The Latest Oracle Posts

WARNING: inbound connection timed out (ORA-3136)
Causes of the ORA-3136 Error Message There are many changes in the default behaviour from Oracle 9i and Oracle 10g databases. One of the changes to SQLNet was the default timeout for a new connection to be established. This setting is called SQLNET.INBOUND_CONNECT_TIMEOUT. The value in 9i was unlimited and the new value in 10g […]
Enable Archivelog Mode
If you would like to put your database into Archivelog mode, follow the steps outlined below, substituting the appropriate values for the destinations on disk. 1. Check what state and mode the database is in SELECT log_mode, open_mode FROM v$database; If the log_mode shows as NOARCHIVELOG, then you need to put the DB intoARCHIVELOG mode. The result […]
ORA-16191 & Error 1017 – Password File and Log Shipping
The Problem When creating a new DB as the downstream DB for a CDC configuration which is version 11g and the source DB is 10g, there are many occurrences in the alert log which states that the source DB cannot authenticate with the downstream database in order to successfully ship the archived redo log file. […]
DBCA Info
The DataBase Configuration Assisstant (DBCA) is a utility provided by Oracle which allows you to create, configure, re-configure, delete and manage templates of databases. Prior to release 10G, I heard many a DBA speak badly of the DBCA. Why? Because it was clunky, unreliable and installed components that were not needed which meant that you […]
How to Upgrade your Primary and Physical Standby Databases
In our environment we have one primary DB and two Data Guard DBs, both at different physical locations. The set up looks like this: Primary DB, 10.2.0.4 Physical standby DB 1, 10.2.0.4 Physical standby DB 2, 10.2.0.4 Our aim is to upgrade the DBs to 11g, but should the upgrade fail on our primary DB, […]

Oracle 10g to 11g Upgrade Guide
In this article I would like to walk you through an example of how to upgrade your Oracle database from version 10g to 11g. We will be covering the following topics: DBCA vs Manual Upgrade – which should you use? Documentation to read before you upgrade How to deal with Data Guard physical standby DBs […]

ORA-29278: The 4 Most Common Issues & How to Fix Them
There are many reasons you might be getting the ORA-29278 error message. Below you will find the 4 most common and how to resolve them. Let’s get stuck in… The Problem You are trying to use the UTL_MAIL package to send email from your database. When attempting to send a mail, you recieve the following […]

Monitor Oracle UNDO
Before I go into detail about how to check your UNDO tablespace in Oracle, I’d like to very briefly outline what UNDO is used for in the Oracle database. Quick Recap…Essential Info In short, the UNDO tablespace is used to store before images of database blocks which have had some kind of change made to […]

Monitoring TEMP Space Usage in Oracle
It’s a common problem encountered by many DBAs on a daily basis; developers writing queries which run out of TEMP space. It can come at the worst of times, too… For example, you’ve run in the scripts many times overnight into a development environment and they worked fine. They are signed off and run into […]
DBMS_CAPTURE_ADM.BUILD Hangs
Having recently set-up Change Data Capture (CDC) on a development environment which in use, I was running a command to build a copy of the data dictionary into the redo log, as below: set serveroutput on variable f_scn number; begin :f_scn := 0; dbms_capture_adm.build(:f_scn); dbms_output.put_line(‘The first_scn value is ‘ || :f_scn); end; / Looking at […]