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Continue reading →: OTN Appreciation Day : FlashBack Query
I love OTN, and I love Flashback query. It is a feature looking for an application use-case, but it really can dig you out of a major problem, recovering data you have recently deleted. Here’s a silly example of the power: select * from important_data NAME PHONE_NUMBER ——————– —————————— Partner…
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Continue reading →: Stats Collection Time Anomaly
Johnathan Lewis (@JLOracle) recently published a short post about Stats Collection Time, talking about the table dba_optstat_operation (and dba_optstat_operation_tasks ), which reminded me about (what I regard as) an anomaly in the output in the NOTES columns in Oracle 12C. I won’t repeat why it’s useful to check these tables…
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Continue reading →: DOAG Conference + Exhibition
Another quick post to let you know I will be presenting at the German Oracle User Group Conference [DOAG], which runs from 14th-18th of November 2016 This is a huge conference and exhibition over 4 days with many tracks and a vast array of great speakers. I hope to see…
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Continue reading →: POUG 2-day event
Just a quick post to let you know I will be speaking, with a lot of other Oracle ACE and other excellent speakers at the Pint with/Polish Oracle User Group (Chapter IV), taking place on 7th/8th October in Warsaw. Click on Buy Ticket link to see some of the other…
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Continue reading →: Accessing STATUS columns efficiently
A frequently reoccuring design problem with relational databases is the issue locating unprocessed rows in a large table, so we know which rows of data are still yet to be processed. The problem with a STATUS column is that it generally has low cardinality; there are probably only a handful…
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Continue reading →: Oracle Audit Control part 3 – OS files
Just realized that I wrote a follow-up to Part 2 two years ago and never posted it! So here’s the stripped-out key facts to round off auditing control a bit more: Deleting O/S audit files is, like, totally necessary. In Oracle 12C (12.1), they are created by default as AUDIT_SYS_OPERATIONS…
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Continue reading →: UKOUG Tech16 Call For Papers!
It’s that time of year again. The UKOUG Tech16 conference call for papers went out today. You want to learn a subject really well? Better than you currently know it? Teach someone about it! You want to help people avoid the potholes and problems that you hit with your implementation?…
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Continue reading →: UKOUG RDBMS and RAC-CIA Special Interest Groups
On Thursday 21st April, there is a dual UKOUG Database and RAC, Cloud, Infrastructure and Availability special interest group. For the first time, this event is being held in the fabulous Northern city of Manchester! There are a dozen interesting, career-assisting, educational talks from end users, Oracle employees and a…
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Continue reading →: Proxy Accounts Tracking
If you are using Proxy accounts to access users, for example as a DBA to do a release to a schema owner, how do you know the login was via proxy instead of directly with the password? This information is handily recorded in the audit, assuming you have audit switched…
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Continue reading →: Accessing a user when you don’t know the password
There are times that you may need to logon to a database user, probably a schema owner to do a release, but you don’t know the password. You may not be able to (easily) change the password as it could be embedded in application connect strings or worse. If may…
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Continue reading →: Killing Sessions
You have a session which is out of control. You decide to kill it. What options are available to you as a DBA? Assuming you don’t have access to the O/S to be able to use O/S commands to kill the session (using kill -9 in Unix/Linux or orakill in…
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Continue reading →: Contactless Payment Theft
You may have seen stories in the news about Contactless Payment theft; how it is possible for a criminal to merely brush against you with a new contactless card reader and steal up to £30 from your contactless payment card. It might be a good idea to consider protecting your…
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Continue reading →: Pre-creating Interval Partitions
One of the major problems with interval-based partitioning is the statistics. Partitions appear dynamically as-needed based upon data being inserted or udpated, and any partition magically appearing isn’t going to have any statistics. This is generally a stability issue as you will, at best, be using dynamic statistics for your…
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Continue reading →: Primarys Keys and their supporting indexes
Sometimes things just happen which makes you realise that stuff you thought all experienced DBA’s knew about isn’t common knowledge. I suppose it’s a side effect of working with the same evolving product for over 25 years at dozens of clients, when the colleague you are talking to has a…
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