If you are getting odd abends on your Golden Gate replicats due to trail file corruption, make sure you visit your filesystem options for the filesystem where the manager process writes the trail files.

Long story short is that we were finding large swaths of Zeroes appearing in our trail files. Using logdump I could see the header of the trail file was OK, but somewhere down the line a valid record would be followed by straight up zeroes. Lots of them. I verified this using logdump and a hex editor.

I find Encryption is blamed for a lot of performance issues so wanted to find out for myself how much of a performance hit we might be taking for common operations. There ain't no free lunch. Adding any extra processing or manipulation to an operation is going to add time to that operation.

If you have clients connecting to a server and the clients don't specify a specific encryption algorithm in SQLNET.ENCRYPTION_TYPES_CLIENT, be aware that the order of the algorithms listed in SQLNET.ORA on the server side matters...

If you don't specify SQLNET.ENCRYPTION_TYPES_CLIENT from a 12.2 client configuration, a SQLNet client side trace shows the following possibilities, the choices are listed from most secure to least secure:

I've been diving into more OEM Automation and collecting information here.

While the Oracle example scripts are a great way to find out how to interact with OEM via the emcli and python/jython interface, there doesn't seem to be much info about how this all gets done. You feed a Python script to emcli and magic happens right?

Adeesh Fulay has a great intro article here.

After 4 unexplained crashes and a stalled Sev 1 SR I was pulling my hair out. Particularly vexing was the fact that a user was running a distributed query which was crashing a remote database.

I isolated the 4 crash times for the remote database and I wanted to see what users and SQLs were running on the local database up until the crash time. So for a crash happening around 11:16 I would use the following query. Note that access to these queries requires licensing of Diagnostic and Tuning packs :

To troubleshoot a problem I needed to copy a database's worth of files out of an ASM diskgroup and onto the filesystem. I searched around and checked help for ASMCMD assuming there was a recursive option. I found references to one in some places on the interwebs, even official Oracle references to it like Unable To Copy Directory Using ASMCMD Cp -r Command (Doc ID 829040.1) but struck out when trying to do this on 11g and 12c ASM installs.

I recently came across a legacy database that was using Oracle FLOAT datatype for Primary and Foreign Keys. As the database needed some attention I was asked to get data types in order and get rid of the FLOATs in favor of NUMBER data types.

I've gotten a lot of mileage out of my old SQL Developer Archive Log Count Heat Map report that I created in SQL Developer. I was recently asked to estimate the amount of redo that might be sent to a DataGuard standby. Searching The Google for this and I found some methods for calculating Network Bandwidth but I wanted to start with raw redo generated from an instance using information from v$archived_log.

I was recently asked to update the EBS Plugin from 12.1.0.2.0 to 12.1.0.3.0 in my Cloud Control 12 setup. During the prereq steps I got an error: "EM-04050: The selected plug-ins cannot be deployed on the Management Server because there are some Management Agents on which incompatible versions of these plug-ins have been deployed."
Unfortunately no other information was given. I knew there must be some old versions of the Agent plugin floating around out there but didn't have an easy way to find them. Oracle Support to the rescue... Run the following against your SYSMAN schema:

This second vizualization is more of a workflow proof of concept compared to some novel visualization but I can guarantee you haven't seen the SCOTT.EMP table like this before. I have wanted to combine my two favorite tools for a while. Here is how you can drive a d3.js visualization directly from a SQL Developer custom report.