oracle

Came upon this post during my travels. Jonathan Lewis reveals how to write a string to the Alert Log, Current Session Trace File, or Both. Also a few misc functions are included.

dbms_system.ksdwrt(1,'test')
writes to alert log

dbms_system.ksdwrt(2,'test')
writes to session's trace file

dbms_system.ksdwrt(3,'test')
writes to both

see also
dbms_system.ksddt - writes a date-time stamp
dbms_system.ksdind(N) - indents text using ":' characters

I recently fielded a question about getting data out of Oracle quickly. Without much detail on the systems involved here is my answer:

Question:

I need to migrate data from Oracle to MySQL quickly (in less than 1 day). What are my options?

My answer:

Oracle does not supply an out-of-the-box unload utility.

Keep in mind without comprehensive info about your environment (oracle version? server platform? how much data? what datatypes?) everything here is YMMV and you would want to give it a go on your system for performance and timing.

This script will generate dbv commands into a shell script and then execute the shell script.

run-dbv.sql:

set head off
set lines 200
set feedback off
set define off
spool dbv.sh

select 'dbv file='||name||' blocksize = '||block_size||
' LOGFILE=FILE-'||FILE#||'.LOG' from v$datafile;
spool off

host chmod 755 dbv.sh
spool dbv_results.log
host ./dbv.sh
spool off

Output will be created as separate log files. You can run it and review results like this:

$ sqlplus "/ as sysdba" @run-dbv.sql

I ran across Orion in a Kevin Closson blog post. From the OTN site:

"ORION (Oracle I/O Calibration Tool) is a standalone tool for calibrating the I/O performance for storage systems that are intended to be used for Oracle databases. The calibration results are useful for understanding the performance capabilities of a storage system, either to uncover issues that would impact the performance of an Oracle database or to size a new database installation. Since ORION is a standalone tool, the user is not required to create and run an Oracle database. "