You know, this is my blog, but I am aware of my role in our user group. The opinions here are mine; I haven’t stolen them. Selecting abstracts for our conference is done by many in our board, but I wanted to clarify how I look at the task, what speakers I look for to our conference. Thursday this week we sent out emails to 71 people who will present on our next conference that starts March 12. Another group received a more disappointing email. Some have questioned why they did not make it (again). ...

How long is an email address? 30 characters should be enough, I thought. And I was right for about three weeks or so until one of the smartest Oracle experts in Europe tried to submit an abstract at our call for paper site . His email address had 32 chars and therefore failed already at registration. A bit embarrassing. The data model was created in SQL Developer Data Modeler (SDDM) and I had done something right. In the data model EMAIL was defined as a domain and not simply as VARCHAR2(30) in different places in the data model. ...

Of course there is nothing special about restoring a database from the cloud on your own down-on-earth server, but it helps making this post cool and cloudy. When I deployed XE to an AWS instance I made a small script to backup the database once pr day (scheduled in crontab), and another to fetch the backupset to my server here on earth. Backup script looks like this: #!/bin/sh ORACLE_SID=XE ORACLE_HOME=/u01/app/oracle/product/11.2.0/xe PATH=$ORACLE_HOME/bin:$PATH export ORACLE_SID ORACLE_HOME PATH rman target / << EOF > $HOME/script/rman.$$ backup database plus archivelog delete input; delete noprompt obsolete; list backup of database summary; EOF By default the XE is installed without archiving so you need to change that when you install your production XE database. I also turned on auto backup of the controlfile. The RMAN configuration for the XE database looks like this: ...

One of the cool things with Oracle VM is that Oracle offers many templates you can download from edelivery.oracle.com and import into your repository with Oracle VM Manager (OVMM). Well, since I did the same mistake that you did, that is, not reading the entire README file, I confused templates with assemblies. Say you want to download a template for Oracle Linux 6, you have to select product pack Oracle VM Templates. The downloaded zip contains one file with extension .ova (does not mean Oracle Virtual Assembly, but Open Virtualization Format Archive). Since it is written “VM Templates” several places on the web site, it is easy to think it should be imported under VM Templates, but you need to select Assemblies as shown here and do the import from there: ...

In our user group OUGN we used to collect abstracts for our annual conference with a simple Google Form. Advantage: Easy to set up Disadvantages No possibility for users to reconnect and correct what they had already submitted Lots of manual work Difficult to work with in the process later (selection, agenda, late submissions, special guests) Not really cool or cloudy Google Forms is really just a shared spreadsheet with a form interface wrapped around it. And like any other spread sheet it is easy to work with in the beginning, but as the number of people involved increases and data grows it soon gets cumbersome to work with. ...

For schema level exports it may be useful to include roles and public synonyms relevant to the schemas exported. Instead of generating them manually they can be included in the DataPump export. The following example of a parameter file shows how this can be done: FULL=YES INCLUDE=SCHEMA:"IN (SELECT 'PUBLIC' FROM DUAL UNION SELECT username FROM dba_users WHERE username in ('APEX','SCOTT'))" INCLUDE=PUBLIC_SYNONYM/SYNONYM:"IN (SELECT synonym_name FROM dba_synonyms WHERE owner = 'PUBLIC' AND table_owner in ('APEX','SCOTT'))" DIRECTORY=DB_EXPORT DUMPFILE=apex_expdp.dmp LOGFILE=apex_expdp.log INCLUDE=ROLE:"IN (select role from dba_roles where role in (select grantee from dba_tab_privs where grantor in ('APEX','SCOTT')))" When deciding what to include in an export you may want to check the table DATABASE_EXPORT_OBJECTS to find the correct path as in this example: ...

There is one night every year I can stay up as long as I can manage without fearing the next day. Because, on that particular day I can sleep as much as I want on the plane, trying to fool my body into GMT-8, better known as PDT or Pacific Daylight Time. Yes, it is Oracle Open World again, in the second nicest city in the world, only beaten by Rio de Janeiro. ...

Oracle Enterprise Manager (EM) reports on many security policies when they are violated. One of them are about execute privileges on standard PL/SQL packages granted to PUBLIC. One a day this summer with nothing better to do I went on to revoke these privileges. The wages for my efforts was several ORA-600 errors: ORA-00600: internal error code, arguments: [qmxqtmChkXQAtomMapSQL:2], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [] 00600. 00000 - “internal error code, arguments: [%s], [%s], [%s], [%s], [%s], [%s], [%s], [%s]” *Cause: This is the generic internal error number for Oracle program exceptions. This indicates that a process has encountered an exceptional condition. *Action: Report as a bug - the first argument is the internal error number ...

Recently during restore of a large database (over 10 TB) we monitored the alert log looking for messages like «Full restore complete of datafile 42 to datafile copy … Elapsed time: 0:39:32» We saw that the time to restore a 32GB file varied a lot, from around 20 minutes to around 75 minutes. This made me wonder why. We noticed that some of the files belonging to the UNDO tablespace took usually little time, and then I found a couple of more data files that took little time to restore. Then I thought that maybe the UNDO tablespace at the time of the backup had many unused blocks (because there weren’t many active transactions at the time). So I checked the other two files that did not take long time to restore and found out they had lots of free space in them too. ...

In case you are using the DBMS_LDAP package from a reasonable modern environment you may run into the error: ORA-12703 this character set conversion is not supported The simple solution to this is to run: begin DBMS_LDAP.UTF8_CONVERSION := false; end; / or if you are using SQL*Plus or SQL Developer, just: exec DBMS_LDAP.UTF8_CONVERSION := false