How to troubleshoot an ORA-28030 error

ORA-28030: Server encountered problems accessing LDAP directory service. Cause: Unable to access LDAP directory ...

PRKO-2002 : small things, large shadows

This short blog post is a reminder to remember the syntax. I was just trying to bring down local listeners at half rack ...

Step-by-step guide to January 2016 PSU patch apply on 12c drid and RDBMS homes in Linux

ASM nternals: tracking down failed ASM reads

How to build a multi-domain cluster with AlwaysOn availability groups - SQL Server 2016

SQL Server 2016 is making lots of news, and promises to be a revolutionary SQL Server version. In talking about ...

ORA-10173: Dynamic sampling time-out error

Recursion in Hive - part 1

I am going to start this new series of blog posts talking about code migration use cases. We will talk about migration ...

An UNDO in a PDB in Oracle 12c?

Network multicast support on Azure

Oracle ASM rebalance - Turn it up. To 11?

If you've ever seen or heard of the movie This is Spinal Tap, then you have likely heard the phrase "Turn it up to 11." ...

Configure high availability - load balancing for Hiveserver2

We are noticing a steady adoption of Hive adoption among our customers. Due to the increased workload we want to make ...

Oracle RAC on Azure

Microsoft Azure provides an acceptable and affordable platform for a training environment. I am an Oracle DBA, and use ...

Issues with Oracle secure external password stores

Background In the previous article, I covered the basics of how to remove database passwords (credentials) from Oracle ...

Oracle E-business suite: Virtual host names solution

This blog post is a continuation to an earlier post about my musings on Oracle EBS support for virtual host names. ...

Securing Oracle monitoring and backup scripts

Background Almost every DBA writes and uses various custom scripts to monitor and backup their Oracle databases. ...

Oracle's CREATE INDEX command can take a hint

While experimenting with Auto DOP (parallel_degree_policy) in Oracle 12c, I stumbled upon a highly effective (and ...

Nagios authentication with active directory

Nagios authentication with Active Directory (AD) aligns with user management consolidation policies in most ...

How to decipher oracle Internal datatype storage

What started out as an investigation into how the optimizer deals with predicates that are outside the known range of ...

Locks, blocks and deadlocks - what's the difference?

Explanation We are often being paged by development teams talking about locks, blocks or deadlocks and some people make ...

Benchmarking Google Cloud SQL instances

Google Cloud SQL is a fully managed database service that makes it easy to set-up, maintain, manage, and administer ...

Data encryption at rest

This blog post was co-authored by Peter Sylvester and Valerie Parham-Thompson Introduced in version 10.1.3 (and with ...

SQL server 2016 - AlwaysOn basic availability group

Recently I was playing with the SQL Server 2016 CTP 2 and noticed that there was a new feature introduced - Basic ...

High "cursor: pin S wait on X" waits?

If your system meets any of the following criteria:

Oracle upgrade failures due to METHOD_OPT and XDBCONFIG

Background I recently experienced a problem when upgrading an old Oracle 10.2.0.4 database to 11.2.0.4 that had no ...

Implementing fuzzy search in SQL server - part 2: Levenshtein distance

Introduction The Levenshtein Distance, as discussed in my last post, is a way to measure how far two strings are ...

Why locking Oracle accounts is a bad idea

Time and time again I run into database accounts which are marked "LOCKED" or "EXPIRED & LOCKED". The main problem ...

Google Cloud Dataproc in ETL pipeline - part 1 (logging)

Google Cloud Dataproc, now generally available, provides access to fully managed Hadoop and Apache Spark clusters, and ...

Advanced compression option caveat in Oracle 12c

Oracle 12c introduced a new capability to move a partition online, without any interruptions to DML happening at the ...