Everybody, it seems is making their own Christmas cards these days. We are no different, except, we are! Read on …. A couple of weeks ago, in preparation for Christmas, Alison (SWMBO!) and I spend a fun morning and bits of the afternoon at a printer’s in Skipton. Sadly, with my memory, I can’t remember the printer’s name, but suffice to say, he’s an old fashioned printer, with an upper and lower case full of type faces and lots of different fonts, in the old style - made out of metal.

The Oracle database allows the users to change their passwords as follows: SQL> ALTER USER me IDENTIFIED BY my_new_password; or, alternatively, to use the PASSWORD command, which prompts for the old and new passwords. Of course, if the user has forgotten their old password, the system manager can do the necessary: SQL> ALTER USER forgetful_user IDENTIFIED BY a_new_password; Now, if there are profiles in use, as there are, and these profiles have a password verification function defined, these passwords will be validated to ensure that they adhere to the installation standards.

In this, the second part of the Introduction to Oracle Datapump mini-series, we take a look at importing dump files using impdp. If you missed the first part which concentrated on exporting with expdp, have a read of it here. Once again, the following is a quick introduction for people like me - running Oracle on Linux and slightly averse to change! ;-) Introduction to Datapump Imports All of the following is based on 11.

Oracle Datapump, aka expdp and impdp were introduced at Oracle 10g to replace the old faithful exp and imp utilities. Many DBAs around the world find that it’s hard to change from what we know like the back of our hand, to something new. We need to change because exp is deprecated from 10g onwards and might even already have vanished from 12c - which I have to install as one of my upcoming tasks.

A slight variation on the incremental backups. In this (short) article, I demonstrate the use of database file copy backups which are themselves updated on a regular basis to avoid having to restore and recover using numerous incremental backups. What’s Going On Here? This took me a wee while to get my head around. We can take a backup of the database, in incremental form, and then, use our nightly incremental backups to update the backup itself to the latest state of the database.

It’s been a while since the previous post in this series, but I’m back again. This time out, we are looking at incremental backups. What they are, how they work, and how - of course - to take them and use the to restore and recover your databases. More Terminology What exactly is an incremental backup? Previously, this series has shown you how to take a full backup be that of the database, archived logs, tablespaces and data files.

This post has also been categorised under “rants and raves” as you will see below! Oracle 10g was the first time that proxy users could be used easily from SQL. Prior to that only Java and/or OCI programs could use them. They’ve been around since 8i, but not (well) documented. Want to know more? Read on…. A Bit of Background Many years ago, a software company I worked in - as a DBA - was taken over and we inherited a system (no names - you will see why later) which allowed numerous users the ability to use the system, and some of them got to create documents from within the application.

Registration is Suspended - For Now This blog post applied to my Wordpress blog, of which, this is a migrated copy. It no longer applies, but I’ve left it here for old time sake! Until further notice, subscribing to this blog, by self-registration, has been suspended. I can and will subscribe you on request - but see below for terms and conditions. While, I was on holiday for a couple of weeks, over 4,000 spam users “registered” and I spent a lot of time devoted to cleaning up the mess.

Continuing with the setting up and such like, using Arch Linux on the Raspberry Pi. This is the second blog post on the subject. In the previous posting, we managed to set up our locales, languages, keyboards, and so on. We have internet connection vie a wired Ethernet connection using either a dynamic IP address or a Static one. Time to move on. As before, if you see a command with a ‘>’ prompt it means that you should be in the root user, or have prefixed the command with sudo.

The ARCH Linus distro for the Raspberry Pi is not the normal one used by the masses, but the benefits of ARCH are good in that it is a rolling release distro. That means, you never have to reinstall it to be on the latest version. The information that follows assumes that you have installed ARCH from the NOOBS installer. The latest version of ARCH has changed the networking system in use.

Updated 11th January 2015 to document NOOBS 1.3.11. NOOBS is the latest user friendly installation system from the Raspberry Pi. It allows you the ability to choose one of 7 (currently) Operating Systems to run on your Pi and a separate data partition to save your possibly shared data. You can pick and choose and change your OS at any time you wish simply by rebooting and holding the SHIFT key down.

Astell & Kern AK100: My wife bought me one of these because my old iRiver H340 has begun eating batteries. It’s on its third replacement now, plus I have more music than fits the H340’s hard drive. I do not buy Apple products, so any iWhatever (other than iRiver) was out of the question. Nothing personal, I just don’t like them. Finding a suitable replacement music player with decent storage, no hard drive, and Linux compatibility (64 bit essential) was very difficult especially if you are not fond of Apple kit.

If, like me, you have suffered from ORA-29902 Error in executing ODCIIndexStart() routine errors where Spatial indexes are involved, the following might help you fix it. The error involved in the following has been extracted from a log file for a system which doesn’t use Spatial or Locator itself, but calls out to a separate database which does have Locator installed. This latter database was created using Transportable Tablespaces, exported from 10.