Category: RDBMS

February 27

I am used to it with XMLDB, but apparently it is also applied on other Oracle functionality: new features being introduced while “only” applying a patch. Thanks to Doug, I was made aware on the whitepaper published by the Optimizer Development Group called “Upgrading from Oracle database 9i to 10g: What to expect from the optimizer”.

Comparing statistics

In 10.2.0.4.0 new DBMS_STATS functions have been introduced, that enable you to compare for a table from two different sources.

February 13

Today Cary Millsap posted his second story on this new blog site carymillsap.blogspot.com called: “How the OFA Began, Part 1“. What Cary’s story actually triggered on my part, was doing a small trip back into memory lane. This was probably also caused because today I was working with one of my “newbie” colleagues. He won’t like the term when he reads it, but in my mind this is still the case. The guy has a big advantage, he is keen and he is eager. He has also a disadvantage; he is eager. He reminds me a little at when I started working in the IT DBA field, a promising raw diamond, that still has to be cut. So today, before I knew that Cary would post his piece about OFA, I told him about OFA. Showed him the link to the OFA Hotsos site (thank you Doug) and printed it out for him. I wanted to let him realize that a lot of stuff out there in the DBA world was there for a reason and shouldn’t be taken for granted. Also that there was more to those “standards” then he probably knew or realized.

November 26

A long long time ago (during my Oracle 7 days), I once needed to update base table SYS.PROPS$. This action was needed to change the database NLS characterset of US7ASCII to a characterset that would support GERMAN. Based on a metalink note, updating the SYS.PROPS$ base table, was the only way to achieve this (or completely rebuild the environment) in those Oracle 7 days.

This procedure was tricky. If you updated it with the wrong, an unsupported character set or with a typo in the string, the database would be corrupted and could not be started up again (so be warned if you want to fiddle around with the method)

Since those days, I always lookup NLS settings via a quick select on that table. The last time I did this, was a long time ago and to my surprise, while looking up settings, I noticed that this table does contain more data then only NLS parameters these days…

Output of a full (demo) clean database Oracle 11g installation gives: