I have recently received a requirement to provide a daily automatic AWR report, and it should be delivered to the DBA team’s inbox. It looks like an interesting requirement, so I completed this using my test database first, having the…

Editor’s Note: Because our bloggers have lots of useful tips, every now and then we bring forward a popular post from the past. We originally published today’s post on October 29, 2019. It’s no secret to anyone that software release…

There’s a lot of buzz around consolidation nowadays, as well as some fear of change. You may want to consolidate your SQL Server environments to save on maintenance and license costs, and also potentially on hardware and the size of…

A brief background on RAM cache or in-memory OLTP acceleration In this post I will present a feature — to simplify let’s call it RAM cache — introduced in Oracle Exadata Storage Server image 18.1. You’ve probably heard a lot…

Recently, we were affected by an ignored configuration option introduced in MySQL 5.6. This incident caused us to perform extended planning of downtime and the rebuilding of the slave. In this post, we’ll discuss our encounter with binlog_error_action and likely…

With many companies investigating or enacting remote work options in response to the COVID-19 outbreak, the Pythian team would like to share their best advice to those companies considering a move to remote work. Here are some of our remote…

Every now and then I have a conversation with a client who is still reluctant to consider a cloud migration due to what they perceive as a decrease in their security posture. Once we start analyzing this position in detail…

The Oracle Database Security Assessment Tool (DBSAT) is a command-line tool focused on identifying how securely the database is configured and where sensitive data resides with the goal of promoting successful approaches to mitigating potential security risks. DBSAT requires no…

Are you manually (or via a script) killing idle sessions on your database? As a consequence, your users are getting error “ORA-00028: your session has been killed” and probably getting angry at you. What about doing it automatically, in a…

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…