All articles

Redo log block size on ODA X6 all flash

By Franck Pachot . On the Oracle Database Appliance, the redo logs are on Flash storage (and with X6 everything is on Flash storage) so you may wonder if we can benefit from 4k redo blocksize. Here are some tests(…)

ODA X-6 log file sync with NVMe flash

By Franck Pachot . The new ODA X-6 has been announced last month with two smaller configurations and smaller prices: 2S and 2M. Small, but high performance configuration: all SSD, and I/O transfer optimized for Flash with PCIe bus and(…)

Getting Ansible up and running on a SLES 12 SP1 host

Recently at a customer we had to setup Ansible on a SLES 12 SP1 host. In comparison to RedHat or Ubuntu based distributions there are some more steps to do as Ansible is not(…)

SQL Server AlwaysOn: new services packs and new diagnostic capabilities

As you certainly know, the SQL Server 2014 SP2 has been released by Microsoft with some interesting improvements that concern SQL Server AlwaysOn and availability groups feature.

AMM and ASMM derived parameters

By Franck Pachot . The latest DBA Essentials Workshop training I've given raised a question about PGA_AGGREGATE_LIMIT. The default depends on PGA_AGGREGATE_TARGET. So how is it calculated in AMM where PGA_AGGREGATE_TARGET is dynamic? Is it also(…)

SQL Server 2016: New SQL PowerShell CMDLETs for ErrorLog

With the latest release of SQL Server Management Studio(SSMS) 2016 (13.0.15500.91), downloadable here, was introduced new CMDLETs for Always Encrypted, SQL Agent and the  ErrorLog. In this article, I will(…)

Oracle Public Cloud patch conflict

By Franck Pachot . This morning I wanted to test a patch (18633374) in the Oracle Cloud Service. The DBaaS was created as an 'Enterprise Edition Extreme Performance' which comes with all options, including multitenant option. I applied my patch.

SQL Server 2016 AlwaysOn: Direct seeding and backup considerations

As promised in my prior blog post, we’ll talk now about direct seeding feature and backups. We found an interesting LIMIT_CONCURRENT_BACKUPS value for current state of the hadr_automatic_seeding_state_transition event. As said last time, this value is(…)

Set the SQL Native Client Default Port with PowerShell

I written an article about “SQL Server 2012: Configuring your TCP Port via PowerShell” and I received a question from PaulJ: “How do you set the port for(…)

Nulls in composite keys

By Franck Pachot . Comparison of NULL can be misleading and it's even worse for unique constraint validation. Having partial nulls in a composite key can be tricky because the SQL ANSI specification is not very easy to understand, and(…)