Lutz Hartmann

They have changed the editor again and I am not able to insert a photo here
because a menu window is stuck at the botton of my screen and I cannot reach the insert button.

Wordpress is a drag!

I anybody knows a WAY TO MIGRATE BACK TO BLOGGER
it would be highly appreciated if you could let me know how to do it.

Thanks in advance,

 

 

 

Today my blog has reached to the 100′000 hits landmark.

I am very happy that this has become such a successfull forum here.

Thanks for reading
I’ll keep on posting in the future!

 

Oracle seems to have massive problems with the forums on OTN.

The site is down since quite a while now.

=;-(

Oracle Technology Network announces that “Oracle Unbreakable Linux support customers at the Basic and Premier support levels now can download and deploy Oracle Clusterware at no additional license fee or support cost.”

   Oracle Unbreakable Linux.

 Before this the clusterware needed at least one Standard Edition License.

Now you can download the clusterware and use it as an extension of your Linux to make virtually any application highly available even without having an Oracle Database Server.

For more info on this and ready made scripts see my previouse post on how to protect a single instance database with the clusterware.

 This is really cool!

=;-) 

Today I have delivered two presentation @ the

 yearly conference of the Swiss Oracle Usergroup.

The topics were :

- Real Application Testing with Oracle 11g
     REPLAY DATABASE and
     SQL PERFORMANCE ADVISOR

- SQL Plan Management and Automatic SQL Tuning in 11g

I have used my new courseware which
I have produced in the last few weeks for 11g New Features.

I offer to to deliver special courses for topics such as

- High Availability with Flashback and other 10g and 11g features
- Backup 10g & 11g
- Memory Management 10g & 11g
- Upgrade Issues 10g & 11g
- 11g New Features Overview

If you are interested in these topics please contact me by email:

info@sysdba.ch

At the moment I am in Cairo delivering a number of 11g New Features trainings.

I have a completely packed class with 21 students.

 Most of the students are Oracle Trainers, Support Agents and Consultants.

After arriving in Cairo I immediately went to see if the my friend Muhammd Ali is still in living in his place as before 13 years.  I had been living in his place for a while in the 90s.

 Muhammad is an internationally recognized artist and has been painting since more than 25 years now. He had exhibitions in Paris, Hamburg, Berlin, Zurich and many other places.

He lives in a very poor area near the great basar Khan Al-Khalili.

In April he will have an exhibition in Talaat Harb Streeet in Downtown Cairo and I hope  that he will sell a great number of his beautiful naive paintings again.

 Today I have arrived in Cairo, the Mother of the Earth.

I will deliver a number of Oracle 11g trainings here.

This is the first time I am in Egypt after 12 years.
In the middel of the ninetees I had been living here for a couple of longer times.
I am very interested in the developments in Egyptian society since then.

Hopefully I will meet a lot of interesting people. 

Yesterday I had organized a little dinner with Steven Feuerstein, my former collegue Christoph Burandt and his lovely wife Silvia as well as my dear friend Jenny.

Steven had delivered a two day seminar for Oracle University in Munich. Although he was very sick in the last days, he had caught  a chest cold and swollowed an enormaouse amount of remedies in order to be able to deliver anyway, he preferred not to hang around in his room alone and come for our little dinner.

Thanks for coming Steven! Hope you’re feeling better already.

We talked about everything but PL/SQL and had a lot of fun.
Christoph is the one who had introduced me to PL/SQL in 2000 and I was very happy to meet him once again.
I think that he is one of the best instructors in this field you can get in Germany.
His wife is from Peru and Steven adressed her in Spanish.

Everybody could speak Spanish except me!

=

Last week the patchset 10.2.0.4 was released by Oracle.

 This patchset not only contains bugfixes but also comes with a number of New Features.

One of the highlights is the possibilty to capture a workload in a 10.2.0.4 database and ship it to an 11g database for testing.

Only with this feature in place the 11g Real Application Testing Feature DATABASE REPLAY makes real sense.
Before this patchset it was only possible to capture a workload in an 11g database and run it for  testing in an also 11g database.

For more detailed evaluation please see my chapter on CHANGE MANAGEMENT in the forthcoming 11g New Features book.

 It will be shipping aroung middle of the year.

Now customers can check in front what an upgrade would bring for them.

