I took this photo in Scotland, along the Crinan Canal, back in March 2009. Anyone know what it is? Click the image for a full screen version. (Warning - it’s 4000px by 3000px and 5.6 Mb file-size. The original file-size is even larger - it’s almost 12Mb!) Update: it’s a Southern Hawker. Thanks Howard! Scottish Dragonfly. Crinan Canal, March 2009.:

In the old days of exp/imp doing a Transportable Tablespace export/import was relatively simple - unless you had Spatial data, in which case, it wasn’t. Then we got hold of expdp/impdp and it became “different”. It now seems that in order to do a Transportable Tablespace import with impdp, you don’t tell it to do one! Confused? In the old days, you told both exp and imp which tablespaces you were transporting using the TRANSPORT_TABLESPACE and TABLESPACES parameters to exp, and the same with imp.

Rsync is great for making sure that a destination directory is synchronised with a source directory. However, do you add a slash to the source and/or destination directory names, or do you not? The answer is, it depends. Without a slash on the source directory means copy both the source directory, and the contents (recursively if specified) to the destination directory while adding a trailing slash means only copy the contents of the source directory, recursively if specified, to the destination.

I have a network attached 1 Tb hard drive. It’s a white book, Western Digital “My Book World” device. I use it for backups. I needed to set it up to allow the backup scripts ssh access without a password. Here’s how I did it. The web interface was used in the normal way to create a user named my_backups. A share was set up automatically for this new user. The share name is the same as the user name - my_backups.

Accessing a web server or an email server, directly from within a database, used to be quite simple. However, it all stops working at 11g. Why is that and what can be done to fix it? Introduction Prior to Oracle 11g, any user in the database wishing to use the various network packages - UTL_HTTP, UTL_SMTP, UTL_TCP, UTL_MAIL etc, and their predecessors, only requires to be granted EXECUTE privileges on the appropriate package(s).

Oracle has raised an alert in the alert.log and created a trace file as well, for a failed DBMS_SCHEDULER job with a strange name which doesn’t appear in DBA_SCHEDULER_JOBS or DBA_SCHEDULER_PROGRAMS - what’s going on? An extract from the alert log and/or the trace file mentioned in the alert log shows something like: 1 2 3 *** SERVICE NAME:(SYS.USERS) ... *** MODULE NAME:(DBMS_SCHEDULER) ... *** ACTION NAME:(ORA$AT_SA_SPC_SY_nnn) ... Where ’nnn’ in the action name is a number.

I use Java only when I have to, and only ever the JRE (Java Runtime Environment) - there is no way I’ll use Java for development work. I’d rather eat my own ear wax to be honest! Linux Mint 13 comes with OpenJDK installed, and a system I use which runs the fop FO Processor, barfs with a Java.Lang.NullPointer Exception if OpenJDK is used. The following is brief instructions on how to install Oracle’s java on Linux Mint.

WARNING - If you are easily offended, I would advise that you do not read any further. You have been advised, proceed at your own risk and don’t bother to complain, because if you do, I will most likely delete your comments. I have the power! As I write this, the temperature outside is minus 60C - minus 76F in old money, or American degrees - but then again, I am about 36,000 feet up and still have three hours to go until Manchester.

This post is all about cloning an 11g database from one server to another using an RMAN active database clone. This is not being done for Standby Database purposes, only to duplicate an existing database onto another server. The physical structure on both servers is the same, some path names have been changed. Source Structure Database SID: msmdppr /srv/msmdp/oradata/msmdppr/ /srv/msmdp/flashback_area/msmdppr/ Everything hangs off /srv/msmdp/oradata/msmdppr and there are data, index, temp, undo, redo, ctrl, dbs, diag directories there.

Having a Raspberry Pi is fun, but like the days of my ZX-81, Spectrum and QL (I see a Sinclair habit there!) you get all sorts of bits hanging off and making it all look untidy. Here’s how to fit a whole pile of “stuff” into the space of an A4 sheet of paper. I know it’s the size of an A4 sheet because that’s what I drew it on before cutting the wood.

Looking for the location of oraInventory on a server? Want to know where it is? Read on. There is a file, known to Oracle, which holds the location of the inventory. Of course, it isn’t in the same place on every server, but the ones I know of have it as follows: Linux: /etc/oraInst.loc HP-UX: /var/opt/oracle/oraInst.loc Windows: Registry at HKLM/software/oracle/inst_loc For any other Unix, you can find it (as the oracle or root user) with:

As you may know, Oracle databases come with a number of options. Some of these cost extra and if inadvertantly installed, Oracle must be paid money - note, you don’t have to be using them, only have them installed, to require payment. So what do you do if you need to remove an option? In the old days, you used to have to rebuild the oracle binaries to add or remove options.

Have you ever found that the virtual hard drive attached to one of your VirtualBox VMs is getting too small? Want to know how to make it beigger? It’s simple. The steps are as follows: Disconnect the drive from your VM. The VM should be shut down and not snapshotted for this step. You can either use the VMs storage settings to disconnect the hard drive, or go to File->Virtual Media Manager, choose the correct hard drive, and click the release button.