Just recently (31 December 2012) the first Patch Bundle (MOS patch name 13539664 – LNX64-112-CMT: PLACE HOLDER BUG FOR OAK PATCH 2.1.0.1.0) for the ODA was released. This Patch Bundle only contains firmware updates for the shared disks (HDD) and a new version of OAK (Oracle Appliance Kit). Because the only information about patching the ODA came from the documenation… Read more »
An Oracle Database Appliance has its own inventory to keep track of all installed firmware and software component versions and patches. ODA patches are released in the form of patch bundles. ODA patch bundles can contain patches for: System Firmware Operating System Oracle Grid Infrastructure Oracle Database Oracle Appliance Manager The Oracle Database Appliance inventory in fact is a xml… Read more »
The Oracle Database Appliance is sold to allow customers to quickly deploy and Oracle RAC environment using Oracle’s best practices for deployment. And it is true that in less than 2 hours (thats excluding all things that needs to be done in preparation like physically getting the ODA in an data center, connecting cables, configuring network switches and firewalls and… Read more »
The installation (deployment) of an Oracle Database Appliance (ODA) is done by the ODA configuration manager. After you filled out all the information in the various screens (or you have loaded a parameter file and clicked next on all the subsequent screens) after you click the “install” button, the deployment progress is started which consists of 25 steps. Each step… Read more »
This post will show you the order in which SQL*Plus for Solaris reads the configuration files like the tnsnames.ora. tnsnames.ora $HOME/.tnsnames.ora $TNS_ADMIN/tnsnames.ora /var/opt/oracle/tnsnames.ora $ORACLE_HOME/network/admin/tnsnames.ora If the specified alias is not found in (or the file does not exists) in $HOME/.tnsnames.ora it will try to find the alias in the next available file using the above order. If such a file… Read more »
We had a situation where we had to set the sqlnet.expire_time parameter in the sqlnet.ora file to avoid firewall dropping “inactive” sessions. The only problem was that we were not allowed to restart the listener or the database instance. Searching through the Oracle documentation and google just didn’t give a solid answer what needs to be restarted to start using… Read more »
In the last couple of months we had some strange problems with all processes of Oracle database and ASM instances just disappearing. The shared memory segment was still there and you could connect internally to the instance, even execute some queries until you give some statement where it actually needed to do something, resulting in some kind of a “ghost”… Read more »
There are situations (like after cloning databases) where you, as a DBA, want to create database links in other schema’s, for which you don’t have the password. Unfortunately the security of Oracle doesn’t allow (even SYS) you to drop/create database links for other schema’s. One solution for this is to get the password hash value, temporarily change the password for… Read more »
By setting either one or both the profile limits PASSWORD_REUSE_MAX or PASSWORD_REUSE_TIME are set to anything other than UNLIMITED, Oracle somewhere keeps a history of passwords used by a user. This password history is stored in a table with the name user_history$ which is part of the SYS schema. Whenever the users password is changed, either by the user of… Read more »
Some time ago we had a problem using the adrci (ADR Command Interpreter) to look into some diagnostic information for a listener. After staring up the tool it came back with the warning “No ADR base is set”, even while the ORACLE_BASE environment variable was set. While it is possible to use the SET BASE <ADR base directory> to set… Read more »