Database management

Resize your Oracle datafiles down to the minimum without ORA-03297

By Franck Pachot . Your datafiles have grown in the past but now you want to reclaim as much space as possible, because you are short on filesystem space, or you want to move some files without moving empty(…)

What’s the consequence of NOLOGGING loads?

By Franck Pachot . When you load data in direct-path and have the NOLOGGING attribute set, you minimize redo generation, but you take the risk, in case of media recovery, to loose the data in the blocks that you’ve(…)

How to remap tablespaces using Oracle Import/Export Tool

Since Oracle 10g, Oracle provides a great tool to import and export data from databases: Data Pump. This tool offers several helpful options, particularly one that allows to import data in a different tablespace than the source database. This parameter(…)

Oracle 12.1.0.2.1 Set to Join Conversion

By Franck Pachot . Recently, I described the Partial Join Evaluation transformation that appeared last year in Oracle 12c. I did it as an introduction for another transformation that appeared long time ago in 10.1.0.3 but was not(…)

How to find the SQL Server Management Pack in the SCOM database

While working on a customer project, I needed to retrieve the SQL Server SCOM Management Pack version. Unfortunately, the SCOM team took a while to answer and as I am the DBA, I have access to the SCOM databases.

Deploying a SQL Server database to Azure

Deploying an SQL Server database to a Windows Azure virtual machine is a feature introduced with SQL Server 2014. It can be useful for an organization  that wants to reduce its infrastucture management, simplify the deployment, or have a(…)

SQL Server 2014: DBCC CHECKDB and ReFS support

Have you noticed an interesting behavior with SQL Server 2014 when you are running a dbcc checkdb command? If not, you should have a look at this blog post. I discovered it completely by accident during some tests. If(…)

SQL Server: DBCC CHECKDB does not detect corruption

During my audits at customer places, it still happens very often to find SQL Server databases with page verification option configured to “none”. I always alert my customers on this configuration point because it can have an impact on the(…)

PostgreSQL for Oracle DBAs – an introduction

Having worked for several years as an Oracle DBA, I decided to have a look at the PostgreSQL database and see how it functions in comparison to the Oracle Database. The “Enterprise DB” graphical installation of PostgreSQL 9.3 is(…)

PDB media failure may cause the whole CDB to crash

By Franck Pachot . Do you remember last year, when 12c arrived with multitenant, David Hueber warned us about the fact that a single PDB can, under certain conditions, generate a complete system downtime? We are beta testers(…)