oracle

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.

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.

In past Oracle versions you may have used USERENV() to access some of this information. The information is now available in the 'USERENV' namespace of the sys_context function.

http://www.techonthenet.com/oracle/functions/sys_context.php

Here is a useful example. When monitoring the current in-flight SQL it is nice to exclude the current query from the results:

I've been doing some speed testing of rebuilding indexes. I have been adding the PARALLEL clause to my alter index ... rebuild; statements but it has been suggested to me to also run multiple indexes rebuilds in parallel. So if I am wanting to run 4 rebuilds in parallel I could try to make 4 .SQL scripts with the appropriate commands. But what if one finishes early? Then I will be left with only 3 running. Here is a solution:

1) Create a table to hold the list of indexes you want to rebuild:

create table rebuild_indexes (