While in Schaumburg, Illinois last week for the Oracle DBA Workshop II, I was taking some photos on my Motorola RAZR camera phone, in the hopes of posting them for my 5-year-old daughter to see. I needed to clear up some misconceptions, since she was under the impression that I...
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v$sql_bind_capture Not Quite Capturing SQL Binds
A week or so ago, I was working with a developer to find out why a SQL statement he was sending would sometimes work and sometimes return an invalid DATE format error. Part of the troubleshooting led us to examine the actual bind values being received by the server, just...
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A Sub-Prime I/O Primer
My fans on oracle-l already know that I've had a bit of a battle with Oracle I/O recently, most of the damage being self-inflicted. I'd like to give as forensic a review as possible so that those poor souls who come after me will have some hope and inspiration to...
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DBWR and the Devil
I was recently re-reading parts I, II, III and IV of Kevin Closson's series on the perils of overconfiguring your db_writer_processes (which I mentioned earlier this year). My instance appeared to be a perfect candidate. It was configured with db_writer_processes=4, using the one-DBWR-for-each-CPU approach that Kevin rails against for most...
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Greg Rahn Explains Plans
Greg over at Structured Data has a fantastic piece titled "Troubleshooting Bad Execution Plans" which is a must-read for all. Learning about the GATHER_PLAN_STATISTICS hint alone was worth the price of admission.Also time for me to re-evaluate the changes I made to OPTIMIZER_INDEX_CACHING and OPTIMIZER_INDEX_COST_ADJ a few versions back:SQL> show...
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