Information that you and me can find useful in the future, concerning Oracle databases and related technologies.
New 'My Oracle Support'
30 January 2012 @ 00:28 by Miguel Anjo
[Oracle] [My Oracle Support]
Since this weekend, the http://supporthtml.oracle.com is called just "Dashboard". Previously (still seen on http://support.oracle.com) it was called "My Oracle Support | Dashboard".
Since years that Oracle tries to improve their paid support website, with little success. From the time of Metalink, the search speed is still a big handicap. The usability and mainly the user interface do not get any improvement from version to version.
There is the "APEX" layout which I personally don't like. Then the choice of colors, gradients and curved edges which are all out of fashion and with lack of contrast for today's webpages standards.
Let's say what improved in the last 7 or 8 years in the support Oracle website:
- we can see service request messages history while adding more content
- we can see the list of files already uploaded to a service request and download them if necessary
- the search results are a more intelligent (if there is no misspell).
However there is one thing that still I find incomprehensible: the lack of speed of the search engine.
Will it be there one time that a "Google like" (well, maybe the expectation is too high) search engine will be deployed at My Oracle Support?
Just to finish, a first points where the new "My Oracle Support" html version is behind the flash version:
- no highlight of service request on "customer working" status
And a point where there is an improvement:
- you can now resize the tables on the dashboard to see more "Service Requests" or more "News".
Kill long running transactions
03 January 2012 @ 07:20 by Miguel Anjo
[Oracle]
For instance the ones running for more than 12hours:
select 'alter system kill session '''||s.sid||','||s.serial#||''' immediate;',
s.osuser,s.machine,s.module, CEIL(24*(SYSDATE-t.START_DATE))
from v$session s, v$transaction t
WHERE S.SADDR=T.SES_ADDR
and CEIL(24*(SYSDATE-t.START_DATE))>12;
Complex passwords
01 September 2011 @ 07:04 by Miguel Anjo
[Security]
My company wants me to change my password to a more complex one.
Few days ago I saw a nice cartoon about 'password strength': http://xkcd.com/936/
Today I checked this Microsoft Security website to see how strong a password is: https://www.microsoft.com/security/pc-security/password-checker.aspx
I tried with the password: aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa (about 28 times letter 'a'). The result was:
Ideas I would like to develop
09 March 2011 @ 02:49 by Miguel Anjo
[Oracle 10g] [ideas] [Oracle]
- testing and documenting the apply of Oracle PSU by:
. clone a master patched Oracle Home
. attach new home to inventory
. move existing DBs to use the new Oracle Home
. run post-PSU operations on each DB (catpsu.sql, etc)
Advantages:
- minimize downtime
- automatize patching
GoldenGate and invalid dates
12 January 2011 @ 04:40 by Miguel Anjo
[Oracle 10g] [GoldenGate] [Oracle]
GoldenGate is a powerful tool bought by Oracle to replace the "Oracle Streams". It allows heterogeneous replication of data and works just fine almost out-of-the-box.
My client uses it to make a cache copy of data a kind of active standby while running on Oracle 10.2.
Today I had to fight for a problem that comes from the application, which seldom writes to the source database dates in a invalid format, with an year 0 (Oracle should not accept, but the year got in, we are still investigating how).
This makes the GoldenGate replication process to abend, as the write on the target database fails with an "ORA-01841: (full) year must be between -4713 and +9999, and not be 0".
For the workaround, using GoldenGate MAP function, I managed to transform the dates like the following:
Source: 0000-12-09:08:11:20
Target: 0001-12-09:08:11:20
MAP NESSOFT.NEXT_ORD, TARGET NESSOFT_NL.NEXT_ORD , &
COLMAP ( USEDEFAULTS,
EXPIRE = @IF ( @STRCMP(@STREXT(EXPIRE,1,4),"0000") = 0, @STRCAT("0001-",@STREXT(EXPIRE,6,18)),EXPIRE)
);
This allowed to me also to discover the discard file (.dsc) on the dirrtp folder of GoldenGate, where you can see the output of the MAP function, useful for the debug.
