General Administration

April 4, 2012 A fair number of articles on this blog are Oracle performance related in one respect or another.  I started thinking about how to measure how much more efficient something is when compared to something that is never performed.  Consider a situation where you had a database user account that is a member of the [...]

March 22, 2012 Suppose that you receive a request stating that a particular table in one of your databases must be monitored for changes.  One such table might be the one that lists the ERP system’s suppliers and their addresses – you would not want someone to be able to set up a legitimate supplier, and later [...]

February 17, 2012 As I mentioned in a previous blog article, I placed an order for the book “Oracle Database 11gR2 Performance Tuning Cookbook“, mostly because I was curious how the book would compare with the “Oracle Database 11g Performance Tuning Recipes” book (my review of that book was a total of about 35 typewritten pages in [...]

February 8, 2012 Default parameter values are great, as long as it is possible to predict the default values, and the defaults are appropriate for the environment in which the defaults are present.  It is sometimes a challenge to remember all of the rules, and exceptions to those rules, that determine the defaults. I had a [...]

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 [...]