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

ORA-10173: Dynamic sampling time-out error

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." ...

SharePlex replication between two instances on the same host

Several days ago I was asked a question about SharePlex and should verify behaviour before providing the answer. I had ...

Oracle RAC on Azure

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

Oracle Database 12c: PSUs vs database proactive bundle patches

Background When it comes to performing quarterly patches to the Oracle database the options used to be pretty straight ...

More fun with oracle timestamp math

Timestamp Math Several years ago I wrote an article on Oracle date math. Amazingly, that article was still available ...

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 ...

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 ...

Oracle Live SQL: explain plan

We've all encountered a situation where you want to check a simple query or syntax for your SQL and don't have a ...

Analyze index validate structure - the dark side

Recently, a co-worker encountered a significant performance hurdle after a database upgrade. The plan included ...

Improve parsing and query performance - fix Oracle's fixed object statistics

What do I mean by 'fix' the the fixed object statistics? Simply gather statistics to help the optimizer. What are ...

GoldenGate 12.2 big data adapters: part 1 - HDFS

December 2015 brought us a new version of GoldenGate, and a new version for Big Data adapters for the GoldenGate. Let's ...

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

If your system meets any of the following criteria:

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 ...

ASM disk group just will not mount

I recently had an issue involving a damaged ASM disk group. Each time an attempt was made to mount the disk group it ...

Enabling large pages on Oracle Database 11g running on IBM AIX

For implementing Large Pages on AIX first you will need to choose large page size at OS level. On AIX you can have ...

GoldenGate 12.2 big data adapters: part 3 - Kafka

This article continues our deep dive into the GoldenGate Big Data adapters, specifically focusing on the Kafka adapter. ...

GoldenGate 12.2 big data adapters: part 4 - HBASE

This is the next post in my series about Oracle GoldenGate Big Data adapters.

Changes to DBCA patch application behaviour causes PDB cloning to fail

Background A test upgrade from 11g to 12c and conversion to a container and pluggable database recently pointed out ...

GoldenGate 12.2 big data adapters: part 2 - FLUME

In this blog post, we continue our review of the new Oracle GoldenGate Big Data adapters. In the first part of the ...

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 ...