Everything our consultants learn while running databases for customers: Oracle, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, MySQL, MariaDB, MongoDB and Delphix. Expect hands-on posts about installation, day-to-day administration, backup and recovery, performance tuning, replication and upgrades.
Introduction When you are tasked with conducting an audit at a client’s site or on the environment you manage, you might find it necessary to automate the audit process in order to save time. However, it can be challenging to extract information from either the PowerShell console or a text file. Here, the idea would be to propose a solution…
Introduction: What are VLF’s? In SQL-Server, the transaction log is divided into several logical units called virtual log files (VLF). The amount of virtual log files and their size are managed automatically by the database engine. The database engine adds more VLF’s to the transaction log file every time when the transaction log file grows. For this reason, admins can…
In PostgreSQL up to version 16, there is no way to evict the buffer cache except by restarting the instance. In Oracle you can do that since ages with “alter system flush buffer cache“, but not in PostgreSQL. This will change when PostgreSQL 17 will be released later this year. Of course, flushing the buffer cache is nothing you’d usually…
Introduction Oracle Database Appliance X10 lineup is available since September 2023. Compared to X9-2 lineup, biggest changes are the AMD Epyc processors replacing Intel Xeons, and new license model regarding Standard Edition 2, clarified by Oracle several weeks ago. Apart from these new things, the models are rather similar to previous ones, with the Small model for basic needs, a…
Since declarative partitioning was introduced in PostgreSQL 10 there have been several additions and enhancements throughout the PostgreSQL releases. PostgreSQL 17, expected to be released around September/October this year, is no exception to that and will come with two new features when it comes to partitioning: Splitting and Merging partitions. Before we can have a look at that, we need…
Some time ago I’ve written about the options to disable the “alter system” command in PostgreSQL. While there is nothing up to PostgreSQL 16 to do this natively, there are solutions for this requirement (see linked post). PostgreSQL 17 will change that and will come with an in-core option to disable the “alter system” command. The parameter to control this…
Introduction Patching an Oracle Database Appliance is mainly applying 3 patches: the system patch, including OS and Grid Infrastructure updates, the storage patch for data disks and disk controllers, and the DB patch for DB homes and databases. ASR manager (Automatic Service Request) update is included in the system patch. And it’s normally not a topic when patching an ODA,…
REKEY Oracle database configured with Oracle Key Vault
Introduction 6 months ago, Oracle introduced the new Oracle Database Appliance X10 lineup. The biggest surprise came from the supported editions: these new ODAs were Enterprise Edition only! This was because Standard Edition 2 license conditions were not compatible with AMD Epyc processors inside X10 servers. Each AMD Epyc processor is physically equivalent to a 4-socket processor package unlike Intel…
I have been recently blogging about ZDM Physical Online Migration where I was explaining this migration method and preparing customer On-Premises to ExaCC migration. See my blog, https://www.dbi-services.com/blog/physical-online-migration-to-exacc-with-oracle-zero-downtime-migration-zdm/. I have now had the opportunity to migrate customer database and would like to share, in this blog, this success story. Clarifications First of all, I would encourage you to read the…
When using ZDM for a Physical Online Migration, even in the last current version, 21.4.5.0.0, switchover is failing. In this blog, I will share the reason and the solution to solve the problem before moving forward with the migration. Problem description We are using last version of ZDM : [zdmuser@zdmhost migration]$ /u01/app/oracle/product/zdm/bin/zdmcli -build version: 21.0.0.0.0 full version: 21.4.0.0.0 patch version:…
How to clone an Oracle Database which is configured to store the TDE (encryption keys) in the Oracle Key Vault (OKV)
