Jul

23

We Need a 4th Vista DBA / Technical Support

Filed Under Database / Oracle, Work, unix | Leave a Comment

Work for OIIT!

Become our 4th DBA / technical support person for our team.

  • Located in Athens, GA (college town, UGA football)
  • $, benefits, generous leave, rare snow
  • we love open source
PDF of GeorgiaVIEW DBA position

Check out the PDF (right) for more information.

Sorry for the convoluted route to the application…

  • Click this link to go to our HR site.
  • Click the “View Job Postings / Apply for Job” link.
  • Check the “Information Instructional Tech” box.
  • Enter “learning” for the keyword and click search.
  • “Systems Support Specialist 3” is our DBA position. We also have a Business Systems Analyst position for a less technical position.

We’d love to have you.

Feb

6

Finding Sessions

Filed Under Blackboard Vista, Database / Oracle | 4 Comments

Clusters can making finding where a user was working a clusterf***. Users end up on a node, but they don’t know which node. Heck, we are ahead of the curve to get user name, date, and time. Usually checking all the nodes in the past few days can net you the sessions. Capturing the session ids in the web server logs usually leads to finding an error in the webct logs. Though not always. Digging through the web server logs to find where the user was doing something similar to the appropriate activity consumes days.

Blackboard Vista captures node information for where the action took place. Reports against the tracking data provide more concise, more easily understood, and more quickly compiled. They are fantastic for getting a clear understanding of what steps a user took.

Web server logs contain every hit which includes every page view (well, almost, the gap is another post). Tracking data represents at best 25% of the page views. This problem is perhaps the only reason I favor logs over tracking data. More cryptic data usually means a slower resolution time not faster.

Another issue with tracking is the scope. When profiling student behavior, it is great. The problem is only okay data can be located for instructors while designers and administrators are almost totally under the radar. With the new outer join, what we can get for these oblivious roles has been greatly expanded.

Certainly, I try not to rely too much on a single source of data. Even I sometimes forget to do so.

Feb

6

User Interface v. SQL Reports and Tracking

Filed Under Blackboard Vista, Database / Oracle | 1 Comment

Blackboard Vista tracks student activity. This tracking data is viewed as a critical feature of Vista. Our instructors depended on the information until we revoked their ability to run reports themselves due to performance issues. Campus administrators can still generate reports (though some still fail). We doubt the solution to this is Blackboard improving the queries to create the reports. We favor deleting tracking data (data preserved outside of Vista) to resolve the performance issues.

We developed SQL reports to look at the tracking data where the user in question was not a student. Yes, the data is limited, but in determining when and where a user was active, can help determine where to look in logs. When we hit the performance issues we started using these reports where the user interface reports failed to generate.

My understanding was the user interface and SQL reports on tracking were the same. Both looked at the same data. The user interface reports were just sexier wrapped in HTML and using icons. I compared a user interface report to a SQL report. Just prior to doing this, I was thinking, WebCT was stupid for not tracking when students look at the list of assessments. Turns out “Assessment list viewed” was tracked in the user interface all along but was missing in our sqlplus queries. WTF?

The data has to be there. The problem has to be our approach in sqlplus is inadvertently excluding the information from the reports. Because these reports must be accurate, I’ll crack this nut… Or become nuts myself.

CRACKED THE NUT: So, part of the data WebCT collected was the name of pages. There is a page name table which was inner joined to the user action table. So pages without a name were not reported. George suggested an outer join. I placed it on the page name table which now lets us see the formerly missing tracked actions. For the specific case where I found this, I now get all the missing actions.

Considering a Blackboard (it’s their problem now) feature request to ensure every page in the application has a title. I consider it developer laziness (someone else said worthlessness) that some pages might not have something so core and simple.

ANOTHER TRICK: Oracle’s NVL function displays a piece of text instead of a null value. Awesome for the above.

Sep

10

Fun With Oracle Environment Variables

Filed Under Blackboard Vista, Database / Oracle | Leave a Comment

This is more or less for the next time I lose all my brain cells from not working over the weekend….

Critical Oracle variables:

  1. ORACLE_HOME
  2. ORACLE_SID

Pretty much any script that deals with Oracle needs the value of these.

Cron doesn’t have these variables, so use export VARIABLE to provide them to the shell. Also, “export VARIABLE=value” doesn’t seem to work. So use “VARIABLE=value; export VARIABLE”.

Oh, the joys of shell scripting.
:)

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