Category: DBA 101

Installing Oracle Virtualbox

In a previous post, I gave some Career Advice for the New Oracle DBA. We talked about building an environment where you can test. This is the second part of that series and it will be more of a hands on guide where we will step through installing Oracle Virtualbox.

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Using Oracle oraenv with RAC

When you are running Real Application Clusters, the distinction between the instance and the database becomes very clear. You now have an instance running on each server in the cluster that accesses a common database on shared storage. If you run oraenv with a newly installed RAC database, you will notice that you still have to make adjustments to environment variables to access your instance. We are going to continue the theme from my last post (using Oracle’s oraenv), and take a look at using Oracle oraenv with RAC.

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Using Oracle’s oraenv utility

When you install an Oracle code tree on a non-windows platform, Oracle includes a utility that allows you to change the OS environment and access different databases running on the machine. Let’s investigate using Oracle’s oraenv utility.

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Advice for the new Oracle DBA

You’re a developer and its 10:30 am and you have just sat down from getting your second cup of coffee. Your boss comes out of her office and says that she needs to see you. Your mind goes to a bunch of possibilities, most of them are bad. She tells you that the DBA has quit and she needs you to step up and become the new DBA. Now what do you do? What you need is some advice for the new Oracle DBA!

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Online Table Redefinition

A part of your job as a DBA is maintaining database availability to match your service level agreements (SLA) with your customers. But keep in mind that this SLA can also impact any required downtime for maintenance. Throughout the years, Oracle has introduced many tools and features to reduce this maintenance downtime. Today we are going to take a look at a cool feature that will help you when you have to perform maintenance on a large table, online table redefinition.

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Working with the Oracle SPFILE

Let’s take a look at one of my early articles in the IOUG Tip Booklet. It is still relevant today…

In Oracle 9i, the spfile was introduced as a new method to store the initialization parameters. The use of the spfile helped to simplify the remote startup of a database and added options for the busy DBA. In this article, we will look at the spfile and how it is managed on UNIX/Linux and Windows.

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