In the Oracle RDBMS, one of the most frequently misunderstood concepts I see in doing remote database administration, is the role and importance of redo.

Sooner or later, every DBA will need to address how to manage storage capacity in their databases. Nearly every database needs more storage as time goes on, and without attention, the database will fill up, and new data/inserts can’t happen. It’s been my experience that bad space mangement is the root cause of a high [...]

Over the years of experience with Oracle databases, there is one feature, far more than any others, that has proved itself again and again in the real world; I speak of course, of the Oracle Physical Standby feature.

As Oracle consultants we often get caught up in the esoteric areas of performance, such as contention, complex execution plans, and obscure parameters.  But we forget that sometimes it’s the little things that count, many of which we learned in the DBA101 phase of our careers.
I was reminded of this recently at one of our [...]

As a database administer, it’s very important not to forget one of our main responsibilities; that being insuring that the database(s) we’re responsible for, can be recovered in the case of an emergency.  Read my short presentation here, for thoughts on this important topic.
The Importance of Testing Database Recovery, by Jay Stanley

We are frequently asked by clients whether they should upgrade to Oracle 11g. Oracle Corporation’s communications understandably promote using the latest version, and tout its new features. The answer to the question isn’t a simple one, and (like so much else in our world), “it depends”.
One of the traditional answers given by people in the [...]

 
Most Oracle professionals who focus on performance optimization are familiar with Method-R, which Cary Millsap tirelessly promotes.  Briefly stated, this method focuses on a specific process which is not performing satisfactorily.  We trace the process and see precisely what the process is doing.
 
We recently had a problem in which client connections were failing about half [...]