James Koopmann

Both system failures and human blunders continually happen, but you just might be able to tread water if you implement Oracle’s flash features. I am almost ashamed to say that I’ve not every used Oracle’s flash features in a production environment. OK, you caught me; I’ve never used them at all. From my perspective, it […]

Introduction Historically, database replication became a huge topic when distributed and homogeneous systems began to require information that was not readily available through common database connections or gateways. As an example, in the early days of Oracle, when SQLNet was not available, replication took the form of backup and recovery scenarios such as using export […]

DBMS_ALERT may not be the most elegant way to communicate between processes but it does provide a quick and easy method. Most of what I’ve read on the Net regarding DBMS_ALERT had to do with applications using this package to signal one another when something had changed in the database. More specifically, assume you had […]

Oracle’s Time Model – a thousand foot view It is often difficult to zero in on where to spend time tuning an Oracle database. From a very high level, Oracle Time Model can provide direction and offer feedback for tuning. When database performance deteriorates, one plan of action is to check where time is spent […]

How often have we been told to take a look at our operating system documentation to find tuning information about the systems our Oracle databases reside on? I honestly get a little tired of that statement and for years have wanted to be able to get some operating system information from within Oracle. It seems […]

Providing a definition for database workload can be a daunting task. Unfortunately, it depends on what you’re trying to accomplish. Early in my database administration days, I purchased a book entitled ‘The Art of Computer Systems Performance Analysis’. This book, back then and probably now too, has been very influential in my understanding of how […]

Let’s take some of the confusion out of Oracle nested tables. This article takes a step by step approach to create a table with a nested table and then query that table while showing some key DBA views we can use to describe the structures. I think we have all come to grips with what […]

Keep on top of corruption in your Oracle database with health checks. The old saying, there are 100 ways to…. And in keeping with that saying, Oracle, in Release 11g, has introduced database health checks under a framework called health monitor. This health monitor framework is designed to run diagnostic checks on your Oracle database. […]

Oracle’s new ADR with command interface shows promise for DBAs to quickly investigate diagnostic information. This article takes a deeper look at ADRCI’s commands. In Part I of this series we took a very quick look at the ADRCI utility and discussed how to show some of the alert log messages. This looked very promising […]

As a DBA: Do you take things at face value? Do you try things first? Why is it you do what you do? It has been quite a while since I have made an installment in my DBA Call to Action series. I never intended to write a series but I am confronted with things, […]

Oracle’s new ADR with command interface shows promise for DBAs to quickly investigate diagnostic information. In Part I of this series, we took a very high-level look at Oracle Database 11g release of ADR. We visited some of ADR’s infrastructure, parameters, and even how to extract some diagnostic data with a very simplistic ADRCI command. […]

Oracle’s new ADR with command interface shows promise as a way for DBAs to quickly investigate diagnostic information. New to Oracle Release 11g, Oracle has beefed up, revamped, and made better its infrastructure for DBAs to handle, diagnose, collect, report, and manage diagnostic information. Most of the information that falls into this category we have […]