Month: May 2007

DBA, Partitioning, Oracle, Licensing

Rant about partitioning licensing

TweetShareSharePin0 SharesI’ll give myself a quota for no more than one rant a month. However, one of my pet peeves is how Oracle licenses the database. I’l probably return to why I dislike the general model in a future rant, but this on e will be specific to partitioning. To use partitioning, you have to pay for the Enterprise Edition of the database at $40,000 per CPU and then pay an additional $10,000 for the partitioning option. That is a […]

DBA

Optimistic Locking with ORA_ROWSCN

TweetShareSharePin0 SharesAre you using 9i/10G and still implement optimistic locking with your own column rather than through Oracle’s pseudo column? So am I, but I couldn’t really explain why. My main (defensive) argument would be that the system was built long before 9i. Still, it would make sense for us to change it. Let’s look at a, hopefully, quick example. Let’s first create a user with two tables and add the same data to both tables. Two tables with just […]

Oracle, Blogging

Who reads blogs

TweetShareSharePin0 SharesReading this post about why the average Oracle IT worker doesn’t read blogs got me thinking. Does the average IT worker read blogs? I’m not sure. In what I have observed, it is something a segment does. I’d contend that the average blog reader is more advanced and more thirsty for more knowledge that the average person in the same field. I think it is also something the more internet aware do. Everyone knows about the internet, but how […]

XML, SQL, Oracle, Challenge

SQL Challenge I – Solution

TweetShareSharePin0 SharesBoth Gary and Philip postd working versions. Gary’s didn’t work for me when I had the same letter more than one time in the string. Philips did work and the need to deal with each letter as if it is unique can of course be questioned. The intent was for a solution that could handle that and as Philip showed adjusting that is as easy as to just add a distinct. My version is based on not using analytical […]

Challenge

SQL Challenge I

TweetShareSharePin0 SharesWhile maybe a pretentious title, I’ve always enjoyed getting and giving what I call SQL Challenges. It is basically a short explanation for what you should do with pure SQL and some limitations to how you can do it and then you get to try to come up with a solution. It is frequently more about being able to do it, than it is that one would actually implement it that way. The idea is that you lear new […]

SQL, XML, Oracle

Dynamic in-line queries

TweetShareSharePin0 SharesI don’t know of a better name for this feature. I think this name describes the function well, even if it may sound overly ambitious. This whole post will be based on a post by Laurent Schneider where he uses XML features to do a select count(*) from different tables and return the result in one result table. It is like a auto generated number of selects that are unioned together. You can find Laurent’s post here. It’s a […]

SQL, RSS, Perl, Oracle, Alert Log

Creating a feed with ORA-00600 errors

TweetShareSharePin0 SharesInstead of having to look at your different alert logs for ORA-00600 errors frequently, why not have them come to you? This post will, as promised, show the Perl code needed to publish a feed with ORA-00600 errors. This is building on the previous two posts that shows how to create an external table for the alert log and how to pull out all information for an ORA-00600 so each fetch retrieves one the data you’re interested in. The […]

SQL, Oracle, Alert Log

Querying the alert log for ORA-00600

TweetShareSharePin0 SharesTime to expand on the last post. As promised this will be about how to get the ORA-00600 information out of an external table for the alert log. We will use the same user and setup as we had in that post. Lets first review how an ORA-00600 is represented in the alert log. The actual arguments does not matter, I took them from a forum post to just have an example. What we care about for what we’re […]

SQL, Oracle, DBA, Alert Log

SQL Access to the alert log

TweetShareSharePin0 SharesI’m going to discuss how to get SQL access to your alert log in this entry. I will then build on that to make it even more useful in future posts. Browsing the alert log can be convenient if you’re already on the server. However, it is often not possible or at least not overly convenient. You may find that as the developer DBA you do not have access to the production server, or you have to log in […]