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Continue reading →: SYSMAN password change
Some days you just forget the dot all of the i’s. I had just installed a new RAC cluster, got it all up and running and was using DBCONSOLE to check the system out – no access to the Production Grid Control for this cluster yet. I then made a…
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Continue reading →: The Dunning-Kruger Effect – I don’t know
Interviewing people is always a rich source of anecdotes, or should that be anec-dont’s? Whatever. When interviewing for a technical specialist, such as a senior Oracle DBA, it seems important to ask a number of technical questions to ascertain the competency the individual has in relation to Oracle and the…
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Continue reading →: Killing a session. Dead!
… or what ALTER SYSTEM KILL SESSION doesn’t do. So, you have a runaway session and you want it to stop now, please. You enter “ALTER SYSTEM KILL SESSION (sid,serial#) IMMEDIATE” – supplying the parameters from GV$SESSION (adding @instance_id if it’s running in a different node) and you wait a…
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Continue reading →: Oracle Default Password Checker
It’s amazing how much stuff you come across years after it was released by Oracle, like the view DBA_USERS_WITH_DEFPWD. It lists many standard or common database accounts where you still have a default password set. If you combine this with the DBA_USERS view, you can see instantly where you may…
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Continue reading →: Oracle Join Syntax for ANSI people
I was talking with a non-Oracle DBA the other day about Oracle SQL syntax for joins, as I had written some SQL which he didn’t understand, using the old form of Oracle notation to signify outer joins – the (+) operator. It got me thinking; I have been using Oracle…
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Continue reading →: UKOUG Combined AIM and Database Server SIG Agenda
On 18th July, the UKOUG has a combined technical Oracle SIG in London. I am (a) deputy chairman of the Availability, Infrastructure and Management (AIM) SIG, which concentrates on subjects like RAC, Exadata and Grid Control, and we are combining forces with the Database Server SIG to produce a 2-stream…
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Continue reading →: RMAN Incarnations revisited (11G)
Time for an update to a older post. I have previously talked about the annoyance of connecting to RMAN with a duplicated database where the DBID has not been changed. RMAN happily breaks the catalog by assuming the “new” database is a new incarnation, and prevents the previous owner of…
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Continue reading →: Oracle Data Files
I was looking at the contents of a tablespace recently – just the extents, not a block dump – with the intention of shrinking a couple of the associated datafiles (don’t ask why – the reason is both stupid and irrelevant). I needed to know just how much I could…
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Continue reading →: UKOUG Conference 2012 Agenda Online
Today the UK’s big Oracle User event has just lifted its skirts to show off its new frilly agenda, which can be found here. I have been a member of the UKOUG for well over a decade, and a Special Interest Group (SIG) Deputy Chairman for the last 5 or…
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Continue reading →: Outside Interests – not work!
So, what do you do that isn’t work. Sure, you work hard in the office. You might even do work when you get home at night on your own “lab” setup – VM’s make that so easy these days. Even an old desktop can spin up a couple of VM’s…
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Continue reading →: The Fear of Presenting
I am deputy chairman of the UK Oracle User Group: Availability, Infrastructure and Management (AIM) SIG. We arrange several groups per year where we look to get speakers to present on all manner of subject in relation to the remit of the SIG: Exadata, RAC, Partitioning, Grid Control, Managing DBA’s,…
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Continue reading →: Complex Passwords
Increasing numbers of Yahoo mail passwords appear to have been compromised; I don’t use Yahoo [although in a historically stupid move, I have multiple email addresses from multiple providers including hotmail, gmail, my ISP and my own domain ]. Anyway, I have been getting an increasing number of spam emails…
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Continue reading →: Problem solving with DBMS_DATAPUMP
Yesterday I had a problem… I noticed that one of our overnight jobs was failing. The job in question is an ad-hoc tidy-up job, ran as needed when a performance metric for a specific query indicates that we’re going to be in trouble soon. So, what was the problem? I…
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Continue reading →: Oh my God, it’s full of stars
About 1,000,000,000 of them in this amazing composite photograph of the Milky Way. Taking 10 years to make and using 2 telescopes (to get a view from North and South hemispheres) it combines the UKIDSS/GPS sky survey acquired by the UK Infrared Telescope in Hawaii with the VVV survey data…
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Continue reading →: Why ITIL CAB’s do not work as expected
ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) does work. It works very well and is becoming more and more widely adopted, but does not always work the way that management thinks it works. The basic premise of ITIL is to put structure and process around the business of running IT. It is…
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