ORACLENERD: Keeping it Simple

 

Its been a while since i've been able to update the blog  but while i was  catching up i really liked this post about how sometimes a simple thing can do it all. i am a big proponent of keeping it simple. Sometimes i've seen people writing overly complex code with the reasoning that this is the best route or the only route  that they know. It is really hard to explain to such people that keeping an open mind  actually helps in generating better ideas. Anyhow i totally agree with the Oracle Nerd on his observations in the post below

 ORACLENERD: Keeping it Simple

MetaSearch Using Oracle MetaLink Search Plus < Eddie Awad’s Blog

Eddie Awad is upto to alot of good the . He just published a very nice grease monkey script to search metalink++ Here

Novell / SCO Lawsuits Finally Finished - And the winner is ... Novell - dslreports.com

Non Oracle post but certainly one that has an impacto nt he linux community and companies that had the wait and see approach to linux . The court has finally ruled that Novell Owns Unix which means SCO has no case against  IBM. More details and discussion from dslreportsl.com below  

Technorati Tags: linux

Novell / SCO Lawsuits Finally Finished - And the winner is ... Novell - dslreports.com

Oracle 11 is in the House

JUst saw eddie Awads blogs that Oracle 11 is now available for linux. Docs and new feature tutorials are also out  at OTN

Technorati Tags: oracle release

Interesting posts from the Oracle Blogosphere - Ver 2

 

This week  there been a lot going on the blogs

Sergio mentioned the fact that Oracle Now has officially released and Oracle Linux test Kit .  This will be helpful to those people who want to want the stability of the linux kernel for their database.

Alejandro Vargas has  a very nice How to on the implementation of Logminer Here. It is a very well written document to refer to when using Logminer.

Lewis Cunningham has more info on a DBA stealing 8.5 Million records Here. Iti s interesting to read and understand the ramifications of an inside job.

Eddie Awad has info on how to add APEX 3.0  in Oracle XE . You look the DBA functionality but then get  alook of cool stuff that APEX 3.0 provides.

Jonathan Lewis has come info that you should consider about NLS. Funny sometimes when a small character conversion can disable an index.

LogicaCMG is still blogging about Oracle 11G and this time feature an article about invisible indexes.

Doug Burns has a couple of articles about Oracle Development Licensing and WorkLoad Metrics .

More to Follow once i get a chance to read more.

Posts from the Blogosphere

 

Looking around at the Oracle Blogosphere . it seems more and more people are blogging which mean more and more information is available  for people to digest.

Kevin Closson in his post discusses the fact  there is only one LGWR process in the Oracle Database.

The Logica CMG Blog has started a 11g info  compaign here. This article dicusses sql replay.

Fairlie rego has a nice article about using dbx collector here.

H.Tonguç Yılmaz has pointers to  a bunch of nice metalink Docs Here

and finally Paul Gallagher Host this week's  Log Buffer Here.

Pete Finnigan's Oracle security weblog

Pete Finnigan's Blog just mentioned the fact that the Latest Oracle CPU(Critical Patch Update)  is out.

one quote i found really interesting in the article was  the fact that they had broken up the patches into molecules.

 

"The napply CPU is an enhanced CPU format for Oracle Database Server for Unix and Linux platforms version 10.2.0.3 and onward (including 10.2.0.4 and 11g). In a napply CPU, the security fixes are now grouped in what are called molecules. Each molecule in the CPU is independent, and does not conflict with other molecules in the CPU. Conflicts between molecules occur when fixes included respectively in each molecule affect the same file or group of files."

Which also goes on to say that OPatch will have  a new parameter ?-skip_duplicate to only apply new patches thus limiting the amount of change to the system. 

I dod agree with Pete this will relieve a lot of anxiety and make people apply the patches with more confidence. As to How it works the first time we have yet to see.

Thanks Pete for  the excellent summary of the CPU as usual.

Technorati Tags: oracle patches

Pete Finnigan's Oracle security weblog

Off topic:ViaTalk Providing Free Phone Calls

It is interesting how VOIP is changing the way people make calls. Services from Viatalk and grancentral are making it more easier for people to make calls and connect people
There is no sign-up required, just simply goto www.viatalkfree.com and enter in your phone number and the number you wish to call, and you are instantly connected free of charge for up to 10 minutes.

read more digg story

Scott/tiger for system administration?

I'm listening in on the Oracle 11g Webcast and heard Charles Phillips referring to scott/tiger as an initial system administration logon.
I've always thought of that account as the demo schema for schema .
personally i never used it for any administration.
Am i wrong or did i hear wrong .

