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.  [...]

Recently trial restore attempts of a large RAC 11gR2 database from tape resulted in  ”could not locate pieces of backup set key”  and intermittent ORA-01861 errors.   Puzzled that the backup logs were clean but the restore failed, we dug further and located the specific missing backuppieces to discover they were deleted:
SELECT start_time, pieces, status [...]

Here is an interesting issue I came across recently after an upgrade from 11.1 -> 11.2.  This particular database has 15 development / test / qa copies and approximately 1/3 of the database is application auditing data that is generally not needed in the non-prod copies.  So we skip the AUDITDATA tablespace during the duplication which makes the clonings [...]

Happy Valentines Day!
Many DBAs are aware that the Automatic Workload Repository (AWR) including Active Session History (ASH) is only available to users licensed for Enterprise Edition with the Diagnostic Pack.  This is invaluable data for conducting performance tuning based on recent historical data but off limits unless you are properly licensed.  Those 10g users who [...]

My initial goal was simply to create a test ASM environment on my PC running Oracle Enterprise Linux 5 and Oracle Database 11.2.0.2. The first step was easy…download and install Grid Infrastructure 11.2.0.1. This went without a problem until I ran the ASM Configuration Assistant (asmca) and realized that ASM couldn’t see any available [...]

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 [...]