Opening the Door Without the Keys

This week, my DBA team fulfilled a request to restore 1 month old lost data. A review of the RMAN backups showed that ...

The Easy Way of Finding Similar SQL Statements

RMAN: Corrupt Block? Let's Re-Read... Nope, It's All Good

Getting a "corrupt block" page 40 minutes before your shift ends is the DBA equivalent of a jump-scare in a horror ...

SNAPSHOT CONTROLFILE Isn't Just a Backup Copy of a Control File Anymore

Recently, I have troubleshooted failing RMAN backups in 11.2.0.2 RAC environment. The backups failed with an error ...

The Internal Workflow of an E-Business Suite Concurrent Manager Process

Concurrent processing is one of the key elements of any E-Business Suite system. It provides scheduling and queuing ...

Read GoldenGate Discard Files

Extending OEM 12c with Oracle Application Management Pack

Mother, mother Oracle. I have heard you call… Wanted to sail upon your cloud (control) since 7.3.4… You’ve seen it all, ...

Creating a Physical Standby with RMAN Active Duplicate in 11.2.0.3

Creating a physical standby database is a fundamental skill for any DBA, but tutorials often skip over the "why" or ...

Cursor: Pin S Wait on X in the Top 5 Wait Events

Lately, for some reason, I have started to come across the “cursor: pin S wait on X” wait event in the top 5 wait ...

Build an 11gR2 RAC Cluster in VirtualBox in 1 Hour Using OVM Templates

After reviewing my blog post about running EBS OVM templates in VirtualBox, two of my teammates suggested that I work ...

DUPLICATE from ACTIVE Database Using RMAN, a Step-by-Step Guide

Duplicate using RMAN Recently, I had a request from one of our clients to duplicate a single instance database into a ...

EBS: R12 Default OACORE Memory Settings Are Not Enough

Not many of you know that my day-to-day work focus is Oracle E-Business Suite :). Here goes for an EBS-related blog ...

Adaptive Log File Sync: Oracle, Please Don't Do That Again

Disclaimer: Much of what follows is pure speculation on my part. It could be completely wrong, and I'm putting it out ...

How to Tune Using v$mystat

Situation When reviewing the performance of some queries, it is sometimes useful to review the session statistics for ...

How EBS Concurrent Processing Should Run on Oracle RAC

Suggested audience: Oracle Apps DBAs, Oracle e-Business Suite technical architects, and Oracle ATG team. Introduction ...

How to Troubleshoot OEM 12c Cloud Control Auto-Discovery

I was recently involved in an upgrade project to go from 11.2.0.2 to 11.2.0.3 on an Exadata V2. We hit some snags ...

Troubleshooting ORA-27090 Async I/O Errors with Systemtap

Last week, I ran into an issue on a high-volume Oracle database where sessions were periodically failing with ORA-27090 ...

Repost: Oracle Protocol

On 18th May 2003, a man named Ian Redfern published a paper documenting the TNS protocol internals. The paper, entitled ...

Revealing the Hints Behind the Automatic SQL Tuning Advisor

Background A client recently supplied a list of 50+ SQL IDs that should receive SQL profiles, and I’ve been working ...

This is How You Disable AUTO_TASKs in 11G

I find myself forgetting how to disable Oracle AUTO_TASKs on a regular basis. Therefore, I have decided to document it ...

Sleuthing for Temporary Space Spendthrifts

I was recently looking at an issue where a large database server was running out of temp space. The issue had occurred ...

Exadata Eighth Rack: A Few Thoughts

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has announced the arrival of a new, smaller member of the Exadata X3 H2M2 family: the eighth ...

Changing SID on a RAC Environment

This post is just a short note documenting a procedure that isn’t done frequently or described anywhere else (to my ...

Select Statement Generating Redo and Other Mysteries of Exadata

Like many good stories, this one also started with an innocent question from a customer: “I often check “SELECT ...

Oracle Direct NFS Configuration File Explained

While Oracle tech folks do their best to explain the meaning of not so many DNFS configuration file (oranfstab) ...

Flashback and Forth

A reader of my previous post about Oracle’s Flashback Database posted a comment noting that the Oracle documentation ...

Temporary Tablespaces: to BIGFILE or Not to BIGFILE

I saw a question on the OTN Exadata forum asking whether or not to use BIGFILE temporary tablespaces in an Exadata ...