ACE Director

Thank you all those who attended my presentation - "Under the Hoods: Cache Fusion, GCS, GES and GRD". I hope you found it useful. Here are the demo scripts I used during the session, if you want to play with on your own system.

The actual presentation itself will most likely be available at a later date on the oracleracsig.org website.

Thank you all those attended the websession today for LAOUG. It was a great honor to be the first speaker in the virtual conference series. Many thanks for inviting me, Francisco. I'm also looking forward to the next three I am supposed to deliver.

For those who attended, you may want to download the scripts at www.proligence.com/sec_scripts.zip

Many thanks to those who attended my webcast "Secure Your Database in a Single Day" for IOUG's wecast series. I hope you found it useful. I would highly appreciate if you take a moment to let me know how you felt - good, bad and ugly. Please write to me at arup@proligence.com.

You can find the scripts referenced in the webcast here.

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

Thank you for all those attended my sessions during Collaborate 2010. Two of the sessions I presented were not mine; but that of Riyaj Shamsuddin. Riyaj was stuck in Denmark thanks to the ash cloud scenario in Europe and asked if I could present his. I agreed to and, with a lot of trepidation, I did. I hope I did justice to the sessions. For questions on those sessions, please reach out to Riyaj directly.

Going to my own sessions, here is where you can download the presentations. For the sessions I wanted to show live demos; but in a short span of 30 minutes for Quick Tips, it was impossible. You can download the scripts here so that you can check them out yourself. The slides show which scripts to execute.

RAC Performance Tuning, part of RAC Bootcamp (Recorded)
Stats with Intelligence (Recorded)
Publish Stats after Checking, part of Manageability Bootcamp (Recorded and shown via Webcast)

Once again, your patronage by attending is highly appreciated. A speaker is nothing without attendees. I sincerely hope that you got some value from the sessions. As always, I am looking forward to hearing from you – not just that you liked; but things you didn't.

I’m excited to share the news that Oracle ACE program has been extended to cover MySQL community now and Pythian’s Sheeri Cabral has become the very first Oracle ACE Director in MySQL expertize area. It’s a special privilege for me to blog about it because I had a pleasure to nominate Sheeri in the first place. Being an Oracle ACE Director myself and knowing what’s involved, I believed that if Oracle ACE program is extended to MySQL, Sheeri must be the number one candidate.

It’s impossible to overestimate Sheeri’s role in the MySQL community — her advocacy for the technology and commitment to building and supporting the community. She’s been presenting about MySQL countless number of times and been actively involved in several community projects and organizations. She blogs frequently and with passion. It’s no surprised that Sheeri has been awarded MySQL’s Community Advocate, Communicator and Facilitator of the Year for two years in a row (2007 and 2008).

Thank you for all those who attended my webcast today on SQL Plan Management for All India Oracle User Group. It was a privilege to present before you and to be able to address your questions. I am sorry I couldn;t read all the questions properly; since it was extremely difficult to see the questions scrolling up in the tiny chat window. Also, as the webcast was designed, I couldn't hear anything the attendees were saying.

The presentation and the associated SQL scripts are available here. The article I referred to can be found here.

If you have a question regarding that specific webcast, please post a comment here and I will address it here. Please, limit your questions to the material discussed in the webcast only.

Recently I encountered a situation that demonstrates how, in an Oracle database, an error may stem from a very unrelated cause. A DBA was building a physical standby database for an upcominmg training. The two servers he was using were part of a RAC cluster; so the Oracle binaries were already there. He decided to use the same ORACLE_HOME for the new databases as well - a quite logical decision to savbe on space and administration issues. He created a primary database on server n1 and a standby database on the server n2. Follooing the usual manual procedure in building the standby database, he copied the pfile from primary database, modified the parameters and brought up the standby instance in nomount mode on the server n2.

SQL> startup nomount pfile=initSTBY.ora

But it refused to come up, with the following error:

ORA-00304: requested INSTANCE_NUMBER is busy

Alert log showed:

USER (ospid: 14210): terminating the instance due to error 304
Instance terminated by USER, pid = 14210