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Wising up
We've been attempting to tune some datwarehouse operations this week and I came across some behaviour that i wasn't expecting so took to otn to try and get an explanation of what was happening and to...
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Why you should reduce attack surfaces!
I normally steer clear from blogging about security topics for one thing there are plenty of other people that do it better than me and  i generally find the whole topic pretty dry and boring - a...
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Parallel cats (an overview of catctl.pl)
As many of us are now aware I'm sure the upgrade process is very different in 12c than in previous releases due mainly to the introduction of the catctl.pl script for running parallel upgrades of...
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Physician heal thyself
Post our patch to 12.1.0.5 cloud control i was having a look at the general db performance of the OMS repository. It was actually pretty bad and i didn't know if the patch caused it or it had been bad...
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Apex 5 and the mview refresh
I've been trying to create a 'simple' app in apex to replace something that was written by one of my colleagues about 15 years ago in perl/apache on AIX. AIX is in it's final death throes here and this...
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Double Dynamic Apex
After my last Apex post i'm now on a roll and have coded what is perhaps the most fiddly block of plsql ever attempted to create a data source for a page......So what the hell was i doing you ask -...
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When a fix breaks something
In a post a couple of weeks ago i described how i fixed a performance problem on cloud control. However i found out this week that the all was not well with this fix.....Here is a small part of the...
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Solving the red stack
In the weeks running up to Christmas Red Stack laid down the gauntlet with their 'Christmas challenge'Â http://rstchristmaschallenge.instapage.com/Â The challenge is now long since closed so i thought...
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The curious case of the missing index
Today we were moving some schemas from database A to database B - all was pretty much fine apart from some messages about bad index stats right at the end where it was failing to import some metadata...
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Partitions with different attributes?
This past week the topic of archiving came up - the thing that everyone talks about but no-one does....One of the topics that came up was that old partitions could be exchanged out of the main table...
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Sneaking past firewalls to the database
Firewalls are an essential part of any IT setup, however at times a missing rule can cause major issues if it can't be quickly resolved. In very complex networks this is actually sometimes not trivial...
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On patch name changes
When looking for the latest PSU's for 12.1.0.2 this week i noticed that the names have been changed (to protect the guilty...?).What we'd all got quite used to with the 5th digit changing to reflect...
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opt_param to the rescue
It's been a few weeks since my last blog entry - work has been crazy with all things cloud and I've not had the time (or the energy) to write anything up.Just a short post today on something that has...
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Active database duplication summary
Today I've had to duplicate one of our DW environments to create another 'test' environment. To do this i made use of the rman active duplicate function - this is well documented in other peoples blogs...
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Friday night ORA-1555 fear fest
Now this is the kind of call you don't want to get on a Friday night."The app isn't displaying any updated data on screen for the past x hours"Time to put down the beer, take the slippers off and power...
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Cloud control controlling the ......(errrr) cloud
This week I've been setting up cloud control 13c in Azure with a view to this monitoring everything we put up in 'the cloud'. Following the detail in Tim's notes made this easy and I'm not going to...
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It's not paranoia if they really are out to get you.....
These past few weeks have really been my first 'real' work done in public cloud, i've played around as I'm sure many other people have but now we're really using it.The thing that surprised me most is...
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Tuning is sometimes all about the data......
Now this week I've really had to think when performing some SQL tuning, my usual trick of just looking at some SQL and just saying 'add this index' or do some other clever stuff just wasn't cutting it...
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When data is silently altered..... beware the characterset
I was hit by a vaguely interesting issue again when moving data from one database to another recently and thought it was worth a write up. I recreated the problem using a simple case to illustrate the...
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Azure command line on OEL
We're working more and more with azure related services at the moment and I've been looking in to the different ways that azure infrastructure can be created/managed other than through the web gui. The...
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