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…

It is no secret to anyone that software release cycles are more aggressive than ever. Now that the cloud has become ubiquitous as a strategic component of IT services, we are spoiled by a constant release of new features and…

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…