Time for an update to a older post. I have previously talked about the annoyance of connecting to RMAN with a duplicated database where the DBID has not been changed. RMAN happily breaks the catalog by assuming the “new” database is a new incarnation, and prevents the previous owner of the catalog from using the backups.
I wrote a blog post a while ago about hacking your way past this problem, but was recently informed by Martin Bach that there was actually an RMAN command to fix the Incarnation problem I had encountered, so I though I had better take (more...)
I was looking at the contents of a tablespace recently – just the extents, not a block dump – with the intention of shrinking a couple of the associated datafiles (don’t ask why – the reason is both stupid and irrelevant). I needed to know just how much I could shrink immediately, and if there were any quick wins in terms of moving objects from near the end of files so even more space could be reclaimed. I was a little surprised to discover that something which I have been doing for over 20 years was not as common knowledge (more...)
Today the UK’s big Oracle User event has just lifted its skirts to show off its new frilly agenda, which can be found here.
I have been a member of the UKOUG for well over a decade, and a Special Interest Group (SIG) Deputy Chairman for the last 5 or 6 years. As an independent consultant this costs me money in lost earnings, basic membership fees, travel, hotels, flowers for the wife, etc. However, I make my living as an Oracle consultant and I need to keep up with trends, understand a broad range of information about the Oracle world, (more...)
So, what do you do that isn’t work. Sure, you work hard in the office. You might even do work when you get home at night on your own “lab” setup – VM’s make that so easy these days. Even an old desktop can spin up a couple of VM’s if you stick some extra memory in it. I just bought 12GB for £25, so that’s pretty cheap and easy to do.
You might have read some technical books on your commute to and from the office, or listened to technical podcasts on the way there and back if you (more...)
I am deputy chairman of the UK Oracle User Group: Availability, Infrastructure and Management (AIM) SIG. We arrange several groups per year where we look to get speakers to present on all manner of subject in relation to the remit of the SIG: Exadata, RAC, Partitioning, Grid Control, Managing DBA’s, etc (for more info, check here). However, it can sometimes be difficult to get presenters, and close to impossible to get new presenters.
Now, most people are pretty scared to get up in front of their peers and present. It initially seems quite a daunting prospect. However, I (more...)
Well, there’s a lot been said about bankers in the last few years, much of it negative and with good reason. Tony Robinson asked if they were human in an excellent rant on Question Time. Manipulating the LIBOR is pretty egregious. It undermines the basis of truth behind our (formerly) well-regarded banks. It shows them to be self-interested liars and cheats.
Many of the huge numbers of people who work for banks are just doing their job, ticking along, feeding their families, not being evil. I have worked as a consultant inside many banks, and have also worked directly for (more...)
Increasing numbers of Yahoo mail passwords appear to have been compromised; I don’t use Yahoo [although in a historically stupid move, I have multiple email addresses from multiple providers including hotmail, gmail, my ISP and my own domain ]. Anyway, I have been getting an increasing number of spam emails from friends and acquaintances with Yahoo accounts. Not from any other source. I have been multiply spammed from multiple yahoo accounts this year, but from no other provider. The conclusion I draw from this is that either Yahoo has had its password file compromised and the spammers are slowly working (more...)
The UK Oracle User Group has put out it’s call for papers, and the deadline is rapidly approaching.
Have you registered as a speaker and sent in a abstract yet? NO? Don’t you know how great an opportunity it is for you. Discuss your ideas with your peers. Network. Instruct and inform. Help other avoid the pitfalls which dogged your project. All by telling everyone about it. We will love you for it at the user group. And you will love the feedback you get. Anyone can speak, everyone has a good story to tell.
You need to register by (more...)
Yesterday I had a problem… I noticed that one of our overnight jobs was failing. The job in question is an ad-hoc tidy-up job, ran as needed when a performance metric for a specific query indicates that we’re going to be in trouble soon.
So, what was the problem? I have the stack trace captured in the job output:
Finished shrinks at 02-APR-2012 00:12
Creating job data pump export job LOG_EXPORT
User:....... NEW_SCHEMA
Tables:..... 'table-1','table-2'
DECLARE
*
ERROR at line 1:
ORA-31626: job does not exist
ORA-06512: at "SYS.DBMS_SYS_ERROR", line 79
ORA-06512: at "SYS.DBMS_DATAPUMP", line 911
ORA-06512: at (more...)
About 1,000,000,000 of them in this amazing composite photograph of the Milky Way. Taking 10 years to make and using 2 telescopes (to get a view from North and South hemispheres) it combines the UKIDSS/GPS sky survey acquired by the UK Infrared Telescope in Hawaii with the VVV survey data acquired by the Vista telescope in Chile.
This zoomable image is truly magnificent; to get an idea of scale of the number of visible stars, if you count them at a rate of 1 per second it will take you well over 30 years to count them all.
Happy Counting!
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