Amardeep Sidhu's Oracle blog

Last week i had a chance to conduct my life’s first interview. The guy was a DBA with 2 years of experience and it was supposed to be a telephonic call. I checked out his CV and wrote down around 8 questions on a paper, just to make sure that i myself don’t get confused during the interview  . So i called him in the evening and started with introduction and his present job profile. Then i started with the questions from the projects he had done. He was confident about the stuff he was handling and replied all the questions honestly, saying NO at points where he didn’t know or was not involved in something. One of such thing was testing the backups. He said there is no testing done as such.

In his CV he had written about Data Guard also. So i asked few data guard questions like what is the difference in working of physical and logical standby ? He was not aware about some of the data types not being supported in logical standby.

Overall he answered the questions pretty confidently and honestly. So at the end, i recommended his induction into the company

Happy Ending !

BTW from the first experience i can say that it feels good to be on the other side of table (or phone).

I don’t know a bit about Apache HTTP server but faced one issue in office…so thought about writing it here

We are having a 3 tier setup where Oracle Application Server 10g was there on AIX 5.3. It runs Apache HTTP server and we needed to access the files outside DocumentRoot. A bit of googling revealed that we could use Alias for that. Basically we need to add the following small piece of text to httpd.conf file:

Alias /test1/ "/home/sidhu/test1/"
<Directory "/home/sidhu/test1">
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride None
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>

Now we should be able to access the files in /home/sidhu/test1 by hitting the following URL

http://server:port/test1/filename.html

PS: I couldn’t find the reason but it didn’t allow me to use word “reports” in the directory name.

Our application (3 tier, Front end Forms10g and back end 10gR2) provides user with a front end to refresh the mviews. That form has 2 columns showing mview name and the comment against it. Recently i saw that while opening this front end ORA-01403 NO DATA FOUND was being raised.

I opened the fmb and found that it was populating comments from DBA_TAB_COMMENTS. In 10g the comments against mviews are stored in DBA_MVIEW_COMMENTS unlike till 9i where it was in ALL_TAB_COMMENTS. So there was a little modification required.

BTW if you try to comment on the table (which is created with MVIEW) it won’t allow you to do so and instead raise ORA-12098: cannot comment on the materialized view.

So may be that little change needs to be done !

Just upgraded my blog to WordPress 2.6. There are few new things. This video from WordPress summarizes the new stuff:

Aman made me aware about not being able to post any comments on my blog. I checked and found that everything was fine with Firefox but in IE 6 it was not possible to post a comment. I was using Did You Pass Math plugin to stop comment spam and it had some problems in IE. I disabled it for the time being and installed WP-SpamFree. Everything seems to be fine except that it doesn’t allow very small comments and i haven’t been able to figure out where that setting is ? (yea…i am really poor with this web stuff ).

The display of single post in IE is still broken. Some issues with the theme i am using, i guess. Will try to fix that.

If you have any difficulty in reading or commenting on the post, please let me know at amardeepsidhu at gmail dot com.

Thanks