The scope of this article is to show how to run DBSAT (Oracle Database Security Assessment Tool) against an Amazon RDS Oracle instance. This is based on a real-life execution. The DBSAT version used was 2.0.2 over an RDS database…

The scope of this article is to provide a brief summary of how to run Oracle Database Security Assessment Tool (DBSAT) on Oracle Real Application Cluster using the parameters to exclude sections on the Reporter to avoid duplicated information into…

If you work with Data Guard, the lag between the primary and standby database is an informative but difficult metric to measure. I’ve encountered some “solutions” that use the COMPLETION_TIME in (G)V$ARCHIVED_LOG for the standby destination as the time of…

A customer recently asked us to identify tablespaces that most contributed to sudden space consumption on ASM. It’s easy enough to find what’s using the most space, but finding what’s been growing is a little less straightforward. Fortunately, Oracle keeps…

Continuent Tungsten is one of the few all-in-one solutions for MySQL high availability. In this post I will show you how to automate the upgrade process using Ansible. I will walk you through the individual tasks and, finally, give you…

Pythian has always been serious about reducing human mistakes. Our consultants have always been required to log all terminal outputs for the work we execute so that the information is available to our clients, and to make sure the same…

Nice topic, right? Beautiful thing to work with when you have Oracle Engineered Systems. So, why would you configure a listener over the InfiniBand Network? How does that make sense in your environment and how would you leverage that? Background…

I’ve been looking into how Vagrant and/or Docker can be used to improve the life of DBAs and maybe others, too. I did this mostly to practice using these tools – especially Docker – that are becoming more and more important…

Indexes increase read performance and allow queries to access data faster. But they also need to be updated when the indexed keys are created or modified, which consumes additional time to complete C*UD operations. In this blog post, we will…

Earlier this year Microsoft released the next generation of its data pipeline product Azure Data Factory. The first release of Data Factory did not receive widespread adoption due to limitations in terms of scheduling, execution triggers and lack of pipeline…