If you install 10g and 11g on the same server, which one do you wish to supply the executables for “oraenv”? If you install 10g first and allow 11g to overwrite the files in /usr/local/bin when you run “root.sh” then when you eventually call oraenv to set a 10g environment, you get a warning that “$ORACLE_HOME/bin/orabase” cannot be found. If you allow the 10g files to overwrite the 11g ones, you don’t set ORACLE_BASE.

Install 10.2.0.1 - the base release - of Oracle and deselect the various Enterprise Edition Options - these cost money and we don’t like that, especially if we don’t use them. Patching to 10.2.0.5 (in my installation - it could be different with previous versions) silently adds OLAP, Data Mining etc back into the mix. Not good - especially if/when Oracle decide to audit your licenses. You pay for what you install whether used or not.

Software efficiency halves every 18 months thus compensating for Moore’s Law. Cheers.

Yesterday I had the