Threshing Sheep

I am writing this blog in an attempt to document my learning and progress as a database administrator. I studied databases in college and maintained a fairly respectable GPA. I had originally intended to study math, philosophy, and art, but decided instead, for reasons, I may expound upon in the future, that databases represented a confluence of these disciplines, at least when allowed for a slightly more flexible semantics than found in most programming languages and SQL in particular.

The name of this blog is derived from a particular configuration parameter found in DB2. In DB2 9 this word play is extended somewhat by the fact that the SHEAPTHRES_SHR is a "soft" limit. SHEAPTHRES_SHR is IBM 1337 for "Shared Sort Heap Threshold", and represents the maximum size in memory for heaping data to be sorted in a shared manner as opposed to private.