Recently, during one of my missions, a client asked me to give him access rights to the SQL Server logs from SSMS to his application managers. As you know, you must grant the role “securityadmin” to have such rights. However, with this role you can also manage logins, CREATE DATABASEs and change passwords.

These are “too many rights” for an IT manager, but there seems to be no other way ... or is there?

Even if we (dbi services) usually advise to setup Oracle Enterprise Linux for Oracle deployments on Linux, it might appear that some customers still prefer other certified distributions such as SuSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES). This post describes the configuration of the tmpfs filesystem size on SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 11.0 (SLES 11, without any service pack) in order to use the Oracle 11.2 Automatic Memory Management feature (AMM) through the Oracle instance parameter memory_target.

A few days ago, the dbi services consultants had the pleasure to welcome Oracle guru Martin Bach for a three day Oracle Grid infrastructure training. As many of you probably know, Martin Bach is an OakTable member and the author of 'Oracle Database 11g RAC on Linux'. He also is Oracle Certified Master and Oracle ACE.

Le marché du Database Activity Monitoring (DAM) devenant de plus en plus important avec des produits tels que Imperva, Guardium ou Sentrigo, je me suis intéressé au produit Oracle Database Firewall, qu'Oracle présente comme un substitut aux différents acteurs du marché des DAMs.

I have seen at a customer that SQL Server's policy doesn't follow Microsoft's recommendations about antivirus and databases (kb 309422), such as excluding *.mdf,*.ndf and *.ldf files. In addition, there is no Oracle policy in case of Forefront Endpoint Protection 2010 (known as FEP 2010).

I have decided to create generic databases policies for FEP (optimized by dbi services) adapted for all SQL Server and Oracle environments.

For a few months, I have been testing the new  SQL Server 2012 (codename Denali) and I was very surprised from the DMVs of this version. Dynamic management views (DMVs) return server state information that can be used to monitor the health of a server instance, diagnose problems and tune performance. I will focus on some DMVs which are very interesting for a DBA.

A few days ago I downloaded the Cloud Control 12c binaries for Linux x86_64 from Oracle Technet. My friend Hervé Schweitzer, configured an OEL 5.7 VM for test purposes and I was quite eager to install this new software. I checked the OS settings, the required parameters, etc. - everything was fine. My OMS repository database (11.2.0.3) was ready. Unfortunately, as soon as I started the installer, it directly crashed.

My colleague Hervé Schweitzer reported a very interesting issue to me. It is about the usage of Grid Control 11g while monitoring the available space on an Oracle database – in our case a 10.2.0.3 target database. This post continues my last post about the free space management in a tablespace in relation to the recycle bin management.

Many people do not know how to manage multiple database instances and Integration Services, while facing the end of life for Integration Services reference instance. Let's take a small example with Integration Service installed using instance "TOTO", which comes end of line. We will have a look to SSIS information transfer to a second instance "TITI". This article proposes a small working method to transfer these information correctly. We start with the folders transfer and then get an eye on SSIS packages transfer.

Last week at a customer, I used DBUA to upgrade an Oracle database from 10g to 11g and the migration ran successfully. However, the day after I got a monitoring message that the diag directory is growing very rapidly.

This post describes some basic Oracle database management issues database administrators might be confronted with. It is about space management and differences observed while monitoring the available space from several point of views (tablespace/datafile) in Grid Control 11g. It also relates and explains an issue (ORA-01652) observed on pre 11.2 Oracle releases (targets) concerning the tablespace/datafile space management and the recycle bin.

Lors de mon activité de consultant, et suite à un bug qui n'affiche pas correctement le nombre de CPU (OMS 10.2.0.5, agent 10.2.0.5 et linux x86_64), je me suis intéressé à la manière dont Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control (OEM GC) récupérait les informations de mémoire et de CPU sur les différents hôtes surveillés par ce dernier.

It's already quite a while that I posted my last article on the Oracle basics, so I decided to take some times in the train to continue this small serie. This time, I'm going to speak about one of the root of Oracle administration, starting and shutting down a database server.

SQL Server 2008 has PowerShell and I am going to speak about the way they work together. However, some basics on PowerShell are needed to get the big picture. So let's start with an introduction to the PowerShell technology.

Certaines requêtes DDL offrent la possibilité de ne pas générer des enregistrements dans les redo log via la clause NOLOGGING. Le mode nologging permet donc dans certains cas d'accélérer des traitements, ceux-ci pouvant facilement être récupérables à travers des mécanismes externes à la base de données. Ce mode peut cependant avoir des conséquences fâcheuses comme nous allons le constater et ce pas uniquement dans le contexte de configurations comme Oracle DataGuard.

After my last post - Stop looking for Oracle and MySQL documentation: use the dbi services firefox add-ons! - some of you asked me for firefox search add-ons for Oracle Fusion Middleware (http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E17904_01/index.htm). This add-on will provide you a fast a reliable way to find easily what you are looking for in the official Oracle Fusion and Grid Control documentation.

Are you often trying to find functionalities or error codes in Oracle 9iR2, 10gR2, 11gR2, or MySQL documentation? Of course, each time you are looking for this documentation you are finding unofficial documentation which is never corresponding to the version you are looking for...

Recently, at a customer site, I had an Oracle Data Pump error which was not easy to localize. Here is the error I received during a DBIOWNER schema export with Data Pump:

Processing object type SCHEMA_EXPORT/TABLE/STATISTICS/TABLE_STATISTICS
ORA-39125: Worker unexpected fatal error in KUPW$WORKER.UNLOAD_METADATA while calling DBMS_METADATA.FETCH_XML_CLOB [TABLE_STATISTICS]
ORA-00942: table or view does not exist

According to the Oracle documentation, the dbms_compression procedure allows to determine the compression ratio for a table without creating it. Let's have a look at it.

Last week I encountered a problem while installing Oracle 11g R2 on AIX 6.1 TL06 SP2. I met all the PreReqs of the installation document, but at the end of the installation process, I got the following error message:

Error in invoking target 'agent nmb nmo nmhs' of makefile ins_emagent.mk'