SCN wrapping

From: Mladen Gogala <gogala.REMOVETHISmladen_at_google.com>
Date: Thu, 19 Jan 2012 17:38:28 +0000 (UTC)
Message-ID: <jf9kek$gk8$1_at_solani.org>



It appears that Oracle 11G has a rather serious bug: it wraps SCN numbers around, when doing begin/end backup type of backup:

http://tinyurl.com/6wbker6

One of the quotes in the article reminded me of the CIO who has saved 9.5 million dollars on monitoring by switching to OEM. He was talking about thousands of databases. The interesting passage from the article (page 5) is here:
"Again, only very large customers with many interconnected Oracle databases would be likely to run a significant risk of being affected by this problem. But the larger the Oracle environment, the longer this restoration would take. Typically, large organizations have the least tolerance for downtime."

That's precisely the description of the company run by the guy who has saved millions. This could be funny. Of course, my confidence into Oracle is also a bit shaken, bugs on the level this fundamental are not supposed to happen. I should be able to trust my DB vendor with the same degree of trust as my stock broker. I know that my stock broker is not going to securitize worthless "liar loans", get the deceiving AAA rating for so created security, by the auditing agency owned by the same bank as the brokerage, sell that security to me and bet against the security they sold me with an insurance company. I must have the same level of confidence with my DB vendor, too.

-- 
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Received on Thu Jan 19 2012 - 11:38:28 CST

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