Untold Secrets of SQL Server: What if?

The Strategic Use of Undocumented Commands It's common practice for IT vendors to keep some of the commands and ...

Troubleshooting Oracle's Auto Service Request

I've spent the better part of the day troubleshooting an issue with Oracle's Auto Service Request (ASR) and wanted to ...

Statistics gathering and SQL Tuning Advisor

Our monitoring software recently flagged a long-running job on a client database: an Oracle auto-task for statistics ...

RMAN - Validating Archivelog Backup

There are many posts out there about validating backup. However, none seem to address some recent concerns a client of ...

Oracle RMAN Restore to the Same Machine as the Original Database

Among the most critical but often most neglected database administration tasks is testing restore from backup. But ...

SMB File Share and SQL Server: An option to consider

Introduction When we relate file share and databases, many people will turn up their noses - but today this is a ...

SQL Server Statistics: Maintenance and Best Practices

What are Statistics? There are multiple paths a database can use to answer a query, some of them being faster and more ...

What is the difference between logical and physical corruption in Oracle?

How to move Oracle DB to New Oracle Home on Same Windows Server

I have been thinking about writing a Pythian blog for long time, and today I finally took the opportunity. In the DBA ...

Purge statspack snaps of source db on test db having different DBID?

As most DBAs are aware, the clean deletion of the old statspack snaps is very difficult up to rdbms version 9i. Thanks ...

How to recover a subset of an Oracle database

Today's blog post will discuss how to recover a subset of an Oracle database. Many of you would have come across ...

How to Install a Clustered SQL Server 2012 Instance – Part 4

We have reached the last article of this series. To close this series out, we will talk about Distributed Transaction ...

Concurrent Processing Issues with Distributed Transactions Glitch

Introduction This is my first post in Pythian blog, and I wanted to share interesting use-cases that we've dealt with ...

Guide to Cassandra Thread Pools

This guide provides a description of the different thread pools and how to monitor them. Includes what to alert on, ...

How To Improve SQL Statements Performance: Using SQL Plan Baselines

The performance of any Oracle database heavily relies on query execution(s). The reasons for any SQL statement’s ...

Do AWR Reports Show the Whole Picture?

Introduction AWR report is a great source of aggregated information on top activities happening in our databases. I use ...

Batched table access

When I first saw the suffix BATCHED in an Oracle execution plan from 12c, I was curious to see what is hidden behind ...

Merge Replication Identity Range Management - An Identity Disorder? Part 2

In Part 1 of this series, we explored Merge Replication Identity Range Management of tables with identity columns. We ...

A Simple Way to Monitor Java in Linux

A quick and easy way to know what is it inside Java process that is using your CPU. Using just Linux command line tools ...

How to Install a Clustered SQL Server 2012 Instance – Part 2

The installation: In continuation of our series on how to install a SQL Server 2012 clustered instance, let´s begin the ...

Automating DataPump Export

What’s the most elaborate thing you have done with DataPump? So there I was, given the requirement to export multiple ...

How to Install a Clustered SQL Server 2012 Instance – Part 1

In this series, I will demonstrate how to install a SQL Server 2012 clustered instance in a cluster of two nodes. In ...

What Does oracle-rdbms-server-11gR2-preinstall Not Do?

I was working on a project to clone Oracle install to a new Linux server and this should be simple as ...

Best Certificate Authority for Jar file signing in Oracle E-Business Suite

Most of you are already aware of the recent announcement on Steven Chan’s blog about New JRE requirements that require ...

Script to Collect Database Information Quickly

As a DBA, there are occasions where we are required to collect details from a database which can be used for further ...

What Happens When Active DB Duplication Goes Wrong?

There are many blog posts out there about active database duplication. However, they were all tested in an ideal ...

How to Apply a Standby-First PSU Patch in a 2 node RAC environment

Oracle provides since it’s 11.2.0.1 version a way to apply certain patches, to our standby environment first, without ...

Disabling Triggers in Oracle 11.2.0.4

In March 2012, I put together a blog post entitled Disabling Oracle triggers on a per-session basis, outlining a way to ...