So I'm putting in some time in a neat little company. And I'm definitely enjoying the professional company, and even better, I get some family time. Both in and out of the office. I gave them a good rate, they give me interesting projects that don't tie me down.

I had a bunch of requests in to the Oracle DBA and the Unix Admin. I asked for my own private tablespaces. That was the email at 3:30. I figure they'd be too busy and/or security minded to just grant me my request, and I'd have to play DBA on my own, setup my own Oracle instance, since I also needed to play with init parameters.

And I imagined the fight I'd have with the various admins to get this level of access. It was going to be painful, but I needed to do my job, and my job means performance tuning a particular application on Oracle 1st, and then test on other databases in case something was as good as Oracle for this particular app. No reason to chew up Oracle licenses. I'm not an Oracle DBA, I'm just good at playing one, so I have no Oracle preference.

On the other hand, every time a non-Oracle database is used in an Oracle shop an Oracle admin loses his wings. And ponies cry. And Larry Ellison can't afford missiles for his Mig jet. So Oracle admins are not very happy having to split their mind-share between Oracle (the true ultimate database, at least to them), and whatever piddling other database we might want to try.

Not that I'm saying THIS admin has that attitude, I've just encountered it in the past. So I was prepping for the battle (and it would be a very nice warm fuzzy battle). Really. I've gotten much gentler over the years. And these are good people.

At 5:30 I get a call from the boss. I return it at 8:30. Oracle admin just gave notice. Will be here for the next 2 weeks. New admin won't be chosen for at least that long.

So I gotta mind meld, take ownership, understand current admin tasks. Ok, that means I need a brush up, I last adminned for real about 10 years ago, I was mostly apps and tuning after that. Anybody got a good link for Oracle Enterprise 10.x education. Not seminars, I mean a list of good SQL scripts, articles, discussions, etc. I seem to remember a couple of very good ones out of all the other crap, but now I'm not sure which.

Beside the admin tasks, there are Oracle XML utilities that I believe were being used to import some data. This is a new development task that I might be picking up, based on a project in process. Does anyone have any good pointers for using the Oracle XML tools? All that stuff showed up after me, and any XML work I did was using Perl. I'm not here to reinvent the wheel if they have something that works, but I haven't seen it work yet. I'll know in a day or 2.

Oh, and something tells me I'll have all the access I need to accomplish my project the same time. Odd how these things work out for me.

And Greg: Thank you very much for your time today.