Database Administration & Monitoring

Learning and troubleshooting: Follow the path

By Franck Pachot . You query a simple table to get its rows. Did you ever ask yourself how oracle knows which blocks to read from disk? Let's question everything and follow the path to dictionary, bootstrapping, spfile,... up to(…)

Extended clusters and asm_preferred_read_failure_groups

By Franck Pachot . When you have 2 sites that are not too far you can build an extended cluster. You have one node on each site. And you can also use ASM normal redundancy to store data on each(…)

DB_FLASHBACK_RETENTION_TARGET may hang your database

By Franck Pachot . DB_FLASHBACK_RETENTION_TARGET is set to keep enough flashback logs to be able to flashback database within the specified retention window. But it's supposed to be a target only, meaning that on space pressure some files can be(…)

Which patchset for 12.1.0.2 ?

By Franck Pachot . When you want to download the latest patchset of the latest release, 12.1.0.2, you can find two patchsets referenced: 17694377 and 21419221. The short answer is: download p21419221 and add latest(…)

SYS password on Oracle Cloud Service managed database

By Franck Pachot . When you create a DBaaS on the Oracle Cloud services you have to provide an administration password in the database configuration form. You do not need a password to connect to the VM. You use SSH(…)

Data Guard as a Service

By Franck Pachot . A 'Data Guard' checkbox is available for a long time on the Oracle Public Cloud Database as a Service, but it's only for a few days that it does something: create a service with an database(…)

A near zero downtime, near zero impact major release upgrade using Oracle GoldenGate

In this post I'd like to share what we did for a customer who had the following requirements: Use Oracle GoldenGate Upgrade an Oracle 10.2.0.4 database running on Solaris 10 SPARC to Oracle 12.1.0.2 running on Exadata Keep(…)

SQL Server 2016: new tools management strategy

A lot of customer’s feedbacks are about difficulties to find easily SQL Server tools. Now, it is easier… 😉 A unified web page for SQL Server Tools The first good news is that Microsoft unified and gathered these tools(…)

A look at PostgreSQL 9.6 – psql gexec

This little, but powerful, enhancement that it made it in PostgreSQL 9.6 is probably nothing a application can benefit of. But it can be huge saving for people doing maintenance operations on a PostgreSQL instance. It is(…)

A look at PostgreSQL 9.6 – Killing idle transactions automatically

A common issue with databases: The guy at floor 2 did some work on the database and then rashly left for lunch because the lady on floor 1 is already waiting for him. Unfortunately he did not close his transaction(…)