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.

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:

This is not intended as a complete book review, but a warm recommendation of a book I’ve found very useful the last couple of months. That is, highly recommended if you are working with RAC or going to start with a RAC project soon.

This is more a note to myself… Installing Oracle on Linux has become much easier with a package that prepares the OS before installation of the Oracle Server software. In previous versions the rpm package used to be called oracle-validated, but for 11gR2 on OEL6 it is called oracle-rdbms-server-11gR2-preinstall.