Oracle Blogs Ranked by Technorati Authority - July 07 Edition < Eddie Awad’s Blog

 

I'm on a list ranked 178 on Eddie Awad's list. Not bad for a blog thati  think i read and write on my own :)

Hopefully i can start writing more interesting things and maybe get people's attention(Just kidding).

Writing a blog  has been a very nice experience for me sharing stuff i learn on my own and others.and even for looking up stuff that i need to find.

del.icio.us Tags: oracle

Oracle Blogs Ranked by Technorati Authority - July 07 Edition < Eddie Awad’s Blog

Oracle 11g launch is almost Here

 

Oracle 11g Launch is on Wednesday at 9:00 am Central.

you can Watch the Live Webcast Here.

Oracle blog: Change behavior of GROUP BY clause in 10g.

 Jaffar at this blog has a detailed explanation of   a change in behaviour in the way data result sets are retrieved in 10g. This is interesting to learn since i'm working on a couple of upgrades and i know Oracle has never guaranteed results in an ordered but people have gotten it in an ordered fashion. I'm going to throw this out to my developers and see if this affects any of their code.

Thanks jaffar for pointing this out.

Technorati Tags: oracle, upgrades

Off Topic: Six flags Deja Vu Stuck

Al little offtopic but i thought i'd share.

I was at six flags great america and the ride Deja Vu had a temporary malfunction.

Some pictures to look at that moment.

Pythian Group Blog » Oracle Releases Method to Disable AWR Collection

from What i understand Oracle has now officially released a method

to disable AWR for people without the Diagnostic Pack license. It seems this was done after Mark Brinsmead's wonderful attempt in asking  ORACLE for providing this framework as part of the database.

One thing that Paul Valee pointed  out is that ORACLE still wants people to keep AWR enabled . Quote from ORACLE

"Oracle, therefore, recommends that all customers, with or without Diagnostic Pack license, leave AWR enabled so that they can benefit from features that do not require pack license but implicitly use AWR"

 

This means that  maybe there still might be hope .

Technorati Tags: oracle

 

  

Pythian Group Blog » Oracle Releases Method to Disable AWR Collection

Pythian Group Blog » An Open Letter to Larry Ellison on AWR and ASH Licensing

 

Mark Brinsmead brings up an interesting point and  i would like say that i concur with Mark Fully. This is a really  interesting situation that ORACLE has put on its customers  and ASH and AWR are marvellous tools which would help sell ORACLE more if only people were  allowed to use it without buying the  OEM packs. Please sign the in the post below and maybe We DBA's can make a difference. :)

Technorati Tags: oracle

Pythian Group Blog » An Open Letter to Larry Ellison on AWR and ASH Licensing

Cursor Attribute changes from Oracle 8 onwards

There was aPl/sql change in the way oracle handles cursor attributes.
A colleague of mine at work had this issue and i decided to look this up.
Below is the test case (Oracle Always wants one ).

--CREATE TABLE DDL
create table test (test1 varchar2(1));

set timing onset time onset echo onset serveroutput on
DECLARE v_test1 VARCHAR2(1) := 'A'; BEGIN --CREATE A RECORD insert into test values ('A'); commit;
DELETE FROM test WHERE test1 = v_test1; commit; --THIS IS THE COMMIT THAT PASSES SQL%FOUND IN ORACLE 8i BUT FAILS IN 9i & 10g IF SQL%FOUND THEN -- delete succeeded/passed
DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE('SUCCESS 1');
ELSE -- delete failed
DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE('FAILURE 1');
END IF; END;


The results of this code in each DB version is:
8i - SQL%FOUND succeeds
9i - SQL%FOUND fails
10g - SQL%FOUND fails


Now if you look at the above results it does seem that the changes happened in the 9.2 build (maybe 9.0 but i dont have a database to test).

Kurt Franke d at oracle-l pointed out the fact that from version 9i on cursor attributes are no longer accessible after a commitif you need it anyway you must set a special event in the init.ora:
event = "10943 trace name context forever, level 4194304"


Oracle later on came back with a bug number 2286387 and said that going forward this would be the expected behaviour.

Thanks to all that helped .

Oracle 11g . The Future is Database

Eddie Awad is reporting here the fact that Oracle 11g is all set to launch on July 11th.
Oracle 11g has been in beta testing for about a year and a half now and had a list of highly awaited features.
I do like the data caching features as well as the trial playback feature.

The effect of DBA's on an organization(rambling).

