By Franck Pachot . At Oracle Open World 2014, or rather the Oaktable World, Chris Antognini has presented ‘Indexes: Structure, Splits and Free Space Management Internals’. It’s not something new, but it’s still something that is not always well understood: how index space is managed, block splits, fragmentation, coalesce and rebuilds. Kyle Hailey has made a video of it available…
By Franck Pachot . You are using an Oracle Enterprise Edition and thinking about downgrading to the Standard Edition? In this case, you must be sure that your applications are compatible. It’s not something easy to check. Here are a few ideas. Why? Why do you want to downgrade to the Standard Edition? For licensing costs, of course. Today, it…
This post explains how to configure and use the new AWR warehouse functionality present in Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12.1.0.4. This new feature offers the possibility to store date from the AWR of your main databases in the EM AWR warehouse. As OEM AWR warehouse automatically extracts the AWR data of the database you have selected, there is no impact…
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 used by default. And even in the latest Oracle 12c patchset 1 (aka 12.1.0.2.0) it is still not enabled. But it’s there…
By Franck Pachot . When an Oracle Database spends a high percentage of its DB time in User I/O, I usually check the wait event histograms in order to see if the storage system is working well. But today, with storage going to SSD, most I/O are less than 1 milliseconds and we have no details about those wait times.…
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 quite easy and rather fast. Under Linux you run the graphical installer, dialog boxes lead you through the installation process. You…
By Franck Pachot . In a previous post, I have described Adaptive Plans. Even if I prefer to show plans with the SQL Monitor active html format, I had to stick with the dbms_xplan for that because SQL Monitoring did not show all information about adaptive plans. This has been fixed in the Patchset 1 and I have run the…
By Franck Pachot . It’s just a patchset. The delivery that is there to stabilize a release with all the bug fixes. But it comes with a lot of new features as well. And not only the one that has been advertised as the future of the database. It’s a huge release. Let’s have a look at what’s new. First,…
By Franck Pachot . Do you think that it’s better to write semi-join SQL statements with IN(), EXISTS(), or to do a JOIN? Usually, the optimizer will evaluate the cost and do the transformation for you. And in this area, one more transformation has been introduced in 12c which is the Partial Join Evaluation (PJE). First, let’s have a look…
By Franck Pachot . I’ve read this morning that MapReduce is dead. The first time I heard about MapReduce was when a software architect proposed to stop writing SQL on Oracle Database and replace it with MapReduce processing. Because the project had to deal with a huge amount of data in a small time and they had enough budget to…
By Franck Pachot . You probably know about ‘nproc’ limits in Linux which are set in /etc/limits.conf and checked with ‘ulimit -u’. But do you know how to handle the monitoring and be alerted when you’re close the fixed limit? Nproc and ps Nproc is defined at OS level to limit the number of processes per user. Oracle 11.2.0.4 documentation…
By Franck Pachot . Do you want to know which users come with the Oracle Database and which are the ones you have created? This is that not easy, especially prior to Oracle 12c. You know SYS and SYSTEM, but there are many others – especially when you have installed all options. And it is important to know them all,…
