The Latest Oracle Posts
What’s Holding a Lock on my Oracle dll Processes?
You are probably familiar with the scenario; you’re applying an Oracle interim patch using the Oracle OPatch utility and you’ve followed the instructions to the letter. You run the next step, opatch apply. You are then greeted with an error message stating that OPatch was unable to overwrite some Oracle dll files because you other processes […]
Which Process is my Oracle Service – Task Manager
When you can’t work out which process belongs to which DB service in a Windows environment, there are two easy ways to work it out: 1. PID Identification find PID from task manager. Add the visible column from the options menu if it’s not shown run this command from command prompt tasklist /svc /fi “pid […]
Kill Oracle Session
There are many reasons why you might want to kill an Oracle database session. Perhaps there are a large number of sessions connected from an application server which is malfunctioning and you want to remove them all. Maybe you want to put the database in to a restricted session state and kill off a load of the […]
What Should I look for in an Oracle DBA?
How to Spot a good DBA Throughout my time as an Oracle DBA I have seen many DBAs, through working alongside them to interviewing them. I’m not going to list the qualities of a good Oracle DBA in this article, as I have already done so in a previous one called “What qualities make a good […]
Autoextend
We upgraded our databases from 10g to 11g quite recently. After doing so, and after resolving a few resource manager issues, we thought we had everything covered. Soon thereafter, we started to notice that the tablespaces would automatically extend all datafiles by a substantial amount in one go when a single datafile reached the point at which it […]
What is REDO?
In this article I hope the summarise in simple terms what the REDO logs are for in your database, how to manage them and why they are so important. There are a lot of topics to cover when discussing REDO logs, but the aim of this article is not to comprehensively detail every nuance of […]
Create, Alter and Cache Oracle Sequence
What are Sequences in Oracle? A database object which generates numbers Usually used to generate a value for a primary key column You can select the current and next values from them Are not table specific so can be used to generate a primary key value across multiple tables No locking required if simultaneous generation […]
Sqlplus as SYSDBA
Let’s start by taking a look at what SYSDBA and SYSOPER are, and then dig a little deeper… SYSDBA and SYSOPER are special system privileges They are used to perform administrative actions, such as starting and stopping the database You can connect to the database even if it is not open with SYSDBA and SYSOPER […]
The IT DBA
In this article I am going to write about the role that the IT DBA plays within the support environment, particularly the Oracle DBA as I have the most experience in this role. I hope to give you an insight into what a DBA does, what it means to become an Oracle DBA, how to […]