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 ...

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 ...

Statistics gathering and SQL Tuning Advisor

Our monitoring software recently flagged a long-running job on a client database: an ...

Silent Installation of RAC 12c database

Nowadays, everyone is installing Oracle Database 12c in different variants, posting screenshots, and discussing the ...

UDM is watching you, UDMs

With time monitoring of several thousand targets of different versions and on different operating systems ...

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 ...

Mining the AWR to Identify Performance Trends

Sometimes it's useful to check how performance of a SQL statement changes over time. The diagnostic pack features ...

Oracle free block corruption - test case

My very first blog post at Pythian - Trick or Treat? So there I was, faced with more that 4000 block corruptions as ...

Simple and Quick Way to Get SQL_ID of Query in Oracle

Notice

If you need to get SQL_ID of a query from a busy system, which has similar queries scattered all ...

Options for Tracing Oracle dbms_stats

A Baffling Case of ORA-00942

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 ...

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 ...

Step-by-Step Installation of an EBS 12.2 Vision Instance

It's here! It's here! It's finally here!

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 ...

Meaning of "Disk Reads" Values in DBA_HIST_SQLSTAT

This post builds on my previous work regarding Mining the AWR. While analyzing performance, I ...

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 ...

getMOSPatch.sh - Downloading Patches From My Oracle Support

The transition away from FTP access in My Oracle Support (MOS) several years ago introduced a significant hurdle for ...

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 ...

Magic Knobs in Replication Agents

Have you ever wondered if there's a "secret sauce" for tuning your replication configuration to squeeze out better ...

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