Author: Maris Elsins

Maris Elsins, Lead Database Consultant at Pythian, Oracle ACE & OCM, explores whether the failure of a solid-state device used by Oracle Smart Flash Cache affects the availability of the database.

Last week I published a blog post titled “Are You Ready For the Leap Second?“, and by looking at the blog statistics I could tell that many of you read it, and that’s good, because you became aware of the…

If you’re not aware of what the leap second is look into it. The fact is, this year the last minute of June 30th will be one second longer and “June 30, 2015 23:59:60” will be a valid and correct time….

I worked on root cause analysis for a strange node reboot on client’s Oracle Database Appliance yesterday. The case was quite interesting from the perspective that none of the logs contained any information related to the cause of the reboot….

AWR report is a great source of aggregated information on top activities happening in our databases. I use data collected in AWR quite often, and obviously the easiest way of getting the data out from the AWR is by running the…

UKOUG Tech13 was great! Not only because of the amount of interesting presentations to choose from, but also because of the surrounding events. I felt this conference was quite different from previous UKOUG Oracle Technology & E-Business Suite events in…

How to download patches from My Oracle Support (MOS) directly to the server? This has bothered me since the ftp access was closed a few years ago. Of course, I’ve been given some options by Oracle, like, I could access…

This post relates to my previous writing on mining the AWR. I noticed that it’s very easy to misinterpret the DISK_READS_TOTAL and DISK_READS_DELTA columns in DBA_HIST_SQLSTAT. Let’s see what the documentation says: DISK_READS_TOTAL – Cumulative number of disk reads for…

Sometimes it’s useful to check how performance of a SQL statement changes over time. The diagnostic pack features provide some really useful information to answer these questions. The data is there, but it not always easy to retrieve it, especially if…

We were using a 10.2.0.3 database, and it had been running without any issues for several years. What could possibly go wrong? Anything!