Search

Top 60 Oracle Blogs

Recent comments

Home » Monthly archive

November 2007

Boring life.

Submitted by mno on Fri, 2007-11-30 00:05

As my 18-year old daughter Christine said yesterday when she arrived at the scene: "There's ALWAYS something going on in this house."

Here's what happened:

We have insufficient pressure on the cold water in our house these days. It means that something must be done, so CarpenterTorben called on Grethe's brother, who can fix water things.

It required that we broke up a bit of the floor in our entre/foyer/whatever it's called in our house and dig a big hole on the outside in order to get to the water pipes. Torben and I joked about an idea: Why not tear down the whole house and build a new one where there's plenty of space for pipes, wires, and such?

Well, one should be careful about what one wishes for.

Subprogram inlining in 11g

Submitted by Adrian Billington on Thu, 2007-11-29 00:07

Oracle extends the scope of its PL/SQL compiler optimisation. November 2007

Pls-00436 removed in oracle 11g

Submitted by Adrian Billington on Thu, 2007-11-29 00:07

Oracle relaxes the long-standing FORALL implementation restriction in 11g. November 2007

Things I learned at Oracle Open World in SFO 2008

Submitted by mno on Tue, 2007-11-20 23:05

I just came back from a few days at OOW, and it was fun. I shared a biggish apartment with Anjo Kolk, Krister (Sweden) and Oliver (Danish CSC), and it was beautiful to see the beer bottles (good beers, mind you!) gradually filling up the kitchen table allocated for that purpose.

On Sunday, November 11, I was invited to a seven-hour briefing for Oracle ACE Directors (I am such a thing). It was mostly about the Fusion Middle Ware (MW) and in the end a bit about the 11g database.

I have three observations:

1. During the MW presentations I saw more acronyms than in my entire military career.

2. 'Oracle' was the only word with less than seven letters in all those slides.

3. The best thing that can happen to any product is to be bought by Oracle. Turns out, that the purchase itself will transfer the product overnight from being worth-, use- and hopeless to being an absolutely state-of-the-art, best-of-beer product.

Oracle copies MOOW :-)

Submitted by mno on Tue, 2007-11-20 22:53

As you all know, Miracle held the first Miracle Oracle Open World (MOOW) conference at Lalandia earlier this year:

http://miracleas.dk/index.asp?page=168&page2=390

Alas, it didn't take Oracle long to copy the idea...

http://www.oracle.com/webapps/events/EventsDetail.jsp?p_eventId=67922&sr...

Of course it's slightly disappointing that they substitute the word 'Miracle' for 'Mini', but we can live with it.

Oracle Security, Part 2: Your read only accounts aren’t that read only

Submitted by tanelpoder on Sun, 2007-11-18 17:44

Couple of years ago an interesting fact floated up in Oracle-L – a regular user with only SELECT privilege on a table can successfully execute a SELECT FOR UPDATE against it, locking all rows and even lock the whole table using LOCK TABLE command. Locking a table in exclusive mode would stall all changes and selects against that table – effectively hanging all applications using that table. Pete Finnigan wrote a review of the issue in this blog entry.

Automatic Memory Management in Oracle 11.1

Submitted by julian on Fri, 2007-11-09 18:22

In Oracle 11g memory can be managed in two ways; manual and automatic. Manual memory management works exactly the same as in previous releases; Automatic memory management is new.

Automatic memory management allows both SGA and PGA memory to be allocated automatically by Oracle. It uses two new initialization parameters; MEMORY_MAX_TARGET a static parameter that specifies the maximum amount of memory the instance can ever use and MEMORY_TARGET, a dynamic parameter that specifies the amount of memory that is currently available to the instance. The instance is free to allocate memory to either the SGA or the PGA according to demand. See the documentation for more information.

The interesting part is the use of shared memory by the new Automatic Memory Management feature. Using Manual Memory Management, shared memory is allocated in one large segment. On Linux you can check the size of this segment using the ipcs -m command.

However, in 11.1 with a MEMORY_MAX_TARGET of 500M and a MEMORY_TARGET of 500M, the ipcs -m command executed by the oracle user will always return something similar to the following:

$ ipcs -m
------ Shared Memory Segments --------
key shmid owner perms bytes nattch status
0x00000000 98306 root 777 393216 2 dest
0x85489c70 458764 oracle 660 4096 0

So shared memory appears to have reduced in size to 4096 bytes. Obviously this is not entirely true. The shared memory area still exists, but it is no longer reported in full by the ipcs command. Instead the ipcs command now only reports the first 4096 bytes of shared memory.

You can see more information about shared memory by listing the /dev/shm directory. For example for an instance called TEST, the first few entries might be:

Sqlplus is my second home, part 4: Getting sqlplus parameter value into a variable

Submitted by tanelpoder on Tue, 2007-11-06 17:22

I’m having some busy times, so can’t blog anything more serious than another sqlplus trick (which likely has value only to some hardcore sqlplus geeks though).
Ever wanted to load a sqlplus parameter (like linesize, pagesize or arraysize) into a sqlplus define variable?
This can sometimes be helpful for customizing your everyday DBA scripts to output (or not output) some columns based on linesize. Or you may want to use the SQL error code somewhere in your script.