Blog Aggregator - Amardeep Sidhu

Let’s start our series on the Non Technical Art of Being a Successful DBA by covering the art of good documentation. Although the importance of a well thought out and detailed documentation library is blatantly obvious, creating documentation is the task most often postponed by an overworked DBA unit.

In keeping with the theme of my most recent post, I just couldn’t stop laughing at Tom’s most recent response to a question about recursive sql.

One of the benefits of my 20-year career (I think) is that most of the jobs I have held can be described as somewhat “unforgiving”, shall we say… What these jobs taught me is that I needed more than just technical expertise to become successful in my chosen profession. I quickly learned that becoming proficient at the various disciplines I will be discussing in upcoming blogs was just as challenging to me as honing my technical skill sets.

I’ve been able to learn from my mistakes and make changes in my technical and non-technical approach to database administration to overcome my shortcomings. I’d like to cover some of my personal best practices that have made my life as a DBA more productive and my customers and co-workers happier.

QUESTION

Hi Robert,

I don’t understand the meaning of any of the items on the query plan.

Is there some document that would explain what they are? If there is, where can I get it?

Thanks.

ANSWER

That’s the best kind of question. Instead of sending me a query plan and asking me to interpret it for you, you’re asking me for the means to do it yourself. Which is good because there is so

This morning someone passed me a link to “The Eight Fallacies of Distributed Computing”. Looks pretty accurate. I’d say that many of them are doubly true of RAC.

Just recieved the following email via one of the Oracle DBA lists I’m on:Hello,

I am XXX from Singapore.I am also an Oracle Certified Professional
(OCP).Could I know size of any database and what’s the size of SGA for
that Database and how long it take to complete Logical Backup and
Physical Backup.I will be awiting for ur reply.

Thanks in Advance
Regards
XXXXNames have been removed to protect

Oracle 10G introduced a new type of tablespace called a Bigfile Tablespace. When I read the 10G New Features manual and found out that you could create a terabyte sized datafile using the Bigfile option, I wanted to immediately find an environment that had enough free disk to allow me to create my first terabyte datafile. That was over a year ago and I still haven’t found a server with a free terabyte of disk that I can use for testing. Even though I haven’t made it into the terabyte datafile club yet, I thought I would discuss Bigfile tablespaces in this blog.

Simon Kelsey commeted on one of my earlier entries on this subject that x$kzsrt may be involved:SQL> select * from v$fixed_view_definition where view_name=’GV$PWFILE_USERS’;

VIEW_NAME
——————————
VIEW_DEFINITION
——————————————————————————–
GV$PWFILE_USERS
select inst_id,username,decode(sysdba,1,’TRUE’,'FALSE’), decode(

Last December I wrote about how to create a simple Perl application that connected to your Oracle database, it is high time that I showed you how to do the same in Java.

What You’ll Need

1. An Oracle database. Make sure you can tnsping your ORACLE_SID. Better yet, make sure you can connect with sqlplus.

2. Java. It’s a free download from Sun. I’m using 1.5, but I’ve tested this on several

QUESTION
=========
1) Does Oracle cache the SYSDBA password?
2) Is there a way to force it to re-read the password file to pick up a changed password without havi
ng to shutdown the
database?

RESEARCH
=========
Note.1029539.6 - UNIX How to Set up the Oracle Password File
Note 185703.1 - How to Avoid Common Flaws and Errors Using Passwordfile
Note 114384.1 - WIN: Checklist for Resolving