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Oracle

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.

Index on trunc(date) – do you still need old index?

By Franck Pachot . Sometimes we have to index on ( trunc(date) ) because a SQL statement uses predicate on it instead of giving a range from midnight to midnight. When you do that you probably keep the index on the column. That’s two indexes to maintain for DML. Do we need it? I’ll show a feature that appeared in… 

Oracle compression, availability and licensing

By Franck Pachot . Various methods of table compression have been introduced at each release. Some require a specific storage system Some requires specific options. Some are only for static data. And it’s not always very clear for the simple reason that their name has changed. Name change for technical reasons (ROW/COLUMN STORE precision when a columnar compression has been… 

RAC Attack! next month 12c in Las Vegas

By Franck Pachot . RAC is the most complex installation you can have for an oracle database. A RAC DBA is involved not only on database, but storage, network, and system as well. It involves also the application in order to be sure that the application service can follow the database service high availability. It’s also brings every database skills… 

Query the Enterprise Manager collected metrics

By Franck Pachot . Enterprise Manager (Cloud Control for example) gathers a lot of metrics. You can display them from the GUI, but you can also query the SYSMAN views directly. Today, I wanted to get the history of free space in an ASM disk group for the previous week. Here is how I got it. Enterprise Manager metrics are… 

12c online statistics gathering and startup restrict

By Franck Pachot . I’ve written about 12c online statistics gathering in a UKOUG OracleScene article. My opinion is clear about it: you sill need to gather stale stats afterwards or you have mising, stale and inconsistent object statistics. This post is about cases where online statistics gathering does not occur (and are not documented) – which is another reason… 

How to set NLS for SQL Developer

By Franck Pachot . I’m using Oracle SQL Developer 4.1 Early Adopter for a while and I like it. That version comes with a command line (in beta) which goal is to be fully compatible with sqlplus but running in java, and having a lot more features. Becuse it’s connecting with thin java driver by default, it doesn’t use NLS_LANG.… 

Is CDB stable after one patchset and two PSU?

By Franck Pachot . There has been the announce that non-CDB is deprecated, and the reaction that CDB is not yet stable. Well. Let’s talk about the major issue I’ve encountered. Multitenant is there for consolidation. What is the major requirement of consolidation? It’s availability. If you put all your databases into one server and managed by one instance, then… 

OracleText: deletes and garbage

By Franck Pachot . In the previous post we have seen how the OracleText index tables are maintained when new document arrives: At sync the new documents are read up to the available memory and words are inserted in the $I table with their mapping information. Now we will see how removed documents are processed. We will not cover updates… 

OracleText: inserts and fragmentation

By Franck Pachot . I plan to write several posts about OracleText indexes, which is a feature that is not used enough in my opinion. It’s available in all editions and can index small text or large documents to search by words. When you create an OracleText index, a few tables are created to store the words and the association… 

Never gather WORKLOAD stats on Exadata…

By Franck Pachot . For Exadata, oracle has introduced an ‘EXADATA’ mode which sets a high transfer rate (with IOTFRSPEED as in NOWORKLOAD statistics) and set a MBRC (as in WORKLOAD statistics). Those values are set rather than gathered because all the SmartScan optimization done at storage cell level, which makes the multiblock reads less expensive, is difficult to measure…