James Koopmann

Don’t know how many database shops I’ve gone into that have no idea of the security breaches that occur across user granted privilege and floating unused synonyms. Let’s not kid ourselves. It isn’t often that we actually think too hard about how we have created users with our Oracle databases. In fact, we often let […]

How many users do you have in your database? Are they all being used? Come for a ride as we trim down the installed base of Oracle default users. Within the last security article, we took a look at expiring and locking user accounts. While the locking and expiring of user accounts, through commands, is […]

After a normal creation of an Oracle database, 22+ Predefined Oracle Database Administrative Accounts, 10+ Predefined Oracle Database Non-Administrative User Accounts, and 6 Default Sample Schema User Accounts that are automatically created for you. Each of these accounts have specific duties within the database and for the most part are turned off for general use. […]

Whether known to you or not, Oracle maintains a set of internal structures, the V$, X$ and views, that keep track of various performance statistics, database structures and application execution information. Without these internal structures, there would be no database to store our precious information. In addition, each of these internal structures holds key information […]

As we all know, Oracle has quite a few 2-Day topical books *2 Day DBA, Performance Tuning Guide, RAC Guide, Data Replication and Integration Guide, and the 2 Day + Security Guide) that step us through the initial concepts of each topic. Well, with security in general being such is a hot topic these days; […]

Within the many development shops I’ve worked in, it has been my observation that many of the decisions to create an index in production have not always been soundly rooted in explain plan analysis or even looking at application code. More often than not, someone just thinks a column or set of columns look good […]

Use this article as a primer to setting up an instance’s configuration for making use of Oracle’s Flashback Database feature. Oracle’s flashback database feature is a great feature when you come to think of it. At any point in time, you can (with proper permissions, configuration, and administrative steps) recover a database to any point […]

Use Oracle’s Flashback Version Query to not only see past data at a particular point in time but also to see how it changed over time. I think everyone can attest to the fact that using Oracle’s Flashback Query functionality is advantageous to finding out what data looked like at a particular point in time. […]

Oracle’s Flashback Query(SQL-driven) makes use of both TIMESTAMP and SCN–but which should you use? It just may be a matter of preference but requires some thoughtful considerations. In order to take advantage of Oracle’s flashback query feature, for SQL-driven flashback, the SELECT statement makes use of the AS OF or VERSIONS BETWEEN clause to retrieve […]

The benefits of Oracle’s Flashback Query are well documented. But with minor nuances of parameters such as _in_memory_undo, how much should you really buy into them? Let’s take a bit deeper look at the _in_memory_undo parameter and how it effects flashback query. Oracle’s flashback technology is surely ingenious when it comes to enabling us to […]

Let’s take a quick look at the typical errors within an Oracle UNDO tablespace, by breaking the UNDO mechanism, and helping to demystify the occurrence of errors. In the last article, Is Your UNDO Tablespace Prepared for Oracle’s Flashback Technology?, we took a quick look at how an out of the box vanilla UNDO tablespace […]

Not every database is automatically created using Oracle’s Automatic UNDO Management. Here is a  step by step approach to setup UNDO tablespaces for Oracle’s flashback technology.  It’s easy to sit back and start using any particular feature in Oracle; but what happens when your database hasn’t been configured for that particular feature? This article will […]