General Administration

December 23, 2011 A day or two ago I saw an announcement that the HTML (non-Flash) version of the Oracle Support site was to be phased out in January 2012.  It seems like the last time I tried to use that site, the search functionality did not quite work for Oracle Database products; I gave up on [...]

October 14, 2011 (Modified October 15, 2011) When reading various Oracle Database books, I often perform mental exercises related to the book’s contents, asking “what could go wrong?”   That is probably why some of my book reviews have extended to record setting lengths… who knew that Amazon imposed a limit on book review lengths… I [...]

September 28, 2011 A friend brought an interesting Oracle Database 11.2.0.2 problem to my attention. He is in the process of upgrading to a new Oracle Database server (and Oracle Database version) and a new version of an ERP package. He has experienced an ORA-00600 error with both patch 6 and patch 9 for 11.2.0.2 [...]

July 21, 2011 Have you ever wondered about the V$OPEN_CURSOR view, the SESSION_CACHED_CURSORS parameter, and the two session-level statistics “session cursor cache count” and “session cursor cache hits”?  I did after reading from two different sources that stated essentially that a larger shared pool would be required when the value for the SESSION_CACHED_CURSORS parameter is [...]

June 7, 2011 While reading through the alpha copy of a performance tuning book, I noticed a set of SQL statements that were identical to those found in the Oracle Database 11.2 Performance Tuning Guide.  The set of SQL statements from the Performance Tuning Guide follow: 10.3.1.1 Causes To determine the possible causes, first query [...]

June 6, 2011 You might expect to see some differences when upgrading from one release version of Oracle Database to another release version (edit June 6, 2011: see this article for expected changes when upgrading from 10g to 11g).  For instance, you might find that Oracle Database 11.1.0.6 deadlock when Oracle Database 10.2.0.5 and below [...]

June 2, 2011 The most popular article on this blog includes a script that demonstrates generating a deadlock on Oracle Database 11g R1 and R2 when the exact same script on Oracle Database 10g R2 does not trigger a deadlock.  I came across another interesting change between Oracle Database 10.2.0.5 and 11.2.0.2 (the change also [...]

May 29, 2011 A year ago I wrote an article that had a couple of topics, one of which described three books that I put on order - ordered with the intention of writing reviews for all three books.  Two of the books arrived in a timely fashion, while the third book has yet to arrive despite being ordered [...]

May 13, 2011 In the last couple of days I have been busy with a couple of non-Oracle Database specific tasks, and I started wondering what types of wait events I might be posting during this time period if I had to report what I was doing.  Waiting on the server to reboot for the 20th time [...]

February 22, 2011 A recent thread in the OTN forums mentioned Metalink (MOS) Doc ID 1203353.1 – “How to find Oracle Database Documentation on OTN Web Site” and lists four easy steps for finding information in the Oracle documentation library, with the starting point being this link.  I think that it is great having the [...]