New Baby

Haven't been able to post for while since we were busy with our new baby.
Ammaar Fuad was born 21st December 2006.
its been quite hectic ever since.
hopefully will be back mining for new oracle info soon.

Pythian Blog and Rman

Courtesy of the pythian blog i found out something very interesting .
The blog title using rman for database growth trend actually brings up the usefulness of the catalog.
currently i've been using the catalog to tell me to some extent the tapes that my backups are on which makes it much faster to communicate to the tape library folks and get the ball rolling faster.
http://www.pythian.com/blogs/318/using-rman-repository-for-database-growth-trend

Oracle 10.2 and failed account logins

Something i was just recently trying to figure out and something that i should have looked at is the new behaviour of 10.2.0.2 and the default profile . pythian groups has the blog entry which seems to be very well timed.
http://www.pythian.com/blogs/284/oracle-102-migrations-%e2%80%93-account-lockedtimed-and-failed_login_attempts

Jonathan Lewis Now in the Blogosphere

Looking at a couple of posts and the Orana aggregator it seems that jonathan Lewis has hit the blog circles at
http://jonathanlewis.wordpress.com/
This is a really nice addition to the blogging community since jonathan always brings a wealth of knowledge in his articles .

October CPU Is out

Just saw that the Ocober CPU is out. The interface is really clean and i like the definition . it makes it more clearer from a DBA's perspective to see if tany of the problems apply to them if not wait for the next CPU or the next patchset which is normally much more stable.
http://www.oracle.com/technology/deploy/security/critical-patch-updates/cpuoct2006.html#AppendixA

history of computers thru compyuter ad's

slash dot had this interestng link about the history of computers based on ad's posted by you tube user.s interesting how times flies by
http://blogs.pcworld.com/techlog/archives/002950.html

Changes coming to Oracle CPU's

Just read the Oracle security blog about the new changes being made for the Oct 17th Patch Release.
It does seems that Oracle is making headways in better documenting and explaining the vulnerabilities but the key problems are installation of theses patches and the pin points alot of DBA's go thru to actually apply these patches.
Oracle needs to come up with a better approach to manage the implementation and documentation of these patches
http://blogs.oracle.com/security/2006/10/11#a33

Project Lockdown

A poster on oracle-l pointed me to this article on Oracle's website named project lockdown.
I'm still in the middle of reading it but it does go into a great length on what should be done.
The link to the Pdf is here http://www.oracle.com/technology/pub/articles/project_lockdown/project-lockdown.pdf
I'll be posting my commentso n the document as i coninue the read.

Not My Day

Apparently this is not my day . started having issues with blogger thought lets just switch to the beta it looks cool. and probably bombarded people with all my old posts. I was look at Orana and saw all my old posts appear again. Blogger needs to put that as a disclaimer as it might have caused a lot of grief to people Sorry Eddie.

Pythian Group Blog » Oracle block corruptions, DBV vs RMAN

Wow, What a coincedence . i just had to deal with this 2 days ago. so i was very surprised when i saw this post from paul of pythian on the subject .
Also i'm very annoyed with the dissappearene of the blog this button anf the appearence of the send to blogger button . it just isnt the same
Pythian Group Blog » Oracle block corruptions, DBV vs RMAN: "
Edit :Well the fact that Blogger is behaving so weirdly today is causing me grief with even posting stuff.

Oracle Stuff I should have known !: If Only ...

Read through Tom Kytes Blog i came through this post.
Very Well written and the fact that we've been trying to get our developers to do the same thing .
if only developers understood how valuable it is too them and to the whole architecture of the project .
These days most projects are dump and run .
which in turn causes a lot of grief to the assicated parties
Oracle Stuff I should have known !: If Only ...:
I've also added a link to Tom's Followup on dbms_application_info which describes information in 10G about program id and line number ofthe pl/sql code.
Makes life much easier and a database more manageable.
http://tkyte.blogspot.com/2006/09/action-module-program-id-and-vsql.html

Ubuntu

Lewis Cunningham has a post titled Kubuntu and Upgrades all Around.
Considering i just hit the ubuntu bandwagon by upgrading my spare windows workstation and installing Oracle Xe . I was very surprised at the look and feel . Although i heard a lot of people dont like the fact that root is locked out by defauly and you have to sudo to do everything. i would say that is the way to go. if i need root i can always unlock it or better yet learn to use sudo more often and make a good secure lifestyle.
Anyways ubuntu looks to me like a stable and to go for distro for home and office so i might take the leap and get it to work at home one of these days

Active Session History

I was hit yesterday with a question . How do we know if someone executes a query or a system call.
since i've not been using 1-g that often. idecided to dig into ash and see all the data the oracle collects.
it was a interesting experience but i still found that oracle misses somestuff maybe becuase i was looking at wrh$_active_session_history which i'm not sure how prunes out what to keep and what not.
but i found some 'alter system' and 'alter session' commands from dba_hist_sqltext and i' didnt find some,
this seemed like a problem. i know the alter system happened since the alert log has a record.
i'll update this post as i find more and maybe someone can comment on this is they have found descrapancies and what and how to secure a system and find out if someone has stolen the sys/system password or just a bad judegement call from the dba's end .
lutz hartmann this week: Active Session History in Oracle 10gR1+2

Oracle Application Express and XE

OK So i havent had time to play around with Oracle Application Express or even 10 to the matter of going deep down under.
Being in a Newbie form i decided to go install Oracle XE on my ubuntu 6.06 workstation.
there was a wonderful article on OTN http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/linux/install/xe-on-kubuntu.html
that helped me walk thru the process like a breeze .
Everything worked as stated in the article which was nice.
I was really amazed at how far oracle has come from the days of takes days to figure out how to install to a pretty much seamless install.
Anyways brought up application express . found out that you cannot be a system user to run application builder(bad practice to use system anyways).
created an account and started building an app. Being a DBA with a some developer experience long time ago. the interface seemed geared towards ease. the test application came up in a flash.
now my goal is to go onto the advanced stuff. maybe write an application that is actually useful to myself or my company.

