tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-185441042011-12-12T15:34:23.205-08:00Stephen Boothhttps://profiles.google.com/107526053475064059763noreply@blogger.comBlogger391100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18544104.post-66151979928114432582010-06-10T10:35:00.000-07:002010-06-10T10:46:31.060-07:00

Is touch screen really expensive to do or something. I've been tossing around the idea of getting a tablet PC to stick OneNote on to use for note taking, reading documents and some web surfing (including Gmail) via WiFi. I'm having to attend a lot of meetings/briefings where the ability to take notes and link them to documents and web pages would be incredibly useful.Looking around the web the

Stephen Boothhttps://profiles.google.com/107526053475064059763noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18544104.post-23924362756256162772010-02-04T09:09:00.000-08:002010-02-04T09:22:13.960-08:00

Interesting article on ComputerWeekly.com about how Oracle are looking to secure the future of Sparc, Solaris and Sun Hardware. They don't mention it but I wouldn't be surprised if we see 'Database as an Appliance' coming soon with Oracle Database running on Sun Hardware with management taken out of the hands of the local DBA and automated or made accessible only to Oracle themselves. This

Stephen Boothhttps://profiles.google.com/107526053475064059763noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18544104.post-50857623923773031472009-04-20T07:14:00.000-07:002009-04-20T07:17:26.820-07:00

Oracle announced today that they will be buying Sun Microsystems. Their plan is to produce 'pre-integrated' systems where everything from the bare metal, silicon and spinning rust up to the application front end is from themselves. The idea is that customers will save money on systems integration costs but reliability will go up.

Stephen Boothhttps://profiles.google.com/107526053475064059763noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18544104.post-24265707769387219262009-03-24T05:23:00.000-07:002009-03-24T05:40:23.674-07:00

Apparently today is Ada Lovelace Day. Ada Lovelace (aka Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace) is widely recognised as the first computer programmer. The daughter of Lord Byron, she was encouraged away from her father's dissolute lifestyle by her mother, who encouraged her interest in mathematics. Ada excelled at mathematics and became a friend for Charles Babbage.When Babbage created his

Stephen Boothhttps://profiles.google.com/107526053475064059763noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18544104.post-79075036189050398182009-03-04T05:21:00.000-08:002009-03-04T05:33:00.677-08:00

As I'm now beginning to work on SAP I've started a blog about it, mostly just somewhere to make notes about interesting/useful things I come across. If it also helps anyone else then great but if it doesn't then no worries.One of the things I have noticed, comparing Oracle with SAP, is that whilst for Oracle you can find online free resources at pretty much any level (both official Oracle sites

Stephen Boothhttps://profiles.google.com/107526053475064059763noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18544104.post-83595930288343259022008-12-01T00:33:00.000-08:002009-03-04T07:35:53.907-08:00

Note an Oracle post, but I know a lot of DBAs and into tech as well.Yesterday I found my old Psion3 mx (which I used before having to switch to Palm handhelds due to work). I had a play and was reminded why I liked it so much. The key advantage it had, and still has over many more modern devices, is the size. It's small enough to fit in a suit jacket or coat pocket whilst being large enough to

Stephen Boothhttps://profiles.google.com/107526053475064059763noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18544104.post-35996820527584332042007-05-23T04:37:00.000-07:002007-05-24T03:29:59.753-07:00

We're looking at implementing Dataguard as part of an implementation of Documentum (a document management system from EMC) and I have been asked to look at producing documentation and scripts for non-DBA users to use during a failover. The actual failover of the database itself will be handled by our DBAs, this is for the sys admins, network admins, application admins &c who may need to do

Stephen Boothhttps://profiles.google.com/107526053475064059763noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18544104.post-88247439714579770982007-02-16T03:48:00.000-08:002007-02-16T04:02:54.186-08:00

This just came up on the mailing list for my local Linux Users Group following last night's meeting (which I didn't attend), the original mail and my response is below:> In the pub, there was an interesting conversation going on regarding> validation of data in databases.>> Excuse the omissions, as I said, it was overheard>> Someone brought up the point that in databaseX If say, you have a>

