Infrastructure at your Service
Plan stability preserves execution plans in stored outlines. An outline is implemented as a set of optimizer hints that are associated with the SQL statement. If the use of the outline is enabled for the statement, then Oracle Database automatically considers the stored hints and tries to generate an execution plan in accordance with those hints (Oracle documentation). Oracle Database can create a public or private stored outline for one or all SQL statements. The…
By Franck Pachot . COMMIT is the SQL statement that ends a transaction, with two goals: persistence (changes are durable) and sharing (changes are visible to others). That’s a weird title and introduction for the 499th blog post I write on the dbi-services blog. 499 posts in nearly 5 years- roughly two blog posts per week. This activity was mainly motivated by the will to persist and share what I learn every day.
It should never happen but sometimes it happens. You just lost your datafiles as well as your fast recovery area (probably because most of the time these areas are on the same disks despite the recommendations). Normal restore operations with RMAN are quite easy and secure as far as you have backupsets for database, archivelogs, and spfile/controlfile: Step 1 – restore the spfile and start the instance Step 2 – restore the controlfile and mount…
By Franck Pachot . I know that lot of people are against the ANSI join syntax in Oracle. And this goes beyond the limits when talking about NATURAL JOIN. But I like them and use them quite often. Why is Natural Join bad? Natural join is bad because it relies on column names, and, at the time of writing the query, you don’t know which columns will be added or removed later. Here is an…
By Franck Pachot . This is research only and totally unsupported. When building docker images to run Oracle Database in a container, we try to get the smallest image possible. One way is to remove some subdirectories that we know will not be used. For example, the patch history is not used anymore once we have the required version. The dbca templates can be removed as soon as we have created the database… In this…
Backup on disk with RMAN is great. It’s fast, you can set as many channels as your platform can handle for faster backups. And you can restore as fast as you can read and write files on disk with these multiple channels. As far as you’re using Enterprise Edition because Standard Edition is stuck to a single channel. Disk space is very often limited and you’ll probably have to find another solution to keep backups…
By Franck Pachot . You find two different ‘runInstaller’ under an Oracle Home. The old one, the Oracle Universal Installer, in $ORACLE_HOME/oui/bin. And the new one, in $ORACLE_HOME directly. They have the same name but are completely different. The old one was used to install an Oracle Home from the installation media. But in 18c you don’t use it. It has been used by Oracle to build the Oracle Home image. Then you download and…
By Franck Pachot . When you have a Data Guard configuration, you want the application to connect to the right server, where the primary is, without taking too much time. The default TCP timeout is 1 minute which is too long. When you don’t want to configure a virtual IP address (VIP) you can simply list all the addresses in the client connection string. But then you need to reduce the timeout. A short duration…
By Franck Pachot . The Oracle database has always distinguished two types of workloads: transactional (OLTP) and datawarehouse (VLDB, DWH, DSS, BI, analytics). There is the same idea in the managed Oracle Cloud with two autonomous database services. To show how this is old, here is how they were defined in the Oracle7 Tuning Book: The definition has not changed a lot. But the technology behind DSS/DWH has improved. Now, with In-Memory Column Store, Smart…
By Franck Pachot . I’ll present about join methods at POUG and DOAG. I’ll show how the different join methods work in order to better understand them. The idea is to show Nested Loops, Hash Join, Sort Merge Join, Merge Join Cartesian on the same query. I’ll run a simple join between DEPT and EMP with the USE_NL, USE_HASH, USE_MERGE and USE_MERGE_CARTESIAN hints. I’ll show the execution plan, with SQL Monitoring in text mode. And…
