If you are experimenting with gathering system statistics it might be helpful to archive your current settings and any intermediate settings you come up with along the way. There is a way to save stats to a table using DBMS_STATS.CREATE_STAT_TABLE and gathering with DBMS_STATS.GATHER into…
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 the past few weeks I have been using the TriVaDis eXtended Tracefile Analysis Tool as a replacement for TKPROF. TKPROF is available with all Oracle installations but is has some drawbacks. Early versions of TKPROF do not provide any information about bind variables. It…
I was recently looking for old (not ancient, just old) install media to support a database migration. The usual collection of download links on OTN usually just has the last 2 releases. If you need older versions (in this case 9i) then hit up the…
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…
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…
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…
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…
I'm still an Application Express beginner -- I'm used to web development that is closer to the HTML. While I am getting used to Apex's Regions and Templates sometimes you just need to build some HTML on your own. I have found some Apex helper…
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…
Its time to test some IO. I have used OraBM/OraStress in the past to throw a load at an Oracle server. (DMann 08-APR-2015 Note: Hammerora has been renamed HammerDB and is available at : http://www.hammerdb.com/ - This post may not be up to date with…
Yup. I'm tired of hearing this from users. Since I changed jobs from a software development house to a more focused DBA role I hear this a lot. As much as I'de like to just log into their app server and comb through logs to…
I had a user that called me about jobs not running on a 9i database. I logged in and found a complete mess. Broken jobs, some DBMS_JOB calls would hang, jobs existed for users that no longer existed (I didn't even know that was possible!).
So I've got a backup script that runs a BACKUP DATABASE followed by a BACKUP ARCHIVELOG command. The BACKUP ARCHIVELOG FROM TIME command runs to collect all the archived logs created since the beginning of the Level 0. The BACKUP ARCHIVELOG FROM TIME command fails…
No, not old customers, old Oracle client software! I was recently asked to write a ON LOGON trigger for an 8.1.7.2 database (don't ask, it is a very old system). Wrote the trigger, tested it, works no problem. It is never that simple. I get…