Stephen Boothhttps://profiles.google.com/107526053475064059763noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18544104.post-56921159773138735902007-02-11T16:33:00.000-08:002007-02-12T03:47:18.250-08:00

This entry is partly an aide memoire for me, partly to try to get something that has been keeping me awake for the past hour or so out of my brain so I can sleep and partly in the hope that someone can suggest a way forward.A quick bit of background. Until April 06 most of our major systems were looked after by an external Faccilities Management company. In April 06 IT was kind of outsourced to

Stephen Boothhttps://profiles.google.com/107526053475064059763noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18544104.post-1168430722321975692007-01-10T04:04:00.000-08:002007-01-17T00:58:03.190-08:00

We have a situation where we need to rationalise the range of installed Oracle clients (i.e. the bit that sits between the app and the network stack) we have installed. We currently have versions from 7.x through to 10.2 installed accross approximately 12,000 desktops (accross various locations in an area of around 26 square miles) running various apps on Windows versions from NT4 to XP (mostly

Stephen Boothhttps://profiles.google.com/107526053475064059763noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18544104.post-1164902645361012672006-11-30T08:03:00.000-08:002006-11-30T08:04:20.996-08:00

We have a NetApp FAS filer attached via Gigabit Ethernet to a Sun V440 running Oracle databases the files for which are stored on the filer The NetApp volume is mounted under NFS version 3 at $ORACLE_BASE/oradata. Under that directory are 7 directories .snapshot, dctm, dchr, dctm_backup, dchr_backup, dctm_nobackup, dchr_nobackup. .snapshot is where the NetApp filer stores snapshots of the

Stephen Boothhttps://profiles.google.com/107526053475064059763noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18544104.post-1164272166008588652006-11-23T00:38:00.000-08:002006-12-03T15:14:05.376-08:00

I was just looking at my stat counter analysis for this blog, it's usually a good way to find out if anyone has linked to me. From the results it looks like the vast majority of people (around 97%) find this blog through a search engine, virtually all (over 99%) through Google. Most common search strings are or include "ORA-07445", "opmnctl failed to start process" and "ORA-01031".

Stephen Boothhttps://profiles.google.com/107526053475064059763noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18544104.post-1164102482247158752006-11-21T01:29:00.000-08:002006-11-22T11:26:31.646-08:00

During his presentation on "Inside RAC" Julian Dyke appeared to suffer laptop difficulties so asked for 4 volunteers to assist in a demonstration. Being the helpful soul (i.e. idiot) that I am, I volunteered. Mr Dyke did seem remarkably wellprepared in terms of props, almost as if he had been expecting his laptop to have problems :-)!Photographic evidence (courtesy of Connor McDonald) can be

Stephen Boothhttps://profiles.google.com/107526053475064059763noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18544104.post-1163968921731558932006-11-19T12:31:00.000-08:002006-11-19T12:42:02.226-08:00

A question just appeared on the Oracle-L mailing list about whether there are any issues with using histograms. I've seen a number of presentations over the last couple of years that have warned about issues where you have histograms on highly skewed data and use bind variable (or have cursor_sharing=force, which synthesises bind variable from literals in queries), so I responded:On 19/11/06, A

Stephen Boothhttps://profiles.google.com/107526053475064059763noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18544104.post-1163550974542814162006-11-14T16:35:00.000-08:002006-11-14T16:36:15.193-08:00

Today was the first day of the United Kingdom Oracle User Group 2006 conference. The day itself was pretty good, lots of good talks (more on that later), but I ran into a couple of issues in the evening. The first issue was when I went into the Handmake Hamburger just accross the canal from the ICC, I was alone and the waitress/Maitre d' said they didn't have any free tables suitable for one

Stephen Boothhttps://profiles.google.com/107526053475064059763noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18544104.post-1157637958539651122006-09-07T06:38:00.000-07:002006-09-07T07:06:00.783-07:00

