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.

Understanding Oracle Redo

Jay Stanley, Sr. Staff Consultant

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.

September 7th, 2010 | Tags: , , | Category: Best Practices, Database Backups, Database Tuning, High Availability | Leave a comment

Always the low cost…

Terry Sutton, Director of Managed Services

  may be the tagline for a major retailer, but it’s not always a reliable term in Oracle. A question at a panel session here at the Hotsos Symposium made me think of a situation with a client just last week.
 
Can you tell which of these execution plans is better?
 
SELECT STATEMENT Optimizer=ALL_ROWS (Cost=36111)
  HASH (GROUP [...]

March 10th, 2009 | Tags: , , | Category: Database Tuning | Leave a comment