Oracle Database as our consultants live it every day: installation and patching, upgrades, RMAN backup and recovery, Data Guard, RAC, performance tuning, multitenant, licensing, and engineered systems such as ODA and Exadata.
Introduction : Oracle ASM Filter Driver (Oracle ASMFD) simplifies the configuration and management of disk devices by eliminating the need to rebind disk devices used with Oracle ASM each time the system is restarted. Oracle ASM Filter Driver (Oracle ASMFD) is a kernel module that resides in the I/O path of the Oracle ASM disks. Oracle ASM uses the filter…
With its 18th release Oracle comes with many improvements. Some of them are obvious and some of them more discrete. This is the case of the new buffer area (memory area) called the Memoptimize pool. This new area, part of the SGA, is used to store the data and metadata of standard Oracle tables (heap-organized tables) to improve significantly the…
The PDB lockdown feature offers you the possibility to restrict operations and functionality available from within a PDB, and might be very useful from a security perspective. Some new features have been added to the 18.3.0.0 Oracle version: You have the possibility to create PDB lockdown profiles in the application root like in the CDB root. This facilitates to have…
By Mouhamadou Diaw During the installation of Oracle Grid Infrastructure, you can optionally enable automated installation and configuration of Oracle ASM Filter Driver for your system with the Configure ASM Filter Driver check box on the Create ASM Disk Group wizard page. When you enable the Configure ASM Filter Driver box, an automated process for Oracle ASMFD is launched during…
One of our customer has been initially creating a RMAN catalog on an Oracle database release 12.1.0.2.0 and was now intending to register new Oracle 12.2.0.1.0 databases. Registering the databases will be failing with errors : PL/SQL package RCAT.DBMS_RCVCAT version 12.01.00.02 in RCVCAT database is too old RMAN-06429: RCVCAT database is not compatible with this version of RMAN The problem is…
It should never happen but sometimes it happens. You just lost your datafiles as well as your fast recovery area (probably because most of the time these areas are on the same disks despite the recommendations). Normal restore operations with RMAN are quite easy and secure as far as you have backupsets for database, archivelogs, and spfile/controlfile: Step 1 –…
By Franck Pachot . I know that lot of people are against the ANSI join syntax in Oracle. And this goes beyond the limits when talking about NATURAL JOIN. But I like them and use them quite often. Why is Natural Join bad? Natural join is bad because it relies on column names, and, at the time of writing the…
Recently I got an interesting request: The customer wanted to allow the application installation routine to create a guaranteed restore point without giving it all required privileges to do so. So the idea was to encapsulate creating and dropping a guaranteed restore point in a PLSQL package and granting the application owner the permission to execute the package. The problem…
By Franck Pachot . This is research only and totally unsupported. When building docker images to run Oracle Database in a container, we try to get the smallest image possible. One way is to remove some subdirectories that we know will not be used. For example, the patch history is not used anymore once we have the required version. The…
Backup on disk with RMAN is great. It’s fast, you can set as many channels as your platform can handle for faster backups. And you can restore as fast as you can read and write files on disk with these multiple channels. As far as you’re using Enterprise Edition because Standard Edition is stuck to a single channel. Disk space…
Facing an internal inconsistency in the ODA derby database is very painful (see https://www.dbi-services.com/blog/oda-lite-what-is-this-odacli-repository/ for more info about the derby database). I have recently faced a case where the database deletion was failing and the database remained then in “Deleting” status. Connecting directly to the internal derby database and doing some self cleaning is very risky and should be performed at…
By Franck Pachot . You find two different ‘runInstaller’ under an Oracle Home. The old one, the Oracle Universal Installer, in $ORACLE_HOME/oui/bin. And the new one, in $ORACLE_HOME directly. They have the same name but are completely different. The old one was used to install an Oracle Home from the installation media. But in 18c you don’t use it. It…
