Arup Nanda

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.

Someone asked me the other day the difference between process and session in Oracle. Are they the same thing? Well, why then there are two parameters in the initialization parameter file – sessions and processes? Is it possible that a process does not have a corresponding session? Conversely, is it possible to have a session without a process?

And, furthermore, the processes parameter is larger than the sessions. So, are there more processes than sessions? To answer that, she got the count from v$session and v$process:

SQL> select count(1) from v$process;

COUNT(1)
----------
23

SQL> select count(1) from v$session;

COUNT(1)
----------
20

At least the answer was pretty clear – there are more processes than sessions (23 versus 20). But then, someone pointed to the view V$RESOURCE_LIMIT, which records the current usage of the various definable limits. Checking the limits for two resources – sessions and processes:

select resource_name, current_utilization, max_utilization, limit_value
from v$resource_limit
where resource_name in ( 'sessions', 'processes')
/

RESOURCE_NAME CURRENT_UTILIZATION MAX_UTILIZATION LIMIT_VALUE
------------- ------------------- --------------- -----------
processes 23 23 40
sessions 26 26 49

This shows that the highest possible numbers for sessions and processes are 40 and 49 respectively. [Note, I have set the processes parameter in init.ora to 49 to reduce the limit artificially]. It shows that currently there are 26 sessions and 23 processes. Finally it shows the sessions and processes have touched a high number of 26 and 23 respectively.

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

For those who attended my 2-day training event in Istanbul, I wish to express my sincere thanks for the participation. For me, or any speaker, the privilege of having your attention for 2 days away from your work and family, means a lot. Some folks came all the way from Ankara and had to go back to work the following day. I hope you all got to learn something worthwhile your time.

The scripts are located in: http://www.proligence.com/racperf_istanbul/scripts.zip The password and userid is the ones I gave you in the class.

I also want to reiterate my earlier request to send me your detailed and honest feedback at arup@proligence.com. You may want to write it in Turkish, if that is more convenient. The important thing is to provide the feedback; I can always translate using Google.

Thanks, Hande and Madalina from Oracle University for arranging it. Much appreciated. Now I am off to Estonia.

For all those who came to my last of my four sessions - 11g New Features for DBAs - I appreciate your taking the time. It was a pleasant surprise to see about 500 people showing up at a lunch time slot on the last day of the conference.

Here is the presentation link. I hope you enjoyed the session and found it useful.