Pythian Group

A data file is considered unrecoverable if an unrecoverable operation has been performed on an object residing in the data file since the last backup of the data file. Operations will become unrecoverable if they are not logged in the redo log. These “nologging” operations that suppress the generation of redo log, include the following:

1. direct load/SQL load
2. direct-path inserts result from insert or merge statement
3. ALTER TABLE commands
4. CREATE and ALTER INDEX commands
5. INSERT /*+APPEND*/
6. partition manipulation
7. database object that has explicitly set with nologging option
8. Oracle eBusiness Suite concurrent job execution identified in Oracle metalink note: 216211.1
9. Oracle eBusiness Suite patches activities that involve database object manipulation

The database recovery operations will look completed, but those data blocks used by the nologging objects in the data file will be marked corrupted when they are recovered. Accessing those nologging data objects in the recovered database instance will return a data block reading error such as ORA-1578 and ORA-26040, and the logical corruption in the data file will prevent the database object from being useful in the recovered database instance.

How do we detect unrecoverable operations?

Unrecoverable data files are those that involve nologging operations since the last successful backup took place. There are several ways to identify them. Read the rest of this entry . . .

Oracle has just released their January installment of their critical patch update (CPU). Vulnerability CVE-2010-0071 is particularly critical, with a CVSS score of 10, the highest possible. It’s a remotely-exploitable listener vulnerability that’s particularly severe on Windows platforms.

Full details are on Oracle’s security site.

Yes, it’s almost that time of the year when one of the best Oracle conferences in the world opens its doors to attendees in Birmingham — UKOUG Conference 2009: Technology & E-Business Suite. The lineup of speakers will be fantastic as usual and agenda is full of juicy bits — You will have usual troubles scheduling sessions to attend and hate to make compromises between presentations you want to see badly but that’s kind of problems you’d rather have at a good conference.

The past year was very eventful so I feel like I haven’t been at the UKOUG Conferences for years even though I did come to the UKOUG Conference 2008. This conference is something special for me — it’s the first conference I attended and presented on so it’s set the tone for the whole conferencing experience of my life and I’m very grateful for that! So far, I haven’t missed a single year since my first UKOUG conference and I hope I keep it this way for years to come.
Read the rest of this entry . . .

Oracle Open World 2009 is just few weeks away and I firmed up my presentation schedule now. I will present three “normal” presentations and couple unconference sessions. I’m arriving in San Francisco few days before the conference (7th of October) get to the Oracle ACE Directors briefing so I’ll spend the first few day in Redwood Shores and then off to Moscone Center.

Before I get to the schedule, if you want to catch up with me during OOW — tweet me @alexgorbachev. You are likely to see me in the OTN Lounge or in “The Cave” if you know what I’m talking about.

Here is a quick summary of my presentations:

Read the rest of this entry . . .

Welcome to the 162^nd edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.

Oracle

The big news this week came was Oracle’s unveiling the OLTP Oracle Database Machine & Exadata v2, as reported by Alex Gorbachev.

Kevin Closson covered it, of course: Oracle Drops Exadata In Favor of Sun FlashFire Based OLTP Database Machine?, and he and his readers kick it around in a diverting way.

The dbaStreet blog offered their very thorough HOWTO, 11gR2 rac installation on 64 bit Linux step by step.

Iggy Fernandez was questioning Method R, in an excellent interview with Cary Millsap.

If that’s not enough “R” for you, there’s another item in the “Q” — Cary himself on the importance of diagnosing before resolving.

The ORACLE-BASE Blog observed that the RELIES ON clause is no more. To which Tom Kyte responded, Read the rest of this entry . . .

Update 16-Sep-09: Apparently, all this was true and you can find more details after the announcement that posted here.

OK. It’s not often that I make predictions these days but this was on my mind for a while so here we go. Mind you, I don’t have any confirmed insider information so it’s based on some assumptions, my perspective on Oracle-Sun acquisition and some vibes I can feel in the air.

The rumors are that Oracle Exadata v2 and Oracle Database Machine v2 are going to be announced within few weeks and my take is that it’s going to happen at the Oracle Open World. I don’t think it comes as a surprise to anyone that it will be configured with Oracle Database 11g Release 2.

Moving on to predictions and speculations…
Read the rest of this entry . . .

What: Sydney Oracle Meetup #7 – Advanced Queuing in E-Business Suite
When:Tuesday, June 30, 2009 5:30 PM (please, make sure to RSVP yes/no/maybe)
Where: Our standard location in Sydney CBD

Welcome to our meetup #7! This meetup will be focused on Oracle Advanced Queuing (AQ) feature and its usage in Oracle E-Business Suite.

For inexperienced SOM members, we are starting with the meet & greet and pizza+drinks at 5:30 pm and move to smart things at 6:00 pm. We will be there until about 8:30pm (some are sticking around a bit longer while some might take off a bit earlier) and will have a break in the middle. The second half is generally more open-ended as most of you already know.

So what are the goodies at this meetup?
Read the rest of this entry . . .

I would like to share with you the virtual hosts set-up (two nodes each on the application tier, and two on the DB tier) for a customer using 11.5.9.

The Facts

• DB Version: 10.2.3
• CRS Version: 10.2.0.3
• ASM Version: 10.2.0.3
• APPS Version: 11.5.9

Set-ups by Sys-Admins

Sysadmins must set up a virtual hostname amongst the two available middle-tier (Applications) hosts. In our case, the hostnames are erpapp01, and erpapp02. Then the sysadmins set up a VIP as erpapp.

We also require from sysadmins virtual hostname amongst the two available backend (database) hosts. Hostnames in our case are erpdb01, and erpdb02. They then set up a VIP as erpdb. Read the rest of this entry . . .

Hardware

My Dell desktop:

[root@erp RPMs]# cat /proc/cpuinfo
model name      : Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.80GHz
cpu MHz         : 2793.022
cache size      : 512 KB

[root@erp RPMs]# cat /proc/meminfo
MemTotal:      2073404 kB
...

Operating System

Download Centos Linux, and install the Linux operating system.

Kernel Version

Download kernel-smp-2.6.9-42.0.3.EL.i686.rpm and apply with:

$ rpm -ivh  kernel-smp-2.6.9-42.0.3.EL.i686.rpm 

The kernel should look like this:

root@erp RPMs]# uname -a
Linux erp.itskills.com 2.6.9-42.0.3.ELsmp #1 SMP Thu Oct 5 15:04:03 CDT 2006 i686 i686
i386 GNU/Linux

Read the rest of this entry . . .

In the first part of this blog I tried to shed some light on EBS patch terminology and naming conventions. In this post, I’ll show you how to check your patchset levels and query applied patches.

The very first question is, how do I find out if patch “1234567″ for example, was applied?

Of course you can use OAM, as the current release has made a huge step in enhancing OAM to show all necessary information about applied patches. If, however, you don’t like to rely on the GUI, you have a number of other options, which I’ll show you here.

Essentially there are two tables one can use to check for applied patches: AD_BUGS and AD_APPLIED_PATCHES.

It is important to understand the difference between these two. AD_BUGS contains all bug numbers fixed on your system, while AD_APPLIED_PATCHES contains all patch numbers which were applied to your system only.

For example: if you apply 11.5.10 CU2, it will add a row with patch_name=3480000 to AD_APPLIED_PATCHES and it will insert thousands of entries in AD_BUGS (including 3480000).

Caveat: if you use merged patches, always check AD_BUGS.

So how do you query the above two tables? Read the rest of this entry . . .