David Fitzjarrell

Occasionally bugs creep in to code trees and end up in production. Oracle is not immune to this eventuality, and in Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM), the agents can exhibit some interesting behavior with regard to Perl. The OEM 13c agent, unfortunately, has a bug that causes some Perl processes to consume large amounts of CPU. […]

Oracle offers the possibility of encrypted TNS connections through the TCPS protocol. This requires the use of SSL, and as a result, certificates to verify both the client and the server. Creating such a configuration is not difficult; the rest of this article will provide the steps and commands to successfully complete this task. An […]

Query tuning is a combination of art, science and intuition. Elegant tuning solutions are art, based on science, that science using two of Oracle’s events, 10046 and 10053. Which one is more beneficial depends on the query and the ‘bad’ execution plan. A 10046 trace can show what Oracle is waiting on and where time […]

New database versions are always interesting; default parameter values can change; new parameters can be introduced, and new settings can appear. In Oracle 12.2.0.1 and later releases a new user setting, LOCAL_TEMP_TABLESPACE, is available. A local temporary tablespace segregates user temp data, like sorts and hash joins, to a temporary tablespace local to the RAC […]

Oracle provides a way to clone a new database home from an existing installation and, for the most part, it works well. On x86_64, however, it appears that the cloning process can miss something that creates unexpected errors when attempting to set init parameters. Let’s go through the process to see what is involved and […]

Security. Each day it seems another breach is reported, another hack revealed, more personal user information is stolen, apparently despite the best efforts to thwart such attacks. It’s becoming increasingly obvious that guarding against break-ins is simply not enough; one must be prepared for the maliciously inclined to succeed at hacking their way into ‘secure’ […]

Oracle, in a desire to let the administrator affect performance, has provided various settings in the spfile to enable or disable features that could possibly make things go faster. Long on the list of bloggers has been cursor_sharing, the parameter used to tell Oracle how to treat query text. By default, it’s set to EXACT, […]

Oracle provides an interesting function, ASCIISTR(), to return ASCII strings from a VARCHAR2 or CLOB column, and in general it does an admirable job. There are non-printing characters however, that ‘put a spanner in the works’, returning HEX strings instead of characters. Since each HEX string is five bytes long, such strings can significantly increase […]

Oracle Solaris is on its way out, which means that for many shops the next project on the board will be to migrate to another operating system for Oracle database servers. Many choices are available with Linux being a top contender. If the enterprise is already using virtualization most likely Linux x86_64 is the O/S […]

Patching is a necessity, and CPU updates can include patches some installations may not need. This ‘all or nothing’ approach may create issues that didn’t exist prior to the patch, which is why it’s recommended to backup both the database and the software home before making any changes. Of course, if a patch needs to […]

Oracle has decided that Solaris needs to retire, giving those who are running Oracle on Solaris roughly two years to move to another operating system. A possible choice involves commodity hardware (x86) and Linux. Since OEL is a ‘ready to use’ version of Red Hat Linux it would be a reasonable presumption that many companies […]

Sometimes it’s desired to move data from production to test or development environments, and if done with the original exp/imp utilities, issues can arise since these were written for database versions older than 9.x. Those utilities don’t support features found in newer database versions, which can create performance problems. Tables with Top-n or hybrid histograms, […]