Oracle Rant

I came across an article on CNN.com titled "Ex-Googlers launch rival search engine." After reading it, I wondered, "is this a Google killer?"

The company is backed by $33 million in venture capital. They claim that they are indexing more than 120 billion web pages which is greater than Google’s 8.2 million (even though Google doesn’t publish how many they scan). Anyways, enough of the marketing muscle. I wanted to give it a try.

I did some comparative search results between Google and Cuil. I found that Google blows cuil away; however, your comparisons may differ.

Some examples:

I searched for an Oracle 600 error. Google found information, Cuil said no results found.

I decided something basic, so I searched for ".NET". Google brought up a list of results for Microsoft. Cuil said, results not found.

So I did a search of "cuil" on Cuil and guess what? It’s not self-aware! It can’t even find itself, so what makes me think it is capable of finding what I am searching for? This is not even a Google Killer. It’s a Cuil killer. It’s pretty bad when it kills itself.

So I tried a simple search. I searched for trees. BINGO! Cuil has plenty of information about trees. The problem with cuil is I can’t really use it, at least not yet. It has a long way to go to catch up with even Microsoft Live Search, much less, Google.

They spent $33 Million to build this? Alta-Vista was better back in the day. The thing with Google, is it was working well before I ever heard of it. It spread via word-of-mouth, and it is synonymous with web search. Cuil would have been better off waiting until the search technology was well refined.

Have you tried Cuil.com? What do you think?

Inquiring mind(s) want to know : )

I wrote previously about integrating RMAN with Veritas NetBackup. The reason for doing so was so that I could easily verify that the backup went to tape and for recovery to be simpler. By integrating, I no longer needed to contact my NetBackup admin should I quickly need to recover my database. Also, as long as NetBackup was installed on multiple servers, I could easily clone/duplicate/restore my databases on any number of servers where it was installed. I am also using a recovery catalog to help simplify things. Without a recovery catalog, you will need to restore your control file which will have information about your backups, spfile, and previous control file backups prior to being backed up itself.

A couple of things to note. I only have 1 NetBackup policy of Oracle type assigned to this server by my Veritas NetBackup admin. Also, that policy is set to infinite retention so that RMAN controls when it wants to delete expired / obsolete backups by allocating a channel "for maintenance device type ‘SBT_TAPE’. A good practice is working with your NetBackup admin in order to configure your policy. You could also define multiple policies so he can more easily identify which backups to send offsite. The only problem with this approach, and it’s very minor at that, is that you will have to explicitly define your Oracle type NetBackup Policy when you do your backups. Read the rest of this entry »