Infrastructure at your Service
A customer had an interesting case recently. Since Oracle 12.2. he got archiver stuck situations after a shutdown abort and restart. I reproduced the issue and it is caused by direct NFS since running ODM 4.0 (i.e. since 12.2.). The issue also reproduced on 18.5. When direct NFS is enabled then the archiver-process writes to a file with a preceding dot in its name. E.g. .arch_1_90_985274359.arc When the file has been fully copied from the…
The amazing DOAG 2018 conference is over now. As every year we saw great technical as well as great non-technical sessions. What impressed me was the non-technical presentation “Zurück an die Arbeit – Wie aus Business-Theatern wieder echte Unternehmen werden” (back to work – how business theatres become real business company again) provided by Lars Vollmer. It was very funny, but also thought-provoking. Lars started with the provocative sentence that people do work too less….
Recently I got an interesting request: The customer wanted to allow the application installation routine to create a guaranteed restore point without giving it all required privileges to do so. So the idea was to encapsulate creating and dropping a guaranteed restore point in a PLSQL package and granting the application owner the permission to execute the package. The problem with that approach is that SYSDBA-privileges are required to create a guaranteed restore point and…
I’m currently working in a project to migrate a Datawarehouse-database from Solaris to Linux Intel (Endian-change). We do use the cross platform incremental backups method as described in My Oracle Support Note 1389592.1 for that. I.e. incremental backups are applied to database files and during the migration the recovered datafiles are attached to the target database via the transportable tablespace method. When testing the transportable tablespace metadata import I got an error for a table:…
During tuning or normal DBA activities one of the most annoying things is sqlplus with its default column output when running queries. I.e. even after setting a linesize of 1000 and a pagesize of 1000 the output may look as follows in your preferred terminal emulation (putty here): Most people address this by using other tools like sqldeveloper (or sqlcl with sqlformat ansiconsole). However, a lot of people still use sqlplus. How can you address…
I recently wrote a couple of sql-scripts which had to run on all of my customer’s DBs. The sql-scripts had to be started from a Linux-client, which does not have any Oracle client software installed. So I thought of using sqlcl (see http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/developer-tools/sqlcl/downloads/index.html), because there is no need to “install” something then. All I needed was an installed JRE on the Linux-machine. Fortunately that was available. So I downloaded the newest version of sqlcl and…
When doing a performance review I often do talk with the DBA about the CPU utilization of the server. How reliable is the server CPU utilization with tools like top or the host CPU utilization in the AWR-report? E.g. on an Linux Intel x86-64 server with 8 Cores and 16 logical CPUs (Intel Hyperthreading), what does a utilization of 50% mean? As I had an ODA X7-M in a test lab available, I thought I’ll…
What are the possibilities to use a Raspberry Pi computer as an Oracle client? Besides other things I’ll show a possibility in this Blog to run the fat/thick Oracle Client on a Raspberry Pi! REMARK: All examples below were made with an Rasperry Pi 3 and the OS Raspbian, which can be downloaded from https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads First of all what’s possible with Java and Thin Clients? Running the Java-Programs sqldeveloper or its counterpart in command line…
If you store your databases on the cluster filesystem ACFS you may use the provided Perl-script gDBClone from OTN to clone databases or create snapshot databases. It is an interesting approach to create clones from the Production DB in minutes regardless of the production DB size. What you do is to create a standby DB from your production DB on a separate cluster and use that standby DB as a Gold/Master copy for ACFS snapshots….
At the DOAG I attended a session “Top-level DB design for Big Data in ATLAS Experiment at CERN” provided by Gancho Dimitrov. The presentation was actually very interesting. As part of Gancho’s improvement activities to reduce space in a table he stored data in a 16 Bytes raw format (instead of a string representing hex values which requires 36 Bytes) and use virtual columns to actually calculate the real hex-string. So the original value is…
