Resetting Your Oracle User Password with SQL Developer on OSX

Database Management and Performance
| Feb 15, 2013
This post started as a shameless copy of Jeff Smiths Resetting Your Oracle User Password with SQL Developer - but it ended in a trilogy about OSX, Oracle and SQLDeveloper.
In my first two posts I made myself comfortable with Oracle instant client on my MacBook. Now I want to use it for something more serious, like changing passwords.

Even with all the modifications from previous post SQLDeveloper still does not show the Reset Password... option. The reason: it just don't know about the library correctly.

First the PATH as shown in previous post is not set in an (more...)

setting environment variables for sqlplus on OSX

Database Management and Performance
| Feb 15, 2013
In my previous post I showed how to create an universal binary for Oracle instant client so I don't need to care about 32/64 bit anymore.

Now I try to show how to set some environment variables so I only need to enter sqlplus and can start my work without preparing anything first.

I know I could do this in my local .profile, but I was looking for a more centralized way to provide them, maybe on a shared desktop where basic applications are installed just once.

This is all about OSX Mountain Lion - I'm working on 10. (more...)

Oracle client universal binaries for OSX

Database Management and Performance
| Feb 15, 2013
Recently Oracle announced a new Oracle Instant Client for OSX. As always there is a 32-bit and a 64-bit version available.
I was curious if they can be merged together to an universal binary. The short answer: yes, they can.

It all starts with downloading the instant client zips for 32 and 64 binary. I loaded basic and sqlplus and unzipped them into 2 directories instantclient_11_2_32 and instantclient_11_2_64. I also created a target directory instantclient_11_2.

Then the simple script
for i in `ls instantclient_11_2_32`
do 
lipo -create ~/instantclient_11_2_{32,64}/$i -output ~/instantclient_11_2/$i || cp ~/instantclient_11_2_64/$i ~/instantclient_11_2/$i
done


did the work with this (more...)

about traveling

Database Management and Performance
| Jan 21, 2013
At the moment I am trying to travel to Edinburgh for a week of Exadata Prove of Concept.
The basic idea was to leave Vienna on sunday evening and arrive in Edinburgh on sunday night.
As I tried to do an online checkin on Saturday evening - I discovered the flights where shifted to monday evening. - That was not my initial plan as one day missing on a 5 days PoC is not so nice.
After some research I discovered my initial flight from Vienna to Amsterdam was cancelled. But there was still an earlier flight on sunday lunchtime. (more...)

side channel attack on ORA-00942

Database Management and Performance
| Sep 17, 2012
Oracle Databases has a powerful set of grants and permissions. One of the easy philosophies behind it is just to hide anything a user is not allowed to see. Technically this leads to an error message
ORA-00942: table or view does not exist.
More precisely it should give a text like table or view does not exist or you are not allowed to access it.
For an ordinary user/schema separation there might be no big difference: If user A can not read table B.TAB it's of no value for user A whether the object does not exist or is just not (more...)

who cares if a listener is dying

Database Management and Performance
| May 5, 2012

In this post I try to show what's going on if a local listener dies in a 11gR2 RAC environment. My basic question is: When does (a) SCAN-Listener knows the local Listener disappeared?
My testcase (a sandbox):

  • A 2-node RAC - all actions are run on node 1, if not explicit defined.
  • My test-DB is called TTT04 (Test, you know?)
  • I have 3 SCAN listeners there, but I want to make the test-case easier so I do pin down my connection string to only one SCAN-listener (it's SCAN2 in my case):
    TTT04_bx =
      (DESCRIPTION =
        (ADDRESS = (PROTOCOL = TCP)(HOST =  (more...)

how to secure CMAN against CVE-2012-1675 – or an easier method than ASO

Database Management and Performance
| May 4, 2012
In the Oracle DBA World at the moment CVE-2012-1675 is a great issue. Oracle announced some methods how to secure existing systems. But these are sometimes not that easy, and there is no backport for older systems.
As I investigated the problem how to secure a connection manager I was hinted at Note:1455068.1.
The solution is somewhat easy: Only allow incoming connections to your systems. e.g.
    (rule=(src=*)(dst=10.220.8.114)(srv=*)(act=accept))

