Author: Babette Turner-Underwood

One of the standard Oracle DBA tasks is to monitor the alert log for errors. Whether you’re using the integrated AWS Cloudwatch or customized monitoring scripts, you’ll want to test that the monitoring function is working properly.      …

How to resolve unusual situation where Oracle was writing trace files into the user directory instead of the usual oracle diagnostic destinations.

Have your scheduler jobs changed run times since the daylight savings time change? The issue hit me this week. On one client the scheduler jobs had changed run time. The strange thing is the scheduled time was 00:05

Today was a mini-Pythian day at RMOUG. Both Alex and myself gave two presentations each. My first session was on using LDAP with Oracle Applications. George Trujillo was presenting on MySQL for the Oracle DBA in the same room, so I stayed and learned a few things. I was lucky enough ( a little tongue in check there!!) to present the last session of the day on Oracle 11g DataPump.

I had a great time at RMOUG today. I attended a lot of great sessions, even though I was a little late getting there this morning. I particularly enjoyed Daniel Liu’s 11g New Features for DBAs presentation. Read my post for more highlights.

It is hard to believe that I leave here tomorrow to fly to Denver for RMOUG. I have been very fortunate to get selected give two presentations, one on Data Pump and the other on Oracle Application Server and LDAP. I am really looking forward to catching up with “my mates” in the Oracle community. I will send regular updates when I get to RMOUG.

As you may or may not know, I have been spending time in the Pythian Office in Sydney, Australia. In this post I share my experiences of what it is like to be from Ottawa, Canada but live and work in Australia (for at least a few weeks).

While perusing the Oracle 11g Data Pump documents recently, I noticed a new parameter that was introduced in Oracle 10g, but I had missed it there. The parameter is TABLE_EXISTS_ACTION, and it applies only to the Data Pump Import. Basically, this feature allows you to decide how to handle importing data if a table already exists. Let’s create a simple test case to demonstrate.

Going stir-crazy from sitting in with all the rain, I was looking for something to do. Paul (from the Pythian Group Australia office) suggested either shopping in Chatswood or going to Crows Nest. Crows Nest is a lovely area of town with lots and lots of shops and restaurants. They have a natural food store that serves organic coffee. Have I mentioned how big coffee is in Australia? You have to go to McDonald’s to get regular drip coffee like I am used to from Tim Horton’s. A few other things I have noticed since arriving here.

I have arrived in Sydney!! I have been in Sydney for a few days now. I was staying at Robert Menzies College. I was staying there because I needed to be at MacQuarrie yesterday morning for my LSAT exam. No matter how much you prepare for the LSAT, it is a tough exam. So my day consisted of writing a tough exam and then being escorted around town by two complete strangers. It reminds me of the famous quote (from the movie A Streetcar Named Desire, which I have never seen, but remember the quote). . . I have always depended on the kindness of strangers. Well that certainly was my case yesterday!!