I'm trying not to scare my users off with endless rows and columns of numbers. I have an app that analyzes memory usage and swap space usage of some of our servers. Instead of throwing all kinds of computer sciency '65535' and '32767' numbers at my user I decided to create a small function to return a bar graph widget.

Here is an example of the graph in use:

Here is a function that will return the HTML for the widget:

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION GetGraph (p_value IN NUMBER, p_total IN NUMBER)

If you use Solaris Zones sometimes it is nice to be able to know the name of the global/parent machine the zone is running on.

Using 'arp -a' you can get information about network interfaces shared by the hosts on 1 machine.

I'm not going to give a whole full blown script to do this as our naming standards are probably different than yours but you can see the steps you may need to follow below to get the info:

Here is how to see all the network interfaces for you current host:

HOSTNAME=`hostname`
/u01/app/oracle >arp -a | grep $HOSTNAME

Now that I am working in an environment where I am responsible for more database instances it seems like data is always moving around. Machines are being retired, platforms are changing, all kinds of fun stuff.

I often have to move using regular old Oracle import/export utilities. These utilities aren't the best at some of the more esoteric Oracle features so some 'backfilling' of objects or permissions may be required.

Here are some queries that are helpful when moving a schema that has Oracle Java Virtual Machine (JVM) Dependencies:

I added a new tutorial to my collection of SQL Developer information. The tutorial covers creation of a HTML Custom Report for SQL Developer.

Here is an example of the report running and showing 1 long operation (click to enlarge):

If you would like to see how this is done the tutorial is available here.

--Dave

I had some trouble adding a new database to an OEM Grid installation this weekend.

I didn't find too many references to the above error so I wanted to post about it here. Of course Metalink was all doom and gloom. Note 745795.1 says to stop the agent, run fsck on the AGENT_HOME filesystem, then start the agent. After that you should be able to add new targets.

targets.xml lives in AGENT_HOME/sysman/emd. At the OS prompt I changed to that directory I was able to create new files there but for some reason the above error kept popping up when Grid tried to save a new target.

Here is a link to a Cary Millsap presentation -- a must read for developers who interact with Oracle Databases. This article can save you some time and heartache!

http://method-r.com/papers/file/10-for-developers-making-friends-with-th...

From the Abstract:

PuTTY is a free implementation of Telnet and SSH for Win32 and Unix platforms along with an xterm terminal emulator. It is one of my must-have utilities that I use when administrating Unix boxes.

If you are using PuTTY on Windows you should check out PuTTY Session Manager. It is a utility that acts as a 'Launcher' for PuTTY sessions. It reads your configured saved sessions and allows you to organize them into folders and launch multiple PuTTY sessions at once.

You can download the latest version of PuTTY Session Manager here: http://puttysm.sourceforge.net/

When copying or moving databases it is nice to know if features are used or not. Sure you can always query DBA_REGISTRY to see what has been set up on the source databases, but is it always necessary to install everything that shows up in DBA_REGISTRY on your target systems?

Intermedia is a feature that can be a particular pain to install and configure.

You may notice a new look. I left WordPress in the dust and have adopted Drupal Content Management software.

For 2 years I had problems trying to get Perl, shell scripts, and PL/SQL code to show up correctly in WordPress. Once I had a problem licked another one would show up.

The new software is and is light on blogging features but overall is much better software for organizing the type of data that I present.

All blog posts from the old blog have been migrated to the new site.

After using many different tools to generate DDL I usually end up back at DBMS_METADATA. DBMS_METADATA is an Oracle supplied package that became available with Oracle 9.

DBMS_METADATA is an API that can be used to generate the DDL of most any object in an Oracle database.

It is most handy for getting Table or Index DDL but there is a complete list of objects that DBMS_METADATA handles here.

Table Example