May 2010

I’ve previously published a couple of notes (here and here) about the driving_site() hint. The first note pointed out that the hint was deliberately ignored if you write a local CTAS or INSERT that did a remote query. I’ve just found another case where the hint is ignored – this time in a simple SELECT [...]

When is the last time you looked at the listener logs? Perhaps never. Not a very good idea. Listener logs contain a wealth of information on security events - it shows you the profile of hosts connecting to the database, the programs they are using and attempting to communicate but failed, among other things. But reading the listener logs is not exactly a pleasant experience. A while ago I wrote a series of articles on an online eZine called DBAZine.com on how to create an external table to read the listener logs using simple SQL; but unfortunately DBAZine.com has folded.

I have placed the articles on my website for your reference. As always, I would love to hear from you how you felt about these, stories of your own use and everything in between.

Mining Listener Logs Part 1
Mining Listener Logs Part 2
Mining Listener Logs Part 3

Is it really that time already? I'll be working in London, but for those of you who can make it, this just in from Thomas Presslie ...

"The annual Scottish Oracle Conference is being held in Glasgow on 27th May 2010.  Now with five streams and keynote by David Callaghan, Senior Vice President Oracle, UK, Ireland and Israel a local event in Scotland not to be missed!   More information can be found at http://scotland.ukoug.org/ The OUG Scotland Chairman, Thomas Presslie, has some free places to give away to readers of Doug's Oracle Blog.  Please email Thomas tpresslie@pisec.org for details of the discount code for registration."

Sorry I'll miss it

I will get back to the stats stuff at some point, but I'm quite busy at the moment working on something that I can't talk too much about, but which is throwing up enough generic issues to talk about. This is one that I meant to blog about ages ago when I first noticed it but when it caused us some problems last week, it was a useful reminder.

In summary you need to be careful when you upgrade to 11g because Resource Manager is enabled by default!

I don't want to blog about the ins and outs of Resource Manager and whether it's a good thing or not, but I do think this is a pretty extreme change to implement without a lot of surrounding publicity. It's a bit like the auto stats gather job that appeared in 10g that caused so many problems for Oracle users. It seems like it might be a good idea, but would you really want to introduce it on to a stable system that you're upgrading to 11g?

But rather than just talk about the change, I wanted to highlight how I first realised it was going on ...