Oracle

At UKOUG Tech conference in Liverpool last year I had an interesting talk with a DBA that had two years of experience. Being 23 years the DBA naturally stood out from the crowd. I talked about my thoughts on what is important for a DBA, and since I spend way too much on user group activities and conferences I argued that going to such events are useful for a DBA, and continued with other ramblings about what I think is important for a DBA to do. I hope I stopped soon enough, but stop talking and start listening is an art. Anyway, I decided to write down a list of recommendations for a new DBA. This is what I think is important. ...

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). ...

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: ...

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. ...

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

Oracle User Group Norway (OUGN) organizes the biggest Oracle user conference in Scandinavia. As of March 28, 341 DBAs, developers, managers, sales people, and more have figured out why. Read on for more reasons if you have not registered yet. This year we are breaking many of our own records, for example we have 66 speakers from 15 different countries. We have added another track with a total of 8 different tracks. ...

Vårens store høydepunkt er OUGN sitt vårseminar. Her er programmet og her kan du melde deg på . Drar du til Oslo for å delta på konferansen anbefaler jeg at du flyr inn dagen før for å bli med på et annet stort høydepunkt, nemlig et dagskurs med Cary Millsap i Oslo . Dette er et kurs både for utviklere som integrerer mot Oracle database og for Oracle DBA-er. En bedre presentasjon av kurset finner du på påmeldingssiden . ...

OSL - CPH - SFO. Starting on my route in a few hours. Really look forward to see tweeps and a bunch of people from the worldwide Oracle community. Lots of good presentations of course, but also bloggers’ meetup, Oaktable world, RAC Attack, Anchor Steam, and more. I’ll speak at the Bulgarian Oracle User Group conference 22nd to 24th of November. I have heard from many that this is a good conference. First time in Bulgaria means this will be a triple excitement; giving a presentation about something I have thought a lot about, seeing a new country and meeting a possibly different culture. ...

Sometimes download from Oracle Technology Network (OTN) is really slow, but it may not be Oracle’s fault. Oracle is using Akamai Technologies to distribute the software. You can see this if you do an nslookup on download.oracle.com and see it resolves (finally) to a host under akamai.net. They have servers all over the world and when things work as they are supposed to the box on your end should connect to a host physically near you and not on another continent. If your download is really slow find the IP address that your DNS resolves for download.oracle.com (or the host you are downloading from) and then use a geo-lookup site to see where it is located. ...

Flashback database, (active) duplicate with RMAN, and tablespaces that are read-only. You can only have two out of three from my recent testing. One database with a few read-only tablespaces was cloned by using active duplicate in RMAN. Before the testing (using Real Application Testing replay) a restore point with guarantee flashback database was created. After the testing I tried to perform a flashback database, but it failed with: SQL> flashback database to restore point b4_test; flashback database to restore point b4_test * ERROR at line 1: ORA-01122: database file 38 failed verification check ORA-01110: data file 38: '+DATA/clonedb/datafile/foo_bar002.443.804434293' ORA-01207: file is more recent than control file - old control file The file in question belongs to a read-only tablespace and is certainly not newer than the control file. It looks to be a bug on 11.2.0.3 and I found a way to work around it if you take some actions before you start testing. I did not find the same error stack mentioned together with flashback, or anything directly relevant on My Oracle Support, but similar symptoms made me think the problem would go away if I set the read-only tablespaces read-write. I generated SQL with this:``` ...