Skip to main content

While in Chicago for Kscope16...

I've gotten a request or two to recommend places to eat and drink while in Chicago for Kscope16.

Confession: I am a home body, a creature of habit, and definitely not a downtown body. So....I don't have much of any ideas to offer in terms of eating around the conference hotel downtown. But I can certainly share with you some of my favorite restaurants on the north side of Chicago.

Italian

Anna Maria's Pasteria - lovely, small, neighborhood restaurant

Via Venetto - I am not sure I have ever tasted anything better than their Fagottini Di Ricotta E Pere 

Mediterranean

Andie's - in the heart of Andersonville, we've been going to this restaurant for 20+ years.

Seafood

Glenn's Diner - excellent seafood, not too expensive, small diner experience

Mariscos El Venero  - Mexican seafood restaurant where Mexicans go. Nothing fancy, but amazing food and great experience overall!

Indian

If you really like Indian food and/or culture, you should visit Devon Avenue. It is a remarkable stretch of road in Chicago. Decades ago, predominantly Jewish (and the larger neighborhood, Rogers Park, still has one of the largest concentrations of Orthodox Jews in the country), it has gradually shifted to the Midwest center of "Desi" (Pakistani and Indian) food and culture.

Park and wander. Some restaurants you will be sure to enjoy: Hema's, Udupi, Viceroy.

Plus, I live just a 1/4 mile away - so you can wave to me as you chow down on wonderful food!

Besides Food

I don't know about you, but I get tired of steel and concrete. I yearn for the green. Chicago is justifiably famous for its lakefront parks and trails. The Sheraton is close to the lake, and you should be able to rent a bicycle easily and enjoy lovely Lake Michigan.

In addition, the beautiful Northpark Village Nature Center would make a nice afternoon or morning getaway.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Running out of PGA memory with MULTISET ops? Watch out for DISTINCT!

A PL/SQL team inside Oracle made excellent use of nested tables and MULTISET operators in SQL, blending data in tables with procedurally-generated datasets (nested tables).  All was going well when they hit the dreaded: ORA-04030: out of process memory when trying to allocate 2032 bytes  They asked for my help.  The error occurred on this SELECT: SELECT  *    FROM header_tab trx    WHERE (generated_ntab1 SUBMULTISET OF trx.column_ntab)       AND ((trx.column_ntab MULTISET             EXCEPT DISTINCT generated_ntab2) IS EMPTY) The problem is clearly related to the use of those nested tables. Now, there was clearly sufficient PGA for the nested tables themselves. So the problem was in executing the MULTISET-related functionality. We talked for a bit about dropping the use of nested tables and instead doing everything in SQL, to avoid the PGA error. That would, however require lots of work, revamping algorithms, ensuring correctness, you know the score. Then my eyes snagge
4 comments
Read more

How to Pick the Limit for BULK COLLECT

This question rolled into my In Box today: In the case of using the LIMIT clause of BULK COLLECT, how do we decide what value to use for the limit? First I give the quick answer, then I provide support for that answer Quick Answer Start with 100. That's the default (and only) setting for cursor FOR loop optimizations. It offers a sweet spot of improved performance over row-by-row and not-too-much PGA memory consumption. Test to see if that's fast enough (likely will be for many cases). If not, try higher values until you reach the performance level you need - and you are not consuming too much PGA memory.  Don't hard-code the limit value: make it a parameter to your subprogram or a constant in a package specification. Don't put anything in the collection you don't need. [from Giulio Dottorini] Remember: each session that runs this code will use that amount of memory. Background When you use BULK COLLECT, you retrieve more than row with each fetch,
4 comments
Read more

Quick Guide to User-Defined Types in Oracle PL/SQL

A Twitter follower recently asked for more information on user-defined types in the PL/SQL language, and I figured the best way to answer is to offer up this blog post. PL/SQL is a strongly-typed language . Before you can work with a variable or constant, it must be declared with a type (yes, PL/SQL also supports lots of implicit conversions from one type to another, but still, everything must be declared with a type). PL/SQL offers a wide array of pre-defined data types , both in the language natively (such as VARCHAR2, PLS_INTEGER, BOOLEAN, etc.) and in a variety of supplied packages (e.g., the NUMBER_TABLE collection type in the DBMS_SQL package). Data types in PL/SQL can be scalars, such as strings and numbers, or composite (consisting of one or more scalars), such as record types, collection types and object types. You can't really declare your own "user-defined" scalars, though you can define subtypes  from those scalars, which can be very helpful from the p
24 comments
Read more