Being a DBA for over 10 years i've always contemplated the effects a DBA has on an organization. Back when i started my career as a fresh out of college with little IT experience want to do it all midset. i was greeted into an organization where politics was rampant and life was all about are we going centralized or decentralized as a foxbase+ programmer and having my day 0 being 72 hrs. i was amazed at the lack of detail some organizations are even willing to take into consideration

before making such decisions.

i think even though managements i guess are hired to make decisions but the knowledge quotient of someone making a decision is very important.

across the years i've seen many decisions pertaining to the technologies i've worked with and only now i've started understanding that sometimes a decision made years ago might payoff.

As a programmer who eventually transitioned to being a database admin . sometimes it is hard to agree with a lot of decisions. I've learned that if decisions are explained well or people are taken into confidence some decisions do pay off long term





Technorati Tags: oracle dba

Recovery and Rman vs sqlplus

Hemant chitale in his blog entry put in a very nice description of rollo forward from various forms of backup.

I find this very very interesting since i am one of those people that like rman for its backup and restore capabilities but still like to keep control of the recovery using sqlplus . even though my recovery success rate has been the same be it using rman for the recovery(not restore) vs sqlplus . i think the matter is sqlplus gives a little more control and this makes a dba ( we are control freaks you know) a little more confidence .

any other reason you might want to add please do add



Technorati Tags: oracle, backup

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Questions Answers and then Questions i.e etiquette

Reading Tom Kyte's&nbsp;&nbsp; Post&nbsp;&nbsp; and&nbsp; This Post&nbsp; and&nbsp; This Post&nbsp; . It seems to be a common Theme for the last couple of days.

I have also noticed not only&nbsp; technet(OTN). but on a lot of mailing lists&nbsp; this being&nbsp; a common theme .

People are taking the fact that people respond for granted and try to resolve an issue by using other people's advice without even looking at the fact that the advice is sound or not.

The sheer volume of mail on a lot of mailing lists including but not limited to oracle-l seems to&nbsp; on topics like can someone tell me how to export a table&nbsp; or&nbsp; i want to install RAC&nbsp; . More how to Questions are popping up everyday.

though i do not oppose asking How-TO questions . That is how i learned&nbsp; during my DBA career. But what we did was read the oracle Manuals and try ot understand and then ask a how to question.

I still believe Oracle Manuals are really well written and have more than enough information for us to find&nbsp; info about&nbsp; a feature or a task.

Yeah asking questions is good but i believe asking questions just to save one's self&nbsp; the hassle of looking it up is just plain wrong.

A Answer is much better understood if the person who is asking the question has done&nbsp; the basic analysis.

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Technorati Tags: etiquette

Explain Plans

Tom Kyte has an article on his blog . which deals with explain plans .
This is really interesting since i have recently been very intigued by explain plans. I'mstill investigiating an issue where an explain plan changed between 2 idrntical systems.
and where there was less data but enough to use an index and all the columns that the join was based upon were indexed. after a routine stats gathering the explain plan changed from nested loops to a huge hash join with full tablescans of all involved tables.
whne i hinted indexes it ran in 9 secs . and when i used first_rows hint it showed a very bad explain plan but the query finished in 768 msecs.
i've put that workaround in place till i get time to figure out what is going on .
the database is 9.2.0.8 with optimizer_mode =choose and optimizer_features_enable-8.1.7
and optimizer_index_cost_adj=40
Please note it was working till stats were gathered in a routine stats gathering exercise. since we did nt backup old stats.
i have unable to get it back to where it was regardless of what types of stats i gather or indexes i rebuild.

Hotso 2007 Day 2

Day 2 started with a warm and fuzzy feeling.
started off with a presentation on profiling and how 10046 can tell you stuff awr ,addm etc wont tell you.
there was a mention about OraSrp.
I had heard about the tool but not used it. I will definitely try to use this and see how good this is.
one of the things that i didnt know was the fact that <OCI8 Bind peeking is not done. See you always learn something new everyday.
Jonathan Lewis's paper was about Interpreting Statspack reports and the knowledge imparted was very good.
I learned that index block splits in bitmap index could cause a log file sync since there is commits involved specially if deletes happened ( this is my interpretation of what he said , Please correct me if i am wrong).
Also hard pars=optimize so hard parses are not always a bad thing.
Joze Senegacnik presented his paper on ATO and sqltuning features in 10.
This was nice and interesting topic since it had nice content.
stuff i need to look into are the ignore_optim_embedded hint and the opt_estimat hint.
sql profiles do look good but they might pose a problem too.
Tanel Poder had back to back presentations but i only attended the scalability in 10&11g.
it was nice to hear about the new mutex architecture. the buffer cache/shared pool sharing.