I've just gotten the verbal OK from my line manager to attend the Management and Infrastructure SIG meeting on 4th October. Most of the opresentations look like they will be both interesting and useful. My employer is looking to introduce ITIL so the "Can it help me? What are the pitfalls?" presentation could be useful, similarly the DBA/Database ratio presentation is highly relevant to my

Stephen Boothhttps://profiles.google.com/107526053475064059763noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18544104.post-1157542978760724262006-09-06T04:38:00.000-07:002006-12-03T15:01:39.306-08:00

These are the sessions I'm planning on attending at this year's UKOUG conference:08:00 - 17:45 Registration Open09:15 - 09:30 Introduction by Ronan Miles, UKOUG Chairman 09:30 - 10:30 Opening Technical Keynote: "What's Coming Next?" by Tom Kyte, Oracle10:30 - 11:00 Coffee Break11:00 - 12:00 Accountability for System Performance (introducing Six Sigma quality in Oracle software

Stephen Boothhttps://profiles.google.com/107526053475064059763noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18544104.post-1156799167832245862006-08-28T13:50:00.000-07:002006-08-28T14:06:10.243-07:00

A thought just crossed my mind. I wonder if there is a market for short (one day) task oriented training for the sort of things that aren't normally covered in general courses.For example I'm aware that there are training courses that mention standby databases and certainly there are courses that cover RMAN, at least for basic backup and recovery. I'm not aware of any that actually take you

Stephen Boothhttps://profiles.google.com/107526053475064059763noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18544104.post-1154988461290872702006-08-07T14:59:00.000-07:002006-08-07T15:31:28.800-07:00

Doug Burns recently posted in his journal a list of common search terms that people have used where his journal appeared in the results. I figured I'd post mine (according to Statcounter.com). Fortunately (or unfortunately) mine are not anywhere near as exciting as his.Perc. Search Term5.80% ora-074454.35% orapwd invalid username password2.90% exception signal: 11 oracle2.90% alter user

Stephen Boothhttps://profiles.google.com/107526053475064059763noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18544104.post-1153217249331978022006-07-18T03:02:00.000-07:002006-07-23T07:24:17.403-07:00

This morning someone passed me a link to "The Eight Fallacies of Distributed Computing". Looks pretty accurate. I'd say that many of them are doubly true of RAC.

Stephen Boothhttps://profiles.google.com/107526053475064059763noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18544104.post-1153152021367231362006-07-17T08:20:00.000-07:002006-07-17T09:00:21.460-07:00

Just recieved the following email via one of the Oracle DBA lists I'm on:Hello, I am XXX from Singapore.I am also an Oracle Certified Professional(OCP).Could I know size of any database and what's the size of SGA forthat Database and how long it take to complete Logical Backup andPhysical Backup.I will be awiting for ur reply.Thanks in AdvanceRegardsXXXXNames have been removed to protect the

Stephen Boothhttps://profiles.google.com/107526053475064059763noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18544104.post-1152196418234244842006-07-06T07:33:00.000-07:002006-07-06T07:33:38.246-07:00

Simon Kelsey commeted on one of my earlier entries on this subject that x$kzsrt may be involved:SQL> select * from v$fixed_view_definition where view_name='GV$PWFILE_USERS';VIEW_NAME------------------------------VIEW_DEFINITION--------------------------------------------------------------------------------GV$PWFILE_USERSselect inst_id,username,decode(sysdba,1,'TRUE','FALSE'), decode(sysoper,1,'

Stephen Boothhttps://profiles.google.com/107526053475064059763noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18544104.post-1152027993942787792006-07-04T08:41:00.000-07:002006-07-06T06:29:25.150-07:00

QUESTION=========1) Does Oracle cache the SYSDBA password?2) Is there a way to force it to re-read the password file to pick up a changed password without having to shutdown thedatabase?RESEARCH=========Note.1029539.6 - UNIX How to Set up the Oracle Password FileNote 185703.1 - How to Avoid Common Flaws and Errors Using PasswordfileNote 114384.1 - WIN: Checklist for Resolving CONNECT AS SYSDBA (

Stephen Boothhttps://profiles.google.com/107526053475064059763noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18544104.post-1151785338851176782006-07-01T12:30:00.000-07:002006-07-02T14:00:38.630-07:00

