David Fitzjarrell

The General Data Protection Regulation from the European Commission, known as the GDPR and primarily applicable to the European Union, can affect enterprises outside of the European Union if they service EU customers. It is a law and compliance is mandatory. One provision of the GDPR involves the privacy of personal data and it offers […]

Occasionally it may be necessary to have a table with 255 or more columns (data marts and data warehouses come immediately to mind). Oracle allows up to 1023 columns in a table but once the column list expands beyond 255 some interesting behavior appears. Let’s look at a situation, using Oracle 12.2.0.1 on OEL 7, […]

The “Cloud” has become a popular location for many things, and Oracle databases are in that list. Oracle Corporation provides Cloud services to create, migrate and manage databases there, and once a subscription is in hand the provided Cloud dashboard can make it fairly easy to migrate single instance and RAC databases to Cloud storage […]

A number of tools and utilities are available for database backup and recovery, utilizing various storage technologies. Some shops backup directly to disk, to make the database backups immediately available should they be needed. This, of course, requires a plan to archive older backups so that local disk storage can be used to its best […]

Oracle 12.2.0.1 offers a number of enhancements over version 12.1.0.2, but one of those enhancements may throw a ‘monkey wrench’ into any alert log monitoring that may be in effect. It’s a quiet change that won’t be noticed until alert log monitoring scripts no longer generate reports. In 12.2.0.1 the alert log timestamp changes to […]

Performance is high on the list of IT requirements, especially with queries, functions and stored procedures. Queries have been easy to work with because the execution plan gives all of the details one could need to find trouble spots. When it’s PL/SQL, that’s been a more difficult apple to peel since extracting statements from a […]

Going back to Oracle’s UNIFIED AUDIT TRAIL some notes need be made as to which auditing actions are reported to regular users and which are reserved to privileged (SYSDBA) accounts. There are basically two types of policies that can be created: action policies and privilege policies. Action policies are triggered by actions executed by any […]

In earlier versions of the Listener, Oracle has been more forgiving with static registrations; with 12.2 that seems to have changed as static registrations, if not configured completely, can cause the listener to dump a core file in the directory where the listener process was started. What can make this even more confusing is that […]

The UNDO tablespace is one of the workhorses of an Oracle database (TEMP being the other) yet, unlike TEMP, UNDO requires a special tablespace configuration so that the UNDO mechanism operates properly. Conventional wisdom on configuring tablespaces in general has little or no place when it comes to the UNDO tablespace and following such guidelines […]

For several years the FORALL loop, in conjunction with the BULK COLLECT operation, has allowed PL/SQL developers to more efficiently process data by eliminating the row-by-row fetch cycle in favor of a bulk load into memory. Such a change can speed processing up considerably, but it can also throw a ‘monkey wrench’ into the works […]

It appears that Oracle’s temporary tablespace is still a mystery to some, possibly because it’s not managed in the same way as a conventional tablespace. Extents are allocated and re-used so space management looks nothing like that for a traditional tablespace. Because of that space errors are managed differently. Let’s look at how to manage […]

With the recent release of Oracle version 12.2.0.1 some shops will be planning and executing upgrades; part of this may be the availability of expanded JSON functionality, APEX improvements and online table management such as moves and partition splits. Careful planning is crucial to a successful upgrade, including object management tasks that may not seem […]