Knowledge increases exponentially. Today, you probably own more books than great universities of times past—Cambridge University owned less than two hundred books in the fifteenth century. First came the invention of writing, then alphabets, then paper, then the printing press, then mechanization. Each step caused an exponential increase in the collective human knowledge. In our generation, Al Gore invented the internet and the last barriers to the spread of knowledge have been broken. Today, everybody has the ability to contribute, communicate, and collaborate. We are all caught up in a tsunami, an avalanche, a conflagration, a veritable explosion of knowledge for the betterment of humankind. This is the blog of the good folks at Database Specialists, a brave band of Oracle database administrators from the great state of California. We bid you greeting, traveler. We hope you find something of value on these pages and we wish you good fortune in your journey.

NOCOUG November, 2011 report

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 [...]

Standby database creation of VLDBs

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 [...]

Simplifying storage management; using fewer tablespaces

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 [...]

Sometimes it’s the little things.

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 [...]