A couple of days ago I posted an entry about an issue I'd run into reseting the SYSDBA password. Today I noticed my hits had jumped, checking my refer log I noticed a lot from Peter Finnigan's blog, he'd posted an entry linking to the post.In the entry he says that, if true, it was interesting. I don't know about interesting, but it's definately a true record of what happened. I'd be suprised

Stephen Boothhttps://profiles.google.com/107526053475064059763noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18544104.post-1151685622906938952006-06-30T08:59:00.000-07:002006-06-30T09:40:23.040-07:00

I installed HTMLDB (off the 10.2 Companion disk) on Solaris today. Install seemed to run OK and at the end it told me that the HTMLDB instance had started and could be accessed at:http://wintermute:7778When I tried to access it, no joy. Said it couldn't connect. I tried using opmnctl to check the status and found that opmn itself was up but none of the managed services were. Stopping and

Stephen Boothhttps://profiles.google.com/107526053475064059763noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18544104.post-1151595525381021372006-06-29T07:51:00.000-07:002006-10-26T06:44:01.190-07:00

I was just having a play around on one of my test/sandpit databases ("small database on a low power machine that I use for testing out scripts &c, no live data and if the database gets destroyed I just have to wipe out the files and create a new one" type of thing). I'd forgotten the SYSDBA password (for sandpit systems I use the SID as the SYSDBA password so don't bother to write it down, for

Stephen Boothhttps://profiles.google.com/107526053475064059763noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18544104.post-1148491954598785922006-05-24T10:17:00.000-07:002006-05-24T10:35:26.600-07:00

One of the tasks I've recently been given is to collate information about our Oracle and SQLServer databases. Stuff like sizes, init.ora parameters &c. I've developed a script that gets a lot of the stuff we need out of Oracle.Here it is:set echo offset verify offset feedback offset linesize 132set pagesize 60set heading off/* This script must be run as SYS (SYSDBA) */Prompt "Audit

Stephen Boothhttps://profiles.google.com/107526053475064059763noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18544104.post-1148490773248676142006-05-24T09:58:00.000-07:002006-07-19T06:46:26.693-07:00

Finally got a response from Oracle, turned out they had put it with their US office who don't start work until 13:00 our time.The eventual response was:23-MAY-06 14:49:43 GMTDATA COLLECTED===============On alert.log we can see some:ORA-07445: exception encountered: core dump [00000001009B0B04] [SIGSEGV] [Address not mapped to object] [0x000000000] [] []Trace file uploaded shows:/opt/oracle/app/

Stephen Boothhttps://profiles.google.com/107526053475064059763noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18544104.post-1148039700797501282006-05-19T04:06:00.000-07:002006-06-03T11:02:35.516-07:00

Late yesterday one of our projects passed me information abvout an ORA-07445 error they'd had earlier in the day, apparently this is stopping one of the modules in their application to stop working. Why they couldn't have told me about it earlier I don't know, I would have had time to raise a Service Request with Oracle during our maintenence hours (the why we don't have 24x7 cover is a rant for

Stephen Boothhttps://profiles.google.com/107526053475064059763noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18544104.post-1145901013786400532006-04-24T08:15:00.002-07:002006-06-11T03:27:43.140-07:00

Just had a call from a recruitment consultancy offering me an interview with Barclay's bank for a DBA role looking after their share trading systems. Unfortunately it was a production support only role (aka DataBase Baby Sitting), which would bore me silly, so I had to turn it down.The consultant said he'd got my CV off monster.co.uk. I only put my CV up there last Thursday and this is the third

Stephen Boothhttps://profiles.google.com/107526053475064059763noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18544104.post-1143973844452261982006-04-02T03:29:00.000-07:002006-04-02T06:06:31.576-07:00

Anyone else use Linked-In?It's kinda a social networking type of site but business/job seeking oriented. The idea being that you might not know anyone who has the skills you need for a job you have on offer or who can offer a job that would suit your skills but someone that you know might know someone or someone you know might know someone who knows someone &c. Of course it does rely on you

