DBA questions

Hi people,

I'm currently on a short leave from my job as Oracle DBA somewhere in the deep dark jungles of Africa. If anyone gets offered a job there, I can recommend it - good pay and good conditions (bit remote tho).

I've saved up some questions that I can only now ask, and in return I'm offering some scripts that I've made and which could be of interest to others.

I'm working with 6.0.33 (just finished converting from 6.0.27 - Africa, remember) without the TPO option (ie. no PL/SQL). I'm working on VAX and Unix.

Here are my questions. I'll send my scripts in separate postings. The scripts are: 1) How to detect oversize tables, 2) How to recreate a CREATE DATABASE statement, 3) How to calculate the number of workdays (Mo-Fri) between two dates, 4) scripts to recreate tables, indexes and grants, 5) a script to amalgamate adjoining sections of free space in your tablespaces 6) a small script to make it easy for a DBA to temporarily connect to any other user (w/o knowing the password).

The questions:

1. How can I tell, from within ORACLE, what size my redo log files are? (This I want in order to improve my script fo creating a CREATE DATABASE statement - my script shall be posted separately).
2. How can I tell from within SQL*Plus if I'm in ARCHIVELOG mode? Or, if impossible, from SQL*DBA - without writing the results of ARCHIVE LOG LIST to a file and reading it. Note that having a log_archive_dest set and log_archive_start = true doesn't mean you're in ARCHIVELOG mode.
3. Is there a way to increase 255-char limit on output from Vax?
4. I have a separate posting in which I have a script that locates tables which are too large (eg. 1M allocated and only using 100k). Does anyone know of a way of finding oversized indexes, without dropping and recreating them?
5. How to reproduce the INIT.ORA file from a running database? Yes, I know about v$parameter, but it's not the real thing. The VALUE column is only 50 chars long.
6. What are the minimum requirements in order to be able to recreate a database? A full export and the INIT.ORA?
7. See my posting on how the numbwr of working days can be calculated. Does anyone have an easier way?

Mucho thanks,

Rick Bakker, roving DBA

--
Paul Bakker  bakker_at_cs.uq.oz.au | "PhD theses usually marshall an
Computer Science Dept.          | army of facts to starve a
The University of Qld           | slender and tedious truth
QLD 4072 Australia              | into submission" - The Guardian