Blog Aggregator - Amardeep Sidhu

Today I received a copy of the latest Newsletter of the Swiss Oracle Usergroup, which is a special issue for the 20th. aniversary of the foundation of teh Swiss Oracle Usergroup. Nice one!
 with my article on
Fast incremental backups with block change tracking in Oracle 10g.
This article is also available on my blog.
I am not so […]

My last post was about modifying $ORACLE_HOME/rdbms/admin/sprepins.sql which is the script that produces the statspack report.

Another change I make in my sprepins.sql is about the section “Top 5 Timed Events”. In 9.2 this section lists the wait events and CPU time and their percentages contributing to the database time. This way we can see which wait event caused most of the waits for that

Due to family reasons, I’ll be away from posting for a while.
Someone very close passed away and I had to travel extensively
and on short notice.
Will try to resume normality as soon as possible, folks.

Thanks to all who sent their condolences via other means or here.

While attempting to insert several rows into a table in our Oracle database, a colleague dutifully copied the exact ANSI/ISO SQL standard syntax for his purposes. Guess what happened?

INSERT INTO table (column1, column2)
VALUES (value1, value2), (value1, value2);

ERROR at line 1:
ORA-00933: SQL command not properly ended

Unlike some other databases (DB2, PostgreSQL, MySQL), Oracle doesn’t

There is an interesting interview with Mrs. Leng Tan, Oracle’s vice president of database manageability and diagnosability available in the web.
In the interview Mrs. Tan tell us about her vision of the self-managing database.
She talks about enhancements in Oracle Database 11g, such as the
– Automatic Database Diagnostic Monitor (ADDM) & RAC
– automatic sql tuning using sql […]

Along the side of my page, you’ll see my favourite Oracle blogs listed. I carefully maintain this list of fellow enthusiasts whose opinions and insights I most especially want to follow among the seemingly hundreds of Oracle blogs that are out there. Studying them, I think you’ll find that each of them share the same core qualities listed below.

1. Accuracy

Accuracy is an absolute must. Just

Before Oracle database 10g Oracle explicitly recommeded not to gather statistics on data dictionary objects.
As of Oracle database 10g Oracle explicitly does recommend to gather statistics on data dictionary objects. As you might know, there is an automatically created SCHEDULER JOB in every 10g database which runs every night and checks for object which have either no statistics […]

I’ve been an Oracle DBA since the days of 7.0.16 (on Netware, but that’s a story for a different day). I’d like to think I have a decent amount of experience with Oracle and it’s nuances. Sure, some things are quirky and don’t work the way you think they should, but that’s just getting used to the software. I can count on one hand the number of one-off patches I had to install over a base patchset in 7.x to 9.2. (I’m talking RDBMS here, not Oracle Apps.)

I specifically waited to move to 10g until it had been out a while. Our move to 10.2.0.3 has been quite disappointing. Sure, we did a lot of testing. But production is different than testing. After about 30 days of one db being live, we’ve had to install three one-off patches. And we just got slammed with two more in the last couple days to bring the total up to five. If we were on 10.2.0.0, I’d understand, but 10.2.0.3? Five freaking one-off patches.

C’mon Oracle, get your act together. We’re trying to run a business here.

I use STATSPACK extensively for comparing two time periods, comparing a time period to a baseline, monitoring trends and diagnosing performance problems. It provides important data about the database performance. The code producing statspack reports is open and you can modify it to your needs.

You run $ORACLE_HOME/rdbms/admin/spreport.sql to produce statspack reports. spreport.sql calls

We’re looking at implementing Dataguard as part of an implementation of Documentum (a document management system from EMC) and I have been asked to look at producing documentation and scripts for non-DBA users to use during a failover. The actual failover of the database itself will be handled by our DBAs, this is for the sys admins, network admins, application admins &c who may need to do