Here is a brief desription of the new 1og Feature:

LUTZ AS SYSDBA @ orcl10g SQL> SELECT * FROM v$version;

BANNER
—————————————————————-
Oracle Database 10g Enterprise Edition Release 10.2.0.4.0 - Prod
PL/SQL Release 10.2.0.4.0 - Production
CORE    10.2.0.4.0      Production
TNS for Linux: Version 10.2.0.4.0 - Production
NLSRTL Version 10.2.0.4.0 - Production

In 10.2.0.4 a new paramter is used to enable workload capturing:

LUTZ AS SYSDBA @ orcl10g SQL> show parameter pre_11

NAME                                 TYPE        VALUE
———————————— ———– ——————————
pre_11g_enable_capture               boolean     FALSE
Note:
The PRE_11G_ENABLE_CAPTURE initialization parameter can only be used with Oracle Database 10g Release 2 (10.2). This parameter is not valid in subsequent releases. After upgrading the database, you will need to remove the parameter from the server parameter file (spfile) or the initialization parameter file (init.ora); otherwise, the database will fail to start up.

Oracle even has created the script $ORACLE_HOME/rdbms/admin/wrrenbl.sql which can be used to modity the parameter.  The script to disable workload capture is $ORACLE_HOME/rdbms/admin/wrrdsbl.sql.  

The package DBMS_WORKLOAD_CAPTURE has been added to the 10g RDBMS. This is the interface to workload capturing and filtering:

SYS AS SYSDBA @ orcl10g SQL> desc dbms_workload_capture

PROCEDURE ADD_FILTER
 Argument Name                  Type                    In/Out Default?
 —————————— ———————– —— ——–
 FNAME                          VARCHAR2                IN
 FATTRIBUTE                     VARCHAR2                IN
 FVALUE                         VARCHAR2                IN
PROCEDURE ADD_FILTER
 Argument Name                  Type                    In/Out Default?
 —————————— ———————– —— ——–
 FNAME                          VARCHAR2                IN
 FATTRIBUTE                     VARCHAR2                IN
 FVALUE                         NUMBER                  IN
PROCEDURE DELETE_CAPTURE_INFO
 Argument Name                  Type                    In/Out Default?
 —————————— ———————– —— ——–
 CAPTURE_ID                     NUMBER                  IN
PROCEDURE DELETE_FILTER
 Argument Name                  Type                    In/Out Default?
 —————————— ———————– —— ——–
 FNAME                          VARCHAR2                IN
PROCEDURE EXPORT_AWR
 Argument Name                  Type                    In/Out Default?
 —————————— ———————– —— ——–
 CAPTURE_ID                     NUMBER                  IN
PROCEDURE FINISH_CAPTURE
 Argument Name                  Type                    In/Out Default?
 —————————— ———————– —— ——–
 TIMEOUT                        NUMBER                  IN     DEFAULT
 REASON                         VARCHAR2                IN     DEFAULT
FUNCTION GET_CAPTURE_INFO RETURNS NUMBER
 Argument Name                  Type                    In/Out Default?
 —————————— ———————– —— ——–
 DIR                            VARCHAR2                IN
FUNCTION REPORT RETURNS CLOB
 Argument Name                  Type                    In/Out Default?
 —————————— ———————– —— ——–
 CAPTURE_ID                     NUMBER                  IN
 FORMAT                         VARCHAR2                IN
PROCEDURE START_CAPTURE
 Argument Name                  Type                    In/Out Default?
 —————————— ———————– —— ——–
 NAME                           VARCHAR2                IN
 DIR                            VARCHAR2                IN
 DURATION                       NUMBER                  IN     DEFAULT
 DEFAULT_ACTION                 VARCHAR2                IN     DEFAULT
 AUTO_UNRESTRICT                BOOLEAN                 IN     DEFAULT

And the data dictionary views DBA_WORKLOAD_CAPTURES and DBA_WORKLOAD_FILTERS can be used to monitor the captures.

 As in 11g the packages captures all incomming requestes into external files which need to be shipped to a testing system and pre-processed on the testing system. Those files contain logical information to replay client requests in the appropriate sequence and with all contention and waiting as it happened on the capture site. On the testing site we need to start replay clients to run the test workload.

This is the interface for REPLAY DATABASE in the OEM GUI:

The executable $ORACLE_HOME/bin/wrc is only available in 11g.

