This week started with diagnosing an interesting situation that didn’t seem to be talked about much (maybe because it is a relatively “old” problem–explanation in a minute), so I thought I’d share the experience for everyone’s benefit. The situation involves a 10.2.0.1 (<gasp>) database on Linux 32-bit RHEL 4. The database is in flashback mode [...]

I’m posting this because apparently it hasn’t happened to anyone else except me (heavens knows I searched for help!). The root cause certainly wasn’t obvious to me, so hopefully, this will help someone (maybe me, once I forget about it). All I needed to do was install a default Oracle Database 11g R1 environment with [...]

Every year it seems like I get part way through the Oracle OpenWorld event and comment that next year, I need to be less busy so I can enjoy the event a little more and attend others’ presentations more than giving my own. And yet it seems that somewhere between then and the following year, [...]

As one of the organizers of the IOUG RAC Attack! event, I may have a slightly partial viewpoint, but I think the event overall went very well. The hands-on lab was especially popular and I think participants in the hands-on lab all got to learn at least a few new things. If you’ve been to [...]

Many of you have (hopefully) heard of the IOUG RAC Attack! event taking place yesterday and today in Chicago. We had a great first day yesterday with many great technical sessions and the first-day lab guinea pigs didn’t find many bugs or issues in completing the lab exercises and tests. Overall, the format is working [...]

Sometimes I think that people think of security, especially database security, as a domain for the highly-skilled consultant. However, sometimes it is the most basic little things that need attention and it doesn’t require a high-priced, highly skilled consultant to figure it out. Case in point: I recently arrived at a new customer site to [...]

The Oracle RAC SIG and the IOUG are co-sponsoring the IOUG “RAC Attack” event and if you haven’t yet heard about it, you might want to check it out. The event runs for 2 days, August 4-5, in downtown Chicago and will bring together some excellent presenters as well as the opportunity for hands-on experiences [...]

I’ve been to more than one RAC customer site and seen several different ways to misconfigure the listeners for a RAC cluster. This post describes how I usually configure the listeners and their associated instance parameters normally. This really has nothing to do with TAF or connection load balancing, those those features may not work [...]

I recently had an opportunity to do a deeper dive into a performance issue related to the performance of a PIPELINED function. The results weren’t quite what I had expected, so I thought they may be of general interest. As with many performance issues, the issues encountered here are likely data- and database-specific. This was [...]

For those that didn’t bother to install the OS, Oracle or other DST patches (to handle the adjusted DST change schedule) last year and elected to just change the time on your servers by hand twice a year, get ready to do that again this weekend. Personally, I’d rather burn two whole regular work days [...]