Stephen Boothhttps://profiles.google.com/107526053475064059763noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18544104.post-1137174428465230112006-01-10T07:38:00.000-08:002007-05-26T04:19:02.543-07:00

Had a problem last week. About 20 past 4 in the afternnon (I officially finish at 4pm) on Thursday (5th Jan)I had an email telling me that users couldn't run reports on a particular database. This database sits behind an OLTP app written in Oracle Forms 6i and connects, via a database link, to another database which holds metadata for an instance of Documentum (a document management system from

Stephen Boothhttps://profiles.google.com/107526053475064059763noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18544104.post-1136036045668988562005-12-30T17:27:00.000-08:002005-12-31T05:34:05.716-08:00

A few days ago I brought up some problems I've found with IT application training and trainers in my entry "(Almost) All Users Are Idiots". Following a comment from Doug Burns I read an entry in his blog entitled "In Praise of Good Trainers". Doug (an excellent trainer himself, in my opinion based on having attended two courses taught by him) has layed out a pretty much definitive description

Stephen Boothhttps://profiles.google.com/107526053475064059763noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18544104.post-1135940928798146092005-12-30T03:08:00.000-08:002005-12-30T03:08:48.800-08:00

Project Raptor has escaped (software isn't released, it just sometimes escapes).I downloaded it at work and had a quick play. Overall I liked it a lot. People used to products like TOAD won't see much new. The biggest advantage I've seen is that you don't seem to need any extra Oracle software installed. Just copy the software on to the machine, enter the IP address, the port and the SID/

Stephen Boothhttps://profiles.google.com/107526053475064059763noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18544104.post-1135940165398461762005-12-30T02:30:00.000-08:002006-05-03T10:35:31.446-07:00

The organisation I work for has a large number of sites (literaly hundreds) all connected via a WAN. Whilst for some applications everyone who uses that app are in the same office (or two or three offices) for others the users are widely disperesed, so making maintenence when a database changes name or moves to a different machine very difficult and time consuming. In one case we have a thick

Stephen Boothhttps://profiles.google.com/107526053475064059763noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18544104.post-1135777342042172372005-12-28T05:39:00.000-08:002005-12-28T05:43:36.746-08:00

I just thought I'd mention that I've added a bunch more Oracle related blogs to the list down the right hand side of the page. I recommend that you give them a read. If you know of any others I should be reading (if only I had the time to read more) then feel free to comment here.

Stephen Boothhttps://profiles.google.com/107526053475064059763noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18544104.post-1135629114534651702005-12-26T10:46:00.000-08:002006-05-25T10:54:00.783-07:00

No, I haven't turned into BOFH.A common comment I've heard in every IT department I've worked in has been about the idiocy of users, or how one particular user has done something really stupid, because they don't understand IT. But why should they? They're users, they do a job which isn't IT based but just happens to use IT. They're finance people, or HR people or social services people, or

Stephen Boothhttps://profiles.google.com/107526053475064059763noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18544104.post-1131050155839409312005-11-03T11:57:00.000-08:002005-11-03T12:35:55.853-08:00

On my way home this evening I popped into Waterstone's and bought Tom Kyte's book "Expert Oracle: Signature Edition". Unusually the off-the-shelf price (47.99ukp) was the same as that listed by Amazon.Obviously I haven't had a chance to read it yet, just flicked through and read a few passages. What I have read looks really good, the chapter on materialized views looks particularly interesting.

Stephen Boothhttps://profiles.google.com/107526053475064059763noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18544104.post-1131029117828132332005-11-03T06:14:00.000-08:002005-11-03T14:55:14.400-08:00

With a final presentation from Connor McDonald (on running Oracle at home), apparently the latest he has ever stayed on the last day of conference, the UKOUG 2005 conference and exhibition drew to a close yesterday.I found this year's conference very useful, lots of excellent presentations. I learned a lot, from the comments I was hearing, I wasn't the only one.One thing I've noticed over the 4

Stephen Boothhttps://profiles.google.com/107526053475064059763noreply@blogger.com0