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Besides the two breathtaking episodes on TSMC and Dr. Morris Chang , I am just 10 minutes into  The Art of Selling Enterprise Software (with ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott) and then this quote blows my mind so much I had to pause listening to write it down: I always tell people in sales, and I said it then, performance is the price of freedom. I never wanted to sit in internal meetings and have a boss tell me what to do or how to do it. What I would just tell them is, I’ll be number one in the country or number one in the world. Just let me run. I'll just add that this should not be the case for Sales only. (I think I've found another favorite  podcast  😅 , and I got the t-shirt )

Going beyond the normal application availability check One interesting use of the  OpenNMS JDBC poller is for extracting data from the Oracle administrative database tables, for example tracking tablespace quota usage to detect quota exhaustion, sudden usage peaks and graph usage over time. Graph of quota usage for user [redacted] on tablespace DAT. Notice the cleaning operation running at 3.30 AM Tablespace quotas is a feature present in the Oracle database that allows the DBA to set a limit on the amount of storage that any given user can consume on a specific tablespace. This allows the DBA to share tablespaces across users yet still be able to policy users into predefined usage boundaries. When a user consumes all its quota it can no longer store data, but it can delete it, thus allowing self-recovery.

If you, like me, would like to play around with Oracle Enterprise Linux or whatever it's called these days it is most likely you'll end up installing it on some flavor of VmWare. I tried Esxi 4.1, and installation is smooth (I chose RHEL 6 as Guest OS type because Oracle Linux was not available). Not so much for the Vmware Tools install which quite blankly stated that the kernel headers were not valid, whatever kernel directory I threw at it. Then it hit me that Oracle is using a special kernel which is buzzworldy named UEK (Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel). I then edited grub.conf and reverted to a normal kernel (normally the second item), rebooted and installation of Vmware tools finally succeeded. Next question is: should I bother about NOT using Oracle's UEK? The answer is generally no (in my case I'm just running a Zope App), unless you are using the VM for running a production database (and in that case you shouldn't be running it on vmware in the firs...