In a well designed environment where you can separate your DB Servers from others at low network layers, a set of CMAN (more...)

do not touch if you do not know for sure

Database Management and Performance
| Mar 26, 2012

Oracle provides and documents a huge load of possibilities and functions for nearly every purpose. For me it is impossible to know all of them. Even to know such an area exists is hard.
But still sometimes these functions Oracle does not document for customers purpose seems to be more attractive than those officially available.
One of these attractive packages is DBMS_SYSTEM. You will not find any description of this package in the official Oracle documentation. There are some small traces available, but nothing really useful.
Oracle also have quite clear words about using such unofficial, and hidden, packages:
In (more...)

looking close at TAF

Database Management and Performance
| Mar 19, 2012

At the moment I'm trying to collect and sort some informations about Oracles Transparent Application Failover. There is a lot of general information available in the wild, but no deeper details. Here I try to show my findings.

Testcase

For my test-database with DB_UNIQUE_NAME: TTT06_SITE1 I created the service
srvctl add service -d TTT06_SITE1 -s TTT06_TAF -P BASIC -e SELECT -r TTT061,TTT062 .
The tnsnames.ora entry is
TTT06_TAF =
  (DESCRIPTION =
    (ADDRESS_LIST =
      (LOAD_BALANCE = OFF)
      (ADDRESS = (PROTOCOL = TCP)(HOST = crs908.my.domain)(PORT = 1521))
    )
    (CONNECT_DATA =
      (SERVICE_NAME = TTT06_TAF)(SERVER=DEDICATED)
    )
  )

tracing

Just
strace -f -t (more...)

creating my mobile toolbox (for windows) I

Database Management and Performance
| Mar 5, 2012

I am somewhat tired to re-install the same set of software again and again, every time I (have to) switch to a new PC. Probably it's me, not the PCs, but it takes some tome to have the system setup, and me productive again.
Somehow it's like a craftsman has to setup a new labor space with new tools in every house they visit. But craftsmen are clever, they bring your tools with them - and take them away if not needed anymore. In best case they do not leave any traces (except the work done).
I try to mimic (more...)

total abuse of technology

Database Management and Performance
| Feb 27, 2012


I had a (for my environment) unusual request:
After the migration of a Repository Database from 9i to latest 10g I was asked to keep a backup of the old DB for at least 3 years.
This does not sound very unusual, but it's not that simple in our environment. We do only keep backups for weeks to some month, worst case. I also cannot just backup the datafiles at all: The old database run on Solaris, but we are switching to Linux right now. With just some bad luck I would not have any system to restore (or open) (more...)

restore DBMS_SCHEDULER.CREATE_CREDENTIAL cleartext password

Database Management and Performance
| Feb 16, 2012

If you want to use Oracle file watcher, you need to Create a Credential. As there a password needs to be stored in the database, Oracle tries to save it in a secure way. But as the password must be decrypted for the purpose to login on the file watchers agent side, it is not safe at all:
The credentials are stored with DBMS_SCHEDULER.CREATE_CREDENTIAL. Here an example:

exec DBMS_SCHEDULER.CREATE_CREDENTIAL(
  credential_name => 'local_credential',
  username => 'oracle',  password => 'welcome1');
exec DBMS_SCHEDULER.CREATE_CREDENTIAL(
  credential_name => 'local_credential2',
  username => 'oracle2', password => 'welcome1');


It's quite easy to see the values (more...)

some tracing events in DBMS_SCHEDULER

Database Management and Performance
| Feb 16, 2012


I currently have the fun to review DBMS_SCHEDULER. As I'm always interested in ways to trace anything, to dig deeper in case of problems, I searched for ways to trace it.
As I did not find a collected list of events anywhere, I start them here. It's by far not a complete list, so feel free to discuss and contribute, if you want!

event 10862


resolve default queue owner to current user in enqueue/dequeue
Cause: resolve default queue owner to current user in enqueue/dequeue.
Action: turn on if client wish to resolve the default queue owner to the current user. (more...)

get your traces – yourself

Database Management and Performance
| Feb 6, 2012


I'd like to mention a small peace of software. It's called MrTrace and available in Version 2.0.0.43 right now. For me it's a tool to save time. So what is it doing at all?
MrTrace is a plugin for Oracles SQL Developer to access tracefiles via SQL Developer. It's previous version could only access the tracefile for the statement you just executed. But since version 2 you anyone with the right permissions access any tracefile in the trace directory.

