Amardeep Sidhu

I just opened the Oracle Community page and :

Today I was searching for an error message in metalink and it was giving strange messages. Then i came to know that the error message contained “%” character and metalink was not really happy searching for it. Rather it showed a confusing message:

Pretty strange…

I recently upgraded my blog to Wordpress 2.5. The manual process is real cumbersome. Today I came across few plugins which help in almost automating the upgrade stuff.

Wordpress Automatic upgrade: As per description this plugin first takes backup and then upgrades. I didn’t try this one, though.

Instant Upgrade: I upgraded one of my blog using this. It doesn’t take care of backup but otherwise the upgrade was super smooth. Just few clicks and you are done.

Happy upgrading !

If you use Gtalk and Winamp simultaneously and tried to set the currently playing track as your status, you might have been faced by Gtalk hanging. I also struggled with this for 2 weeks until  I did a bit of googling and got a link which gives a trick to get rid of the problem.

The trick is to create an empty winamp.m3u file in \Program Files\Winamp folder and you are done.

Finally finally finally a small sticky has been posted on OTN Database forums homepage. But its there only on Database forums page not on PL/SQL. It reads like:

Posters, please mind these common-sense rules when participating here:

- When asking a question, provide all the details that someone would need to answer it. Consulting documentation first is highly recommended. (See http://blogs.oracle.com/shay/2007/03/02 for more hints.)
- When answering a question, please be courteous; there are different levels of experience represented here. A poorly worded question is better ignored than flamed - or better yet, help the poster ask a better question.

Thanks for doing your part to make this community as valuable as possible for everyone!

- OTN

That means Database forum enjoys most number of flames

Few days ago i posted about DBAzine being down. I was just checking to see if its back.

Its rocking now.

Welcome back DBAzine.com

Just finished upgrading to Wordpress 2.5. Everything seems to be working fine.

Another issue I just came to know that wherever i am using syntaxhighlighter to format the code, it doesn’t display properly in Internet Explorer. May be something to do with the plugin. Will try to fix it. It works fine in Mozilla.

Today I was upgrading 10gR1 to 10gR2 (10.2.0.1) on Linux x86. The upgrade went almost fine (except that I had to install one package and change few kernel parameters) but while running DBUA to upgrade databases, it gave an error:

Could not get database version from the Oracle Server component. The CEP file rdbmsup.sql does not provide the version directive

and

Start of root element expected. Upgrade Configuration file
'C:\Oracle10g2\cfgtoollogs\dbua\test\upgrade5\upgrade.xml' is not a valid XML file.

I searched in the metalink and found that this all happens due to customized glogin.sql file which was there in my case also. And removing that customization made DBUA rock

You might want to check here, here and here.

I registered on Twitter and my page is http://twitter.com/amardeep_sidhu

Today I was running export of an Oracle 9.2.0.1 database. The export completed but with an ORA-600 error:

EXP-00008: ORACLE error 600 encountered
ORA-00600: internal error code, arguments: [xsoptloc2], [4], [4], [0], [], [], [], []
ORA-06512: in "SYS.DBMS_AW", line 347
ORA-06512: in "SYS.DBMS_AW", line 470
ORA-06512: in "SYS.DBMS_AW_EXP", line 270
ORA-06512: in line 1
EXP-00083: The previous problem occurred when calling SYS.DBMS_AW_EXP.schema_info_exp

I googled a bit and found that the problem is with applying some patchset. Then metalink confirmed the same. Somebody tried applying a patch to upgrade it to 9.2.0.5 but didn’t perform all the steps (missed post installation steps, to be precise). Metalink Note 300849.1 covers the issue and also gives the solution. In nutshell startup the database with startup migrate and run catpatch.sql.

I was copying some data from a DVD and it stopped in between due to some error with some file. Then I was reminded of Total Copy (A small alternate utility to Windows copy) but even thats is not much stable and you have to right click & drag for copy/paste.

I googled a bit and came across another small utility called Tera Copy. Its just 1 MB download and replaces Windows copy/paste. It provides many options like skipping a file, resuming copy and some other stuff. A must have for all Windows users. There is a pro version too.

Engineers Develop Solid-state Fan That Puts Traditional Coolers to Shame

Cool ! isn’t it ?

Soon we may be using 5 Ghz super cool processors in our desktop box

Today I was googling about Oracle Data Guard and came across an article on dbazine.com. I opened the link and it showed some stupid page. I checked again and again. Finally I noticed a message on top right:

dbazine.com expired on 03/13/2008 and is pending renewal or deletion.

It was a nice website.

I came across a very nice post about Autonomous Transactions in Oracle written by Kevin Meade on orafaq. Thought about sharing the link.

His blog also has some very nice stuff.

I came across a post about syntax highlighting for code in Wordpress on Thomas Roach’s blog who in turn saw it on Tyler Muth’s blog. There is a plugin called syntax highlighter which does all the beauty. Use is very simple:

Download it from here.

Upload to your blog’s plugins folder and extract it over there.

Now (on Wordpress) go to Plugins page and activate the plugin.

To use it wrap your code like

and you are done.

Wanna see, how does it look like

SQL>drop database;

Isn’t beautiful

Today one of my colleague was working on a simple PL/SQL procedure. Based on some logic it was returning count(*) from all_tab_columns for few tables. It gave count incorrectly for one table out of around fifty in total. He just hard coded the table name and ran it but again it showed count as zero.

Then he took the code out of procedure and wrote it in DECLARE, BEGIN, END and after running it showed the correct count. But ran as database procedure it always shows incorrectly.

Finally just as hit and trial, he gave SELECT on the TABLE to database user [Table was in different schema], used to run the procedure and everything was ok. Isn’t it bit stupid

Update: Well, it happens for a reason. Nigel Thomas pointed out in the comment. The reason is that privileges granted to a role are not seen from PL/SQL stored procedures. You need to give direct grant to the user for this or another method is to define the procedure or package with invoker rights.

Thanks Nigel

From Eddie’s blog I got a link to 3 posts on Regular Expressions on OTN written by CD. Wonderful stuff. Check out.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

& Thanks CD…wonderful work buddy !

Well, it was in my mind for some time, to register my domain name and finally its here . I have imported all the posts from my blog on blogger. I will be checking and editing all the posts for any kind of issues with wordpress. If you see anything out of the way do let me know