AWS's Top 5 Commands: ALTER SYSTEM and Managing SYS Objects in RDS

Essential administrative commands for Amazon RDS for Oracle

Navigating administrative limitations in RDS

We often manage services over EC2, this is not news. But when migrating to Amazon RDS, it's usual for new users to have issues with performing some administrative actions on the database, especially when it's done via internal Oracle procedures or when it requires privileges beyond the ones we have available on RDS credentials, even though they are part of DBA work. Amazon Web Services created internal procedures so we can still execute those actions, but in a different manner. I decided to list five daily basis commands / procedures that frequently cause questions for initial users.

Managing sessions and clearing memory

Kill sessions:

begin
 rdsadmin.rdsadmin_util.kill(
 sid => &sid,
 serial => &serial,
 method => 'IMMEDIATE');
 end;
 /

exec rdsadmin.rdsadmin_util.flush_shared_pool;
 exec rdsadmin.rdsadmin_util.flush_buffer_cache;   

Controlling access to system objects

begin
  rdsadmin.rdsadmin_util.grant_sys_object(
  p_obj_name => 'V_$SESSION',
  p_grantee => 'PYTHIAN',
  p_privilege => 'SELECT');
 end;
 /

begin
  rdsadmin.rdsadmin_util.grant_sys_object(
  p_obj_name => 'V_$SESSION',
  p_grantee => 'PYTHIAN',
  p_privilege => 'SELECT',
  p_grant_option => true);
 end;
 /

begin
  rdsadmin.rdsadmin_util.revoke_sys_object(
  p_obj_name => 'V_$SESSION',
  p_revokee => 'PYTHIAN',
  p_privilege => 'SELECT');
 end;
 /

Hope this helps!

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