This journey ends tomorrow (tecnically not until Friday since my flight out is at 2 am Friday morning).  This has been one rough ride with days lasting typically from 7:45 to 21 or 22.  I must say that this has worn me out a bit and I am more than ready to spend the weekend in London with my wife and daughter.  The days are very similar with so much work, not much going on.  A funny TV station caught my eye though.  It is in Arabic so I don‘t really know if it it that funny but its name is Al MustaKillah.  If I were, let‘s say an Iranian, rapper, I‘d take up this name with out giving it further thought. 

This morning I was awake at 6:30 am.  Damned drills outside, starting a new skyscraper.  They start working at 6 to use the daylight and avoid the heat even though it is pretty cold here by Qatari standards.  Daytime temperature is probably around 30 C and it is very pleasant to go out for a walk at night.  I understand that in summer they often start around 3 am and stop at 11 just to start again later in the day.  I am told that it is so hot sometimes that some people have litterally somehow drowned or suffocated in the heat and moisture when it is close to 50 C.   No words on that.

I don‘t remember if I mentioned this but we found a new beer place.  Actually just across the street from us in the Four Seasons Hotel.  This is such a fancy hotel that it almost requires a dress code to use the bathrooms over there.  It is amazing.  Outside there are big Beamers and Mercedes‘ in rows.  The beer is still very good and their olives are to die for.  Next time, this is my hotel.  Gunnar, cough up the money for a decent hotel!

My work is mostly done.  In this round I finished 33 out of 36 indicators planned.  The 3 that are left need further work on the clients behalf so nothing I can do more.  Now it is simply time to wrap up, document and finish the little things.  I am amazingly relaxed after these hectic 3 weeks.

We had this little problem of the Oracle Portal not cleaning up sessions.  I set up a profile to kill sessions that have been idle for 10 minutes or more and assigned that profile to the portal user.  Sessions where killed/sniped left and right but they still were not cleaned up.  I got this little hint, which works nicely, from Jón, my collueage at Miracle:

select ‘orakill <yoursid> ‘ || p.spid from v$process p,v$session swhere s.paddr=p.addr and s.status in ('SNIPED',’KILLED’);

Then simply run this, spooling the output to a file to run which you can then run.  You can of course automate this.  This is for Windows.  Unix has the same problem and there you can apply a kill -9 instead of the orakill.  So, it is necessary in this case to kill the shadow process manually.

End of Qatar blog.