 So we can now capture in 10g and replay in 11g.

I

 I am just downloading the latest patchset for RDBMS Server 10.2.0.4 for Linux x86.

It is documented in Metalink NOTE: 316900.1

 Components of This Patch Set

The following are the updated components of this patch set:

• Up to January 2008 CPU is included in this patch set.
• Platform-specific bug fixes as listed in the “Fixed Platform-Specific Bugs” section
• Generic bug fixes as listed in the List of Bugs fixed document
• Oracle Configuration Manager 10.2.7.1

I am very curiose about the possibility to capture a workload in 10g and run for Real Application Testing in 11g.

It should be included in this patchset.

I will try it and post about it here ASAP.

=

It worked!

All you need to do is threaten them!

They have removed the links to my content.

We’re Sorry - We Were Unable to Locate The Article You Requested.It’s possible that this article is no longer available, has been reported as a bad link or is currently being reviewed/edited by its author.

We apologize for the inconvenience! Please use the menu system or the search boxes to locate other items that may be of interest.

If you feel there has been an error, please contact us and let us know about the issue and we’ll get on it immediately!

Yesterday I got informed that the “Wordlwide SQL SERVER USERGROUP” has again added content from my blog to their site.

This is the second time already that this strange organization steals my posts and demands money from their “MEMBERS” to look at it. I had them remove my posts already in 2006.

This so call usergroup does not have any publications of its own and there are no meetings of the members (if they had any, a lot of people would show up there and yell at their chairman I think). Their members seem to be just people who are not able to search the web by themselves and pay for a compilation of links to stolen content they could have for free in the web.

 It seems to be  basically just one person behind this organization:

Steve Wynkoop:

The SQL Server Worldwide User’s Group (SSWUG.ORG) Bits on the Wire, Inc. 8987 E. Tanque Verde #309-269 Tucson Arizona 85749

I think that the expression usergroup should be a protected expression by law and that it should be possible to screw such crooks for making money with the intellectual property of other people.

Looking at my list of referrers to my blog I recently found a link comming in to one of my posts.

I followed the link and found a website where someone had a blog which justs consists of stolen posts. He just had added my post to his blog and did not even mention me. His name is, oh no! I am not even going to mention it here because this would only increase his daily hits!

I contacted him by email and asked him to remove my post right away - nothing ever happened since more than a week now.

Theft of intellectual property seems to become a more and more fashionable practice.

Here is a link to a list of some recent popular cases of this kind of vandalism.

I am not sure if I want to continue blogging in the future.

Let’s publish books again
and let people pay for it!

Today I have received a comment on my last post from my friend Jean Francois Verrier.
J.F. Is a courseware developer at Oracle Corporation and we have met in San Francisco and Utrecht a couple of times.
He is responsible for the New Features and RAC courseware which Oracle University uses in their courses.

 I had a look at his profile and found a very interesting link there, which I want to share here.
It is a website from Oracle Server Technologies. It gives very intersing information about how to protect against SQL injection, one of the most serios threats for DBAs.

Have a look here! You will like it!

 =

Lutz

Tonight I met with Laurent Schneider and we had a couple of beers together.

 We chatted about God and the world and we had lots of fun.

Amoung others we talked about things in Oracle 11g which do not really work yet and¦or are undocumented or documented wrong.
I was lucky to be able to tell him about things which he did not know about yet
like the not yet documented parameter DDL_LOGGING, see my post here.  I think that Oracle development just forgot to document it.

It is hard to catch up with Laurent sometimes!

I am the reviewer of Laurent’s yet to be published book on 11g SQL for advanced developers and DBAs and he demonstrated some features he had filed a BUG for in the last days.

Of course Oracle 11g was a big topic and we have found out some interesting things about system partitioning ( it is more that he found out than me, altough I teach the stuff to people in my New Features courses !!!!)

He  talked about something in one of the chapters in his book which he had found about system partitioning in 11g and which did not work. 

I got suspicious because I was so sure that it was possible, since it was something I teach to my students in my 1day 11g New Features Overview classes.
But I had to back down and confess again that I did not really verify every single bit of code of the Oracle Coureseware.

