Blogs

I found a new graphing/charting tool that I am really digging. I'm letting Munin simmer for a while because it seems like its mostly geared towards being a network admin/reporting tool. I want graphs and I want to make them available on web pages. I'm not asking for much right?

If a browser based Flash solution is a possibility for you, check out XML/SWF Charts by Maani.US.

Writing your own spell checker or creating a page to generate suggestions for Web 2.0 domain names? You need a word list!

Check out this page for a pretty comprehensive collection of different types of lists:

http://wordlist.aspell.net/

-- Dave

If you haven't seen this optimizermagic.blogspot.com post already, check it out.

It covers the standard Execution Plan stuff, but also covers use of the dbms_xplan package including using dbms_xplan.display to format output and using dbms_xplan.display_cursor to see Bind Variables used to generate a plan!

Click here for Article

-- Dave

I'm currently investigating the new hotness of Munin to replace my old and busted gnuplot graphs. Munin looks much more involved than generating a format file for gnuplot and letting it fly, but it looks like Munin handles text on graphs waaaay better than gnuplot.

http://munin.projects.linpro.no/

Check out the purty examples here: Example Site.

-- Dave

I just downloaded and installed the latest version of ActiveState Perl for Win32. After installation I started to hit the laundry list of post-install tasks and noticed that 1) there is a new graphical Perl Package Manager and 2) I couldn't install DBI and DBD-Oracle because they were already installed! No more looking for the old ESoftmatic drivers!

There are some nerdy web comic artists out there. I think its a couple of years old but still gets a chuckle out of me. Click to get the full sized version...

-- Dave

I haven't look at Oracle's Remote Diagnostic Agent (RDA) tool in a couple of years. Back when we ran our systems on Windows I remember using a clunky version of RDA that looked like it was cobbled together with batch files and VB code.

What is RDA? From the Oracle website:

Want to use SubVersion but only have access to a box via SSH? Maybe you've got a cheap web hosting account and the host hasn't gotten with the program to officially offer SubVersion as a feature?

This post outlines a way to install SubVersion server and have your client access the repositories via SSH.

Pros:

• If you've got SSH access and rights to compile some code, you can get SubVersion running. I was able to do this on a cheap Bluehost.com account.

So I have mentioned before about the replication product that we use that is based on Archived Redo Logs (Golden Gate). Well sometimes the replication process abends before the RMAN backup. Since there is no communication between the two processes, RMAN happily removes archived logs that the replication process might need the next time it starts up.

Because of this we usually like to keep a few hours worth of archived logs hanging around.

Does this suck up disk space? Yes.
Is it worth it sacrifice some disk space in order to save us some DBA time? Absolutely.

I colleague turned me on to a helpful command the other night.

Where I work we have an archived log based replication system. It was way behind on processing and the replication process doesn't give any indication of what log its currently chewing on.

/sbin/fuser to the rescue!

• 1) 'cd' to a directory where you want to check the files
• 2) run '/sbin/fuser *' to discover what processes are touching files in the directory

[oracle@test /] cd /u01/app/oracle/oradata/TEST
[oracle@test TEST] ls redo*