February 23, 2009 marks the 2nd anniversary of the Structured Data blog. Looking back, I guess I forgot to have a first anniversary, but oh well, I guess I’ll celebrate twice as much this year to make up for it. The past two years have been fun and I’ve enjoyed sharing my experiences and interacting with the readers of this blog. I do wish I had a bit more time to commit to writing but I guess it is what it is. Being a bit of a perfectionist, I’d rather focus on quality than quantity. The past year has been a fun, but busy one, especially with the launch of Oracle Exadata and the HP Oracle Database Machine. I think the rest of 2009 will continue to be a busy and exciting one and I hope to have several more Exadata posts.

The Past Year

Looking back over the past year the top visited blog posts have been:

I’m glad to see the first two of those have been frequently visited because I think they cover topics that are extremely helpful in dealing with the root causes of bad execution plans, a problem that many DBAs face. Contrary to what some “experts” would like to have you believe, there are no silver bullets or magic involved with query plan tuning. It all comes down to understanding how things work and I hope that those posts give you insight into exactly that.

I’ve been meaning to circle back and expand more on #3 ever since I read this comment from Tom Kyte’s blog. Hopefully I will finish up that up in the next few weeks.

The Next Year

One of the main reasons that I started this blog was to share my work experiences with the Oracle community in hopes to explain and help DBAs use the Oracle database software optimally as well as to assist in troubleshooting common, but often difficult issues. In conjunction with my modus operandi, I’d like to offer up the Topic Suggestions page. Feel free to use this page to suggest topics that you would like to have further explained or would like discussion of.

Thanks to all of you who have read and contributed to this blog and may the next year be a great one.