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May 2013

Java 7 EE Launch : June 12th & 13th

Submitted by oraclebase on Fri, 2013-05-31 19:08

The Oracle ACE program recently invited members to a teleconference session about the upcoming launch of Java 7 EE. Arun Gupta took us through a preview of the information that will be available to everyone as part of the launch.

If you are interested in getting the low down on this new release, you can register for the launch events here.

Cheers

Tim…

Oracle Security Class and software for Oracle security

Original article

Submitted by pete on Thu, 2013-05-30 15:59

I have just agreed a public class dates of my very popular " How to perform a security audit of an Oracle database " with Oracle University to be held on September 24th and 25th in Rome, Italy. The registration....[Read More]

Posted by Pete On 30/05/13 At 05:54 PM

BGOUG Spring 2013 : Photos

Submitted by oraclebase on Wed, 2013-05-29 18:55

I was a little bit rubbish and forgot to get photos of the recent BGOUG event. Fortunately, the conference photos have arrived. You can check them out here.

There are a number of photos of an old fat guy that looks a little like me. I don’t remember meeting him though. Weird… I think he needs the toilet in this shot.

Forcing Smart Scans on Exadata – is the _serial_direct_read parameter safe to use in production?

Submitted by tanelpoder on Wed, 2013-05-29 12:38

One of the most common Exadata performance problems I see is that the direct path reads (and thus also Smart Scans) don’t sometimes kick in when running full scans in serial sessions. This is because in Oracle 11g onwards, the serial full segment scan IO path decision is done dynamically, at runtime, for every SQL execution – and for every segment (partition) separately. Whether you get a direct path read & smart scan, depends on the current buffer cache size, how big segment you’re about to scan and how much of that segment is actually cached at the moment.

French Philosophy

Original article

Submitted by Jonathan Lewis on Tue, 2013-05-28 17:45

From Mohamed Houri, here’s a French translation of all my “Philosophy” notes to date.

Philosophy

How to hint

Submitted by Jonathan Lewis on Tue, 2013-05-28 17:25

Here’s a live example demonstrating a point I’ve often made – you have to be very detailed in your hinting or Oracle will find a way to obey your hints and do the wrong thing. A recent posting on the OTN database forum gave use the following query and execution plan:

CUR Gets

Submitted by Jonathan Lewis on Mon, 2013-05-27 18:16

Here’s an interesting anomaly from the OTN database forum – PL/SQL track. It’s a single row delete from a table that does a huge number of db block gets and (in the first example shown) physical reads. Here’s the supplied output with autotrace enabled:

Debugger Dangers – Part 2

Submitted by tanelpoder on Mon, 2013-05-27 17:31

About 5 years ago I wrote about the risks that connecting to Oracle processes via debuggers may cause and what are (in my opinion) the safer and less safer options for taking stack samples from running Oracle processes.

In the end of that article I listed different options for getting a stack traces and whether they were safe or not.

For example, ORADEBUG-based process stack traces (DUMP ERRORSTACK, SHORT_STACK and event the process/system state dumps (at level 256 or higher) are not 100% safe – because they alter the execution path of the process they attached to. Your process may crash or get some error if you hit a bug (of course once you patch/fix the bug, you’ll be fine again – until you may hit the next bug).

An example bug is this:

Oracle

Star Trek Into Darkness

Submitted by oraclebase on Mon, 2013-05-27 13:27

After yesterday’s visit to see Fast & Furious 6, I went this morning to see Star Trek Into Darkness.

The reviews I read about this pretty much slated it as being extremely self indulgent. Being only an observer of the franchise, rather than a rabid fan, I only noticed a few of the main back references and I didn’t really see them as a bad thing. Instead, I thought they added a little extra dimension to the story.

It’s a full-on action flick more than a sci-fi film really, but worth going to see in my opinion. If they do more of them I will probably go to see them. If they don’t I won’t cry myself to sleep.

Fast & Furious 6…

Submitted by oraclebase on Mon, 2013-05-27 07:40

Similar to the Resident Evil franchise, you know exactly what you are going to get when you go to see one of the Fast & Furious franchise. Fast & Furious 6 does not disappoint. It contains a liberal mix of car porn, car chase porn and disaster porn, with the odd bit of comedy thrown in for good measure. It is totally ridiculous, but totally fantastic at the same time.