This is why I want to share the lecture I had to take tonight (luckily with a couple of beers!):

Oracle has introduced a number of new partitioning algorithms with release 11g.  One of these new features is called SYSTEM PARTITIONING. This is very handy if you want to partition a table but cannot make uo your mind about a partitioning key for some reason. Maybe there is only one column holding xml data in the table or what so ever.

The current version of the courseware for the 11g New  Features Courses says that the following syntax is valid and Laurent showed me that it is not:

– I create a table which is system partitioned:

SYS AS SYSDBA @ orcl SQL> create table lutz.t3 (col1 number, col2 number)
  2  partition by system
  3  (partition p1);
Table created.

– I create a bind varable (first time a number second time a string)
– which I want to use to tell Oracle which partition to user for an INSERT
–and assign it the value 1 and try an INSERT:

SYS AS SYSDBA @ orcl SQL> var par number
SYS AS SYSDBA @ orcl SQL> exec :par:=1
SYS AS SYSDBA @ orcl SQL> insert into lutz.t3 partition (:par) values (1,2);
insert into lutz.t3 partition (:par) values (1,2)
                               *
ERROR at line 1:
ORA-14108: illegal partition-extended table name syntax

– I try another time with a bid variable of type string:

SYS AS SYSDBA @ orcl SQL> var par varchar2(2)
SYS AS SYSDBA @ orcl SQL> exec :par:=’p1′
SYS AS SYSDBA @ orcl SQL> insert into lutz.t3 partition (:par) values (1,2);
insert into lutz.t3 partition (:par) values (1,2)
                               *
ERROR at line 1:
ORA-14108: illegal partition-extended table name syntax

– I try it for a last time and now I try to use the partition number directly:

SYS AS SYSDBA @ orcl SQL> insert into lutz.t3 partition (1) values (1,2); insert into lutz.t3 partition (1) values (1,2)
                               *
ERROR at line 1:
ORA-14108: illegal partition-extended table name syntax

The same error pops up!

And here is the explanation of the error:

[oracle@rhas4 ~]$ oerr ora 14108
14108, 00000, “illegal partition-extended table name syntax”
// *Cause:  Partition to be accessed may only be specified using its name.
//          User attempted to use a partition number or a bind variable.
// *Action: Modify statement to refer to a partition using its name

You can only reference a system partition with its name not by its number or even via a bind variable! At least not in 11.0.6!!!

Sorry people but I just could not yet test all of the more than 500 New Features in the courseware. But I will keep on hitting the road, for sure!

=

“Making PL/SQL a better language”. This is Steven Feuerstein’s obsession.

In his courses he always encourages his students to send their comments to Bryn Llewellyn the project manager for PL/SQL at Oracle.

A while ago Steven already has launched a PL/SQL forum in OTN where people can directly ask him questions.

Now Steven has put together a website to make it really easy for developers to communicate their concerns and priorities to Bryn (with his support, of course).

 Seems to become an interesting place and I will add it to my blogrole. 

This week I was in Geneva again to deliver another compressed course for the IT department of CERN and again it was just a pleasure to squeeze a five day training into three days. These CERN people are so highly motivated and hungry for new features. It is always fun to teach them.

I was especially pleased to see that almost all of the delegates had already attented at least one or two trainings from me last year, so we were already familiar with each other.

Since I did not have the chance to attend the UK Oracle Usergroup meeting it was nice to have Luca Canali again in the class. He had delivered a speach about the ASM internal  in Birmingham last December and I would have really loved to listen to it. He is one of the few persons I know who can really tell about the limits of ASM from real life experience.

Also I was so happy to meet Christopher Lambert again. He just seems to know everything about Oracle Enterprise Manager and I always learn from him.

Here are a few snapshots from the classroom I have taken with my cellphone.

 I hope that I was able to meet their expectations once again and will be invited again.

It is a great honor for me to deliver for you guys!

Yesterday I have returned from Turkey.
I was there  for 8days together with a very close friend.

On the way back we had a stop over at Istanbul airport where

  Tonguç Yilmaz waited for me
to chat and have a coffee. Can you immagine that there is somebody waiting for you at 6:15h in the morning just to hug you and have a chat at the airport.
This is real friendship and hospitality!

He updated me about the latest gossip from the bloggers community and we talked about OOW and UKOUG meeting and who we have met and who is new to the scene. 
 Thanks for coming Tonguç, you are such a nice guy!

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