Category: Uncategorized

This blog was originally a summary of last week’s worth of on-call Production Support, but it went so crazy towards the end of the week (and we’re still working with Oracle to fix a corrupted online index rebuild) that it was becoming ridiculously long and a little negative 😉 There might be one or two… Continue reading Call-out

Yesterday I received the sad news that Steve Cain died from cancer. I worked with Steve at Imagine Software for a while and hung around him for a few years more. In some ways, he was one of a number of surrogate big brothers I picked up, because most of them were older than me.… Continue reading Steve Cain RIP

A common requirement cropped up this week. A new Data Warehouse has just gone live and is still in the ‘do we have the right indexes here’ phase. In this case, the suspicion is that there are too many indexes in a specific schema and that a number of them may just be a waste… Continue reading Monitoring Index Usage

That’s a shame. I was hoping that setting the event at the instance level might generate one trace file in the background_dump_dest but, like event 10046, it generates one trace file per session in user_dump_dest. I should have expected that, but I suppose my optimism blinded me. It doesn’t make event 10132 unusable though, but… Continue reading Monitoring Index Usage II – Event 10132

For Animal Porn 🙁 Actually, my stats are looking a lot better since I put the Tripod site back in place with redirection pages to oracledoug.com. A decent percentage of my visits are Google searches for ‘SQL decode’ and the like, so I’d been missing them ….

Oracle support updated my sr to say, yes, we could use event 10132 for this purpose but that it involves some overhead, however small, as well as the 12k disk space per statement (10g) that Jonathan Lewis had already highlighted to me. If that’s undesirable, we could also use v$sql_plan as I mentioned before. This was… Continue reading Monitoring Index Usage III – Support response

I theory, this should be a much more straightforward, less contentious question than my previous – ‘What’s a Data Warehouse DBA?’ A development DBA looks after the development (and test) databases. It truly is as simple as that, but depends on the nature of the project you’re working on and the attitude and approach of… Continue reading What’s a ‘Development DBA’?

Someone sent me this link (Note for limited bandwidth users – it’s a 15 second video), which should cheer up a few Monday mornings (or perhaps evening for some readers). It’s not something I’ll be rushing to share with the boys in the house. God help poor Polly if I did … However, it’s probably… Continue reading Animal Fun?

This looks like an interesting concept – a weekly collection of interesting items for the DBA community. It’s not unusual to see blogs like this from individual bloggers. I’m not averse to the odd one myself. What might make this a bit more interesting for me is that there’ll be more ‘heads’ working on it… Continue reading Log Buffer

If anyone has any alternative titles, that ‘Doug’s Oracle Blog’ is looking increasingly fraudulent! My (sshhh, whisper it) real family are in Sunny Spain. As I’d decided to rent a bigger car that could take all of their luggage to Glasgow Airport, I bowed to the pressure at home and agreed to take my other… Continue reading A Trip to the Beach