These are my personal rules that I’ve been following moderating the public forums on LinkedIn. I’ve posted on that topic in the discussion on IOUG Exadata SIG forum. As I’m passing RAC SIG group to the next folks on the board (I’m the RAC SIG president until end of August) I needed to hand over...

Back in the (really) old days, systemstate dumps had to be used for diagnosing hangs and finding blockers of hung databases. Basically you just identified which resource your waiting sessions were waiting for and then scanned through the rest of the system state dump to see which session held that particular resource (note that over time the instrumentation and systemstate dumps have evolved to resolve and dump the blocker information right at the waiting session section in the dump).

Diagnosing complex hangs was a tedious manual process (or required some scripting), so the hanganalyze was a really welcome addition to hang diagnosis. The hanganalyze basically walked through the blocker-waiter chains, found which session was the LEAF in the chain (the LEAF is the ultimate/final blocker in the wait chain), which everybody either directly or indirectly was waiting for.

Usually I'm pushing information out - now I need to pull some in.

We're evaluating the usage of XMLDB in the database community. We would like to know what components of XMLDB are most frequently used. Please let us know which of the following you use:

• XMLType storage
• XML store as CLOB
• XML store as Binary XML
• XML store as Object Relational
• Indexing
• Unstructured
• Structured
• Functional indexes
• Text Indexes
• XML <--> Relational interaction
• XML Generation from relational
• XMLType views on relational data
• Relational views on XML data (using XMLTable)
• XDB repository
• Protocols
• Webservices
• File/folder access
• advanced features like versioning, events, xlink, anything else
  

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