For a DBA it does not sound spectacular to access tracefiles, but it can be quite annoying to get and (more...)

Setting Up Oracle Connection Manager (without SOURCE_ROUTE)

Database Management and Performance
| Jan 31, 2012

This post must be seen as a direct follow up to Arup Nandas Setting Up Oracle Connection Manager.
As there are many references to this post, please read it first. Problem and Solution are quite similar, only the architecture is a little bit different:

The Architecture

 The network diagram of the three machines is slightly different:


There is a new needed connection: from the instance on dbhost1 to the connection manager on cmhost1.

After changing the setup, you will need to rewrite the TNSNAMES.ORA in the following way:

TNS_CM = 
  (DESCRIPTION = 
    (ADDRESS = 
      (PROTOCOL = TCP)(HOST = cmhost1)(PORT  (more...)

Who created that process?

Database Management and Performance
| Dec 9, 2011
Figure 2-7
Connection to
a Dedicated
Server Process
For some reason I was really curios who created that process. It's not about a particular process in detail, mir a well known kind of processes. At least well known for DBAs.
Which process? 
It's one of these:

oracle   13096     1  0 20:05 ?        00:00:00 oracleTTT071 (LOCAL=NO)

Yes, it's a simple server process, nothing spectacular. Nevertheless, the Concepts guide is not very specific, who created that process. So I tried to find out in more detail.
On my linux sandbox the first column of ps -ef shows the UID, the second is the PID, the third (more...)

bzip2 twice?

Database Management and Performance
| Nov 28, 2011

To check the performance of RMAN backup I recently started to trace it a little bit. As most of the time was not spent in any reading from disk or writing to media manager library event, it was on CPU. It's good to know the CPUs are of any good, but as I still want to know what's going on I tried to dig any deeper. CPU cycles are not just a magic black box where we put in a problem and the answer comes out after some times. At an abstraction layer it's a chain of functions where one (more...)

non-Exadata HCC

Database Management and Performance
| Oct 5, 2011
Oracles Hybrid Columnar Compression was one of the big new features of Oracle 11.2. Unfortunately someone decided this feature should only be available in Exadata. Even Oracle tried to explain it with technical limitations, it was more or less obvious that's just wrong. There are some reasons for this:

  • The Database is doing the HCC compression all the time
  • The Database must be able doing the HCC decompression in case the storage cell can not or want not.
  • Beta-testers where very sure, HCC worked there without any special hardware.
  • Jonathan Lewis shows there are situations, where also an ordinary database (more...)

when does PMON register to remote listeners

Database Management and Performance
| Sep 7, 2011
I had a complex problem today: I tried to setup a connection manager, but unlike Arup, I did not like to to use SOURCE_ROUTE. So I had to make the pmon register itself to the cman. As we have already an entry in spfile for remote_listener=REMOTE, I just enhanced this alias in tnsnames.ora by the additional line for the cmans HOST and PORT.
Unfortunately the services did not show up in the cmans show services. Not even an alter system register; did any good, still no service.
After checking with tcpdump (there where really no communication to the cman) and  (more...)

incomplete list of SRVCTL commands

Database Management and Performance
| Aug 19, 2011
As I have to dig into srvctl more than I liked to do, I figured the documentation is not complete (at least for my installation of 11.2.0.2):
the Documentation for srvctl upgrade claims
The srvctl upgrade database command upgrades the configuration of a database and all of its services to the version of the database home from where this command is run.

But there is a 2nd option missing totally: 
Usage: srvctl upgrade model -s <source-version> -d <destination-version> -p {first|last} [-e <name>=<value>[,<name>=<value>, ...]


in more detail: 
srvctl upgrade model -h



Upgrade the Oracle Clusterware resource types and  (more...)