Desires and Dreams

Today I was reading a book named “The Saint The Surfer and The CEO” by Robin Sharma (author of  The Monk who sold his Ferrari). This is a fiction story about wisdom to live a happier life. As the name suggest, it explains the philosophy of life through three person’s point of view.

After reading first few introduction chapters, I skipped and read a chapter on desires and dreams. It’s a beautiful chapter and really get motivated after reading it. Here author explains 5-step process to achieve your heart’s desires. Below is summary of the text:

Step-1: Articulate a vision

The more clarity, color, emotion and definition you can bring to the goal, you have pictured in your imagination, the greater the probability that it will occur in your outer world.

Step-2 Develop your Strategy to achieve desires

Strategy is really an action plan to closing the gap between vision and results. It is helpful to develop a week-to-week strategy. What happen is, when a goal is too big, it is so scary to even take a first step. So the break down the macro definition into micro portions, which are manageable and easier to realize and achieve.

Step-3 Set up a self-Contract

Make an agreement with yourself starting what you plan to do and when you plan to do it. Without personal accountability, it’s easy to escape from your commitment to making the dream happen. When we initially set a goa l, we tend to be full of excitement and hope about the future possibilities. But as the days pass, our inner critic begins its work and offer up an array of excuses as to why this goal will never come to fruition. The more time passes the more we get distracted by the urgent issues we have to deal with, soon the dream dies a quick death. The way to escape from this situation, is to build an accountability structure and adhere to that.

Step-4 Measurement of Results

What’s not measured will never be happened. By performing continuous measurement ritual, each day can be better than previous one. We can know what is being working and what is not. The whole idea is to learn from your past. Leverage the failures of your past into your future wins.

Step-5 Celebrate your Proud Moments

Proud moments are time during your week when you’ve scored a win in terms of the advancement of the particular desire you’re working on. One of the primary reasons we lose our inspiration and passion for making our goals happen is because we spend more time focusing on what’s not working rather than on what is. (truely said!)
As you recognize and appreciate your small wins, enormous momentum will be created that will make you more committed to your ultimate personal dream.

 I recommend the book to all who really like reading good text on Motivation and Inspiration.

Cheers …

 

 
 

Surprised impact of Improved Performance

It’s always desirable to have database running in optimal performance state. I, as a DBA, even have same desires. But sometimes improved performance may negatively impact on the system users and left you in a situation where you don’t know how to react.

I personally have such an experience. Two years back, I worked for a customer from telecom domain. One of their call center’s application had performance problem. They log a Service request for optimization. Basically, call center guys generate a report on daily basis for number of complaint received. This is for management for MIS purpose. They observed that now it take more than 1 hour to generate the report.

I as a performance DBA, trace the session for report generation and observed that only one query out of several is bottleneck. Query is based on a table whose size is more than 15 GB. Since they were retriving only 1-day of data, I range-partitioned the table on complaint_date column. After partitioning, report completed in 7-10 minutes.

User’s first reaction was, after implementation, report generation was having some problems. When I asked what was the problem, he said, it was not generating complete report. His logic was, it just finished in 10 minutes, so it was not running completely.

I smiled and said “what they guys were expecting from this exercise, performance improvement or something else?”

Oracle RAC Certification 1Z0-048

I started preparing for the exam on 1st April and planning to write it on 25 or 26th April.

While preparing for the exam, I strongly feel the need for Practical exam (as in OCM) instead of objective-questions based. Since it’s an expert-level OCP exam, there must be a 1-day practical lab-based exam which should check practical knowledge like RAC installation, solving performance problem, configuration …

There may me my drawback also. It’s fees may go sky-rocketed as the case with OCM exams.

What do you think?

 

Books in my self

1. The Monk who sold his Ferrari
2. One nigh @Call Centre