Oracle 11g Beta Test

Seems like webpages and bloggers are buzzing 11g is apparently going to beta soon.
Oracle 11g Beta Test

DBA_TABLESPACE_USAGE_METRICS | Ask Mr. Ed

Nice Post mr Mr Ed about DBA_TABLESPACE_USAGE_METRICS Ask Mr. Ed
We have scripts to mimic this functionality today but nice to know that oracle has added this in. undocumented though so maybe thisis something that becomes public in 11 . Ahem Ahem

9.2.0.8

FInally 9.2.0.8 the fixed list is long and it already has a few known issues.
I was pleasently surprised that this patch was available for AIX 5L normally AIX is late.
Back to the testing board it is

rman and controlfile moves

Till now i've been basically trying to just collect useful stuff from the web . This installment should be a bit different and based on my own experiences of working with rman.
I was recently tasked with migrating an approx 2 tb database including controlfiles and redo logs to filesystems. the database files and redo logs was the easy part thanks to rman , when it came down to controlfiles . it became tricky. rman require the instance to be mounted to copy the control. dd was not getting me the right bytes regardless of me setting the right offsets and all that.
so my only option was to do a copy controlfile and and then do a mock recovery using backup controlfile.
Well just thinking of fdoing a backup controlfile ins a working production environment gave me the jitters .
That is until i discovered the replicate command in rman. replicate allows you to replicate controlfile from a controlfile to multiple files listed in the init.ora or spfile

so my controlfile move went like this
2> allocate channel ch1 type disk
;3> copy current controlfile to '/tmp/control01.ctl'
;4> }
using target database controlfile instead of recovery catalog
allocated channel: ch1channel ch1:
sid=641 devtype=DISK
Starting copy at 27-JUL-06channel ch1:
copied current controlfile
output filename=/tmp/control01.ctl
Finished copy at 27-JUL-06
released channel: ch1
RMAN>

The above is optional but i found it a little on the careful side
add the controlfile to you spfile
alter system set control_files='/tmp/control01.ctl' scope=spfile ;
or change it in the init.ora
do a shutdown of the database and bring it back up in nomount state
replicate will not work unless a database is in nomount state
run
rman

RMAN>
run
{2> allocate channel ch1 type disk;
3> replicate controlfile from '/dev/cntl01'
;4> }
using target database controlfile instead of recovery catalog
allocated channel: ch1channel ch1: sid=12 devtype=DISK
replicating controlfileinput filename=/dev/cntl01
output filename=/tmp/control01.ctl
released channel: ch1
RMAN>
then do an alter open.
one thing you might have the noticed . the controlfile that i used to replicate from was not listed in the spfile since i had already changed it to new controlfile.
then i just execute the
SQL> alter database mount
Database altered.
SQL> alter database open;
Database altered.
SQL>

This concludes the converting raw to filesystem for controlfiles.
In filesystems obviously moving controlfiles is just a plain cp command with the instance shutdown.Please leave me a note if you think there could have been a better way to do this

How The Oracle Database Processes SQL Statements � Eddie Awad�s Blog

Eddie Awad has an interesting article onn how oracle processes statements . For all People New and old thisis an interestign flow chart
How The Oracle Database Processes SQL Statements � Eddie Awad�s Blog

First sighting of 11g!

Andrew Clark in his blog mentions a sighting of 11 in a metalink doc. Hey we arent even on 10 and now we have to start thinking about 11 and as andrew mentioned its still a G. Who knowswhats its going to when it released . maybe its going to be N and this database requires no DBA's :)
Radio Free Tooting: First sighting of 11g!

Winter Corp's Spotlight on Oracle White Paper

Abhinav's blog has a link to WinterCorp's Paper "Spotlight on Oracle"
This has come very interesting facts but i would like to know and i'll probably find out by reading the whole paper to who besides oracle.
Oracle Business Intelligence Blog: Winter Corp's Spotlight on Oracle White Paper

TOAD Wiki

Being a Huge Toad Fan i thought u'd add a link to this. the asktoad.com has a lot of questions answered that common users have.
As far as oracle is concerned Toad is a fabulous toad. Oracle is playing catchup with sql developer .

faq:questions - TOAD Wiki

Luca Canali and ASM Metadata Internals - Radoslav Rusinov's Oracle Blog

A very interesting blog post by radoslav pointed me to a paper on asm. asm is something i've stayed away so far but as it starts getting more mainstream and we start working with more linux based servers i guess we'll have to understand the tecnology and how it can be used
Luca Canali and ASM Metadata Internals - Radoslav Rusinov's Oracle Blog

Just A Thought: v$segment_statistics - is index being used?

EveryDay you read interesting Stuff. Just came across this one. the test results look good and interesting i have yet to actually try it and see if thisis always the case.
Just A Thought: v$segment_statistics - is index being used?