Have you found that daily full database backups are becoming impractical for your growing databases?  Incremental backups are no longer the exception in some shops.  But with the increased complexity comes a greater responsibility for thoroughly planning and testing your backup solution.  Testing a more complicated backup solution makes for a more complicated validation procedure.  [...]

Introduction

Early in my career, when I was first introduced to Unix, my mentor at the time recommended that I use a text editor called emacs, but also learn how to use vi as well. I personally like both editors, but I prefer emacs for coding. Over the decades, I’ve continued to use emacs; [...]

Stacy, who is a DBA, has an interesting problem; the company that she works for just acquired another company. The newly-acquired company needs readonly SQL access to a table owned by the main application schema, called ‘HQ’. The newly-acquired company will be writing stored procedures in their own schema, which is called ‘FIELDOFFICE’, and these [...]

Keeping your Oracle database software up to date is a critical and time-consuming task for DBAs.  For many years now, Oracle has been releasing Critical Patch Updates on a quarterly basis.  These patches, as the name implies, contain critical updates to the software, often released in response to a newly found security vulnerability.  More recently, [...]

I was recently reminded of the chaos that can be caused by an unindexed foreign key column when there are corresponding updates or deletes from the parent table. To illustrate this particular situation here is some example DDL
CREATE TABLE parent_t
(
parent_id INTEGER NOT NULL,
parent_name VARCHAR2(30) NULL,
CONSTRAINT parent_t_pk PRIMARY KEY (parent_id)
);

INSERT INTO parent_t SELECT object_id, object_name FROM [...]

As a Remote DBA over the years, I have implemented auditing at a number of customers and have found it to be easy to implement, low overhead and very useful.  In my opinion, every production database should have at least basic auditing enabled.  In this blog, I will give a quick overview of the different [...]

I have seen many times over the years where a production database will experience performance problems that are caused by Adhoc queries running and consuming too many resources.  These will often be from developers trying to debug a problem, or someone in Operations trying to get a custom report, or from some other source.  In [...]

Some database migrations are still performed using export / import (either datapump or the original export / import); for both of these the optimizer statistics are preserved during the export / import but there are a few subtleties to be aware of. For example, if you run dbms_stats.gather_schema_stats shortly after an import you will typically [...]

Thanks to some feedback from Iggy Fernandez, editor of the NoCOUG Journal , I discovered that I was slightly off on a point in my white paper “Thirteen Ways To Make Your Oracle Database More Secure“. In that paper, I wrote about the danger of passwords on the command line being visible by someone else [...]

This is something that I learned recently that made me wonder why I never knew it previously.
Over the years, I have had many occasions when I needed to kill a database session and would
use the “alter system kill session ’sid,serial#’” syntax. This works fine for the most part.
The database session will show a status of [...]