James Morle had the Brewing Benchmarks Presentation.
the tool he discussed can be downloaded under GNU license here.
The tool does look promising and i will download and do a small load test to see how it works.
He did talk about a bug which i might want to look at about Pl/Sql RPC call not being logged to 10046 traces till 10g.This info is available in 10051 trace
there is a once off patch for 9i and 8.1.7.4 .

There was a speaker panel with interesting questions.
I was planning on attending the oracle-l dinner but at the last moment had a bad headache and came back to my room.

Top Oracle Blogs

Someone just sent me this link

but pretty impressive list of blogs

Hotsos Day 1 #2

Doug Burns is doing a play by play here

Pretty much going the same track except because of a shuffle tanel was no longer presenting at his timeslot so i went and sat in Cary's presentation. Very good and very informative presentation. All the points he brought forward were not only true but pretty much what i have experienced in my somewhat limited number of years working as an oracle dba.
onto andy rivenes and his workload characterization presentation nice and informative.
then after lunch had the stephan haisley presentation which after hearing all i could say is this is why i came to hotsos for. very good info and redo and undo. and the IMU in 10g.
am definitely going to read his paper and under more.
Then onto julian dyke for rac .
and then Jonathan Lewis. He is one of the few presenters that i never like to miss.
very good insight and very good presentation.
we had the speaker panel on statistics and then
onto dinner.
the party setting was really nice.
now off to bed to get ready for tommorrow.
P.s will see i am meet doug burns and some of the others from oracle-l

Day 1 Hotsos #1

Overall a very Hectic and full of learning Day

The Day Started out with a Ken jacobs(Dr DBA) going down memory lane for oracle. its been 30 years since oracle corp was founded. the theme was unconventional.

a few of the milstones that i got were

Oracle ver 2 =1979. There was no version 1

was written in assembly on PDP-11

had a UFI(User Friendly Interface) and for reporting had RPF.

no row locks

Oracle Ver 3 =1983 Was Written in C

had transactions and the concept of before image in an external file.

Oracle Ver 4=1984

introduced read consistency . Also called reliable oracle

Oracle ver 5.0 =1985 vr 5.1=86

Audit Trail(ken jacob)

client/server database

DBLinks(5.1) distributed database was written and implemented for larry in a weekend.

OPS

Mar 12 1996 Oracle went public

Oracle 6 =1988

was rearchitected had SMP scalability row level locking and seperation on undo and redo. ALso ver 1 of online backups

lost reliability.

Oracle Ver 7.0 1992. 7.1 1994 7.2 1995 7.3 1996

PL/sql,RI,Roles and parallel features

Oracle 8 1997

Multimedia Database

Oracle 8i 1999

iFs

Java in the db

Oracle 9i 2001 R2 2002

RAC & XDB

Flashback/Undo

Oracle 10G 2004 R2 2005

Grid

automation of processes

So under the banner of stuff that oracle did unconventionally the following were prominent

APEX

XDB

Flashback

ASM

Security

DW

RAC

Here is a pic of ken jacobs on the stand.(using a palm treo)

This is gary goodwin and ken.

Will post part 2 with reast of the details for the day.

News and Hotsos

I'm down here at hotsos. just getting ready to head to the conference hotel.
i'll see if i can blog about the day's events
Amis blog has a nice run down going on here
http://technology.amis.nl/blog/
will add other blogs as i see them pop up.
In other news.
Oracle has bought hyperion and changedthe pricing for its stndardand standard one editions from core to socket.
this makes it more comparable to microsoft's pricing.
Paul Valee at pythian has the details here.
ok its 7:40 off to breakfast and the keynote address.

Hotsos bound

Another exciting year. Another Hotsos trip (my Second trip to hotsos).
Will put out updates on the goos stuff at the conference if i can

New Blog With Lots of Info

Since i've been evaluating andreading about rac for an upcoming project i stumbled upon this blog
http://blogs.oracle.com/AlejandroVargas/
Very good info and precise Oracle Rac deployment solutions .
Definitely worth a bookmark

OTN TechBlog : Preparing for the New Daylight Savings Time

Just Looking at hte OTN TechBlog found this interesting article by Rich Niemiec,
Details about the OS and the database are very nicely put . Thanks to an Act of congress we all have to work harder to make sure our systems dont crash come March.
OTN TechBlog : Preparing for the New Daylight Savings Time

Career Choices for Techies

reading thru Andrew Clarke's Blog at radio free tooting

http://radiofreetooting.blogspot.com/2007/01/management-techies-dilemma.html

i was intrigued at the fact of how many techies change when they go to management. It is a huge change from managing machines to physocally managing people.

i also agree that running tkprof is easier then avoiding a confrontation with a sour colleague . but again that me.



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