. One is the addition of da...

Swingbench 2.7 June 2023 Update

less than 1 minute read

A new build of Swingbench with a whole bunch of small changes mainly related to the benchmarks. Faster build time for the JSON benchmark when creating lar...

Size Makes A Difference

6 minute read

In my previous post “Going Big” I discussed the difference testing a data set of a representative size can make to the usefulness of a benchmark. Running a w...

Going Big

10 minute read

Swingbench makes it simple to generate a dataset that you can simulate transactions against. However one of the problems I commonly see is that the users of ...

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2022

Swingbench 2.7

1 minute read

Swingbench 2.7 So I finally found some time to get a new build of swingbench done. The big change is that swingbench now only supports JDK-17 and above. Now,...

A new build of DB Time Monitor

less than 1 minute read

Following quickly on the heels of the update to MonitorDB I’m releasing a new build of DBTimeMonitor. This is a simple update using the latest Oracle jdbc dr...

A new build of MonitorDB

less than 1 minute read

I’ve just updated MonitorDB. It’s never going to replace Grafana but if you need a quick solution to monitor a few values inside of the Oracle Database and y...

Making Colour work on the Command Line for Windows

less than 1 minute read

I’ll make a confession. I don’t own a Microsoft Windows Machine. I never have and probably never will. This means that I generally never get the oppertunity ...

A New Release of Swingbench

2 minute read

A New Release of Swingbench… Along with a new website, I’m rolling out a new build of Swingbench. This release is a little embarrassing for me, as it include...

A New Look

2 minute read

A New Start… Quite a lot has changed since I last posted on this website. I had just left Oracle to join Google… A year and a half later I returned to Oracle...

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