TOI

It is quite often that I encounter attendees in my Oracle University courses that strive to become OCP or sometimes even OCM, asking me whether they should better go for an older versions certificate before they take on the most recent. The reasoning behind those questions is mostly that it may be easier to do it with the older version. My advise is then always: Go for the most recent version! No Oracle Certification exam is easy, but the older versions certificate is already outdated. The now most recent one will become outdated also sooner as you may think :-)

The corporation announced today that I got the Customer Services Excellence Award 2014 in the category ‘Customer Champion’ for the EMEA region. It is an honor to be listed there together with these excellent professionals that I proudly call colleagues.

When you see that error upon trying to install or upgrade something on your Windows 7 64-bit machine, chances are that it is caused by a Windows Security update that you need to uninstall. There is probably no point in messing around with the registry or the application that you want to upgrade. Instead, remove the Windows update KB2918614 like this:

Open the control panel, then click  Windows Update

Click Update History and then Installed Updates:

With a Data Guard Configuration in Maximum Performance protection mode, don’t go to Maximum Protection directly, because that leads to a restart of the primary database:

The Flash Cache Mode still defaults to Write-Through on Exadata X-4 because most customers are better suited that way – not because Write-Back is buggy or unreliable. Chances are that Write-Back is not required, so we just save Flash capacity that way. So when you see this

What happens when you unplug a pluggable database that has local users who have been granted common roles? They get copied upon plug-in of the PDB to the target container database!

The picture above shows the situation before the unplug command. It has been implemented with these commands:

You can restore a datafile directly from a physical standby database to the primary. Over the network. With compressed backupsets. How cool is that?

Here’s a demo from my present class Oracle Database 12c: Data Guard Administration. prima is the primary database on host01, physt is a physical standby database on host03. There is an Oracle Net configuration on both hosts that enable host01 to tnsping physt and host03 to tnsping prima

UKOUG Oracle Scene has published my article about two exciting Data Guard 12c New Features:

http://viewer.zmags.com/publication/62b883ad#/62b883ad/44

Hope you find it useful :-)

A 12c multitenant database introduces the new concept of local users and common users. This article shows simple use cases why DBAs may want to create common users – in contrast to the common users that are created automatically, like SYS, SYSTEM, MDSYS etc.

A typical requirement is to have a superuser other than SYS, but with the same power. Like the common user C##_SYS in the picture below.

Or suppose we have many pluggable databases (PDBs) and different superusers responsible for different PDBs like C##_ADMIN1 and C##_ADMIN2:

When you install an 11g RAC database without Grid Control respectively Cloud Control present, this is what the DBCA will give you:

There is one Database Control OC4J Container only, running on host01. Should host01 go down, the Enterprise Manager is no longer available now. We could make that a resource, known to the clusterware and let it failover in that case. But also – and even easier – we can start a second OC4J Container to run on host02 simultaneously like this: