Oracle Enterprise Linux available

In his Oracle OpenWorld keynote on October 25th, Larry Ellison announced Oracle Unbreakable Linux Support Program, a support program that provides enterprises with industry-leading, global support for Linux.
Oracle has been talking about even having its own Linux since quite a while now.
I had asked Tom Kyte about Oracle’s ambitions in becoming kind of an OS itself and he said that it could definitely happen in the near future because it would make sense definitely very much.
Please see also unbreacable linux @ OTN
and Sergio Leunissen’s Oracle Blog on Oracle’s Linux project.
He is a member of Oracle’s Linux Team.

It is already possible to download ISOs for Oracle’s enterprise linux!

connect lutz hartmann as sysdba

11g new features

I just listened to an interview Tom Kyte gave at the Oracle Open World today in San Francisco.
It is available on OTN for download.
He talks about some interesting new features which will be available in Oracle 11g.
It looks as if there are a number of really interesting new functionalities comming soon.
=;-)

connect lutz hartmann as sysdba

My perfomance tuning workshop

Today I have delivered a specially tailored workshop in Zurich.
A few weeks ago Tom Kyte had delivered a Q&A session for a bunch of DBAs when he was in Zurich. I was booked for today to deliver a follow up as a workshop in order to discuss some details on memory management in Oracle database 10g.
We had a close look at ASMM (Automatic Shared Memory Management), Automatic PGA Management and the use of temporary tablespaces and temporary tablespace groups in Oracle 10g.
I had compiled specially tailored courseware from different Oracle University courses, such as the New Features for 10g Adminstrator, 10g Performance Tuning and some white papers and metalink notes.
I was teaching a group of about 15 DBAs who are very experienced and deal with very large systems of sizes in the 10s of terabytes.
We also had some very interesting discussions on some features which can cause headaches when upgrading to Oracle 10g, such as bind variable peeking, system statistics, and automatic statistics gathering and its possible effects.

connect lutz hartmann as sysdba

Tablespace 101% full!

Today I had a strange effect in my DBA class:
I filled up my UNDO TABLESPACE which has only one non autoextensible datafile and waited for the alert to show up in DATABASE CONTROL console.
And it did.
See what it showed: => tablespace 101% full.
How can this be?
This is funny, eh!

connect lutz hartmann as sysdba

How to use rlwrap to get a command history in sql*plus

sql*plus does not have a command history function under Linux and Unix.
Lately I listened to Tom Kyte at one of his seminars he delivered in September in Zurich. He used a virtual Linux machine and had a command history for his sql*plus obviousely.
He told us that he used a utility called rlwrap for this.

rlwrap is a readline wrapper for shell commands which uses input from the controlling terminal.
It adds a persistent input history for each command and supports user-defined completion.

I simply had to get it!
And I think that this is worth sharing it.
Here is how it works and how you can get it too.

You can download the sources for the rpm for rlwrap from
here. The most recent version I could find is version 0.26.
There you also find a README and the manpage for rlwrap.

After downloading and unpacking the tar.gz I ran as root (#)
./configure
make
make check
make install

and that was it.

Now I could call sqlplus this way:
$ rlwrap sqlplus user/password@sid.

Finally I create an alias
alias sqlp =”rlwrap sqlplus”
(pls see Laurent Schneider’s comment on this post about alias sqlplus!)
Now I can simply call sqlplus as I always have done
and have a commend history with the ↑ and ↓ keys on my keyboard.

This will put an end to the stoneage habits we have all got used to too much!

connect lutz hartmann as sysdba

SOUG Newsletter 4/2006 shipping

The Newsletter 4/2006 of Swiss Oracle User Group is shipping since last week.
I have an article about the Active Session History in Oracle Database 10g published in it.
You can find it here on my blog as well.

connect lutz hartmann as sysdba