For those of you who did not attend yesterday’s (November 9th, 2011) NOCOUG (Northern California Oracle User Group - http://nocoug.org) meeting, you missed a good one!  Here’s a quick recap of what I saw interesting to me:
The keynote by Feurstein Coding Therapy for Database Professionals actually had some good food for thought. Some of [...]

Why databases aren’t really fast

When most Oracle databases are inspected to see exactly what they are doing, most often it is disk I/O access. Databases read and write a lot of data, and because magnetic drive technology is slow, often the database spends a majority of its time waiting for disk read/write requests to complete.

How [...]

Preface

There is an often overlooked issue when people design new databases; how to accurately store dates and times. Often, little or no thought is given to the best way to do this.
Date and time columns in a database are often used to answer key business questions, such as how long does it take [...]

Introduction

I have mentioned before that the best way to insure Oracle RDBMS uptime, is to create and maintain a physical standby database. There simply is no more reliable way to insure uptime for the Oracle RDBMS.
Creating a standby database involves these steps:

Creating a standby controlfile from the primary database & transferring it to [...]

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 [...]