Tag: Technical Blog

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…

I like to think that I’m somewhat gifted at finding out, or coming up with li’ll useful tricks that improve a hacker’s workflow and help to optimize the pain-to-awesomeness ratio of our daily tasks. I am, however, thoroughly rotten at…

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…

Recently I had a chance to speak with my friend and colleague, Ashish Sharma. We were discussing Project Management topics (he recently passed PMP and ACP). Our discussion ended on a very interesting topic – RISK Assessment. Definition: According to…

My very first blog post at Pythian – Trick or Treat? So there I was, faced with more that 4000 block corruptions as shown from v$database_block_corruption. The script  corrupt_seg.sql identified the corruption as Free Block Corruption (block not associated with any segments)….

One important aspect of a healthy Oracle database is database statistics. It’s the main data on which CBO feeds to generate good execution plans for SQLs. Implementing a periodic and consistent gather statistics procedure in Oracle E-Business Suite is every…

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…

Recently I have been asked to work on the task which is to reduce the size of a MSDB database. The MSDB has grown to 20 Gigs. Well, you would say, what is the big deal with that? 20 Gigs…

It’s here! It’s here! It’s finally here! (what, you don’t get excited when you get new toys?) Now that version 12.2 of Oracle Applications has been released, it’s time for eager Apps DBAs and non-DBA EBS geeks to get their…

Getting ready for the next big thing In the wake of last week’s announcement of the general availability of Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.2, I’ve started spinning up a 12.2 Vision instance, so I can start getting familiar with the…