Introduction

Recently, I was doing some work with OpenOffice (OO), and I noticed a part of OO that I wasn’t aware of - the Base database. Base is similar to Microsoft Access, though it of course lacks some features and polish. It does come with the ability to interact with several different databases, the Oracle RDBMS among them. It [...]

Every DBA should include Datapump, Oracle’s cross-platform data migration utility, in his toolbox, especially since the legacy export utility is slated for obsolescence.  Datapump expdp has a variety of uses, from database upgrades to QA refreshes and logical backups.  A great place to start is with this script which has everything you need to do [...]

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; [...]

getting started with Statspack for performance tuning

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 [...]

If you are familiar with Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) on 10g, you have likely seen output from crsstat that looks something like this.  This is from a 10.2.0.4 two node RAC cluster.  Notice that each instance is listed (RACDB1 and RACDB3) as well as the database itself (RACDB).
 
[oracle@node15 ~]$ crsstat
HA Resource                                   Target     State
———–                                   ——     [...]

 SQLT, also known as SQLTXPLAIN is a tool provided by Oracle Server Technologies Center of Expertise that can be used to diagnose why a particular SQL statement is performing poorly.  It is not like AWR or Statspack which provide a system-wide view of performance.  SQLT is very focused and works on one SQL statement at [...]

The Remote Diagnostic Agent (RDA) is an Oracle-provided diagnostic tool that captures data about your database environment and packages it into a web page report. When submitting a Service Request to Oracle Support, you will often be asked to run the Remote Diagnostic Agent (RDA) and upload the results.  This allows the support analyst to [...]

I recently installed Oracle Grid Control 11g on my linux workstation. Below are the steps that I went through to get it working.  Prior to installing Control, I had already installed Grid Infrastructure 11.2.0.2 and Oracle Database 11.2.0.2 and created a database to be used as the Grid Control repository.
Step 1) Download the Grid Control software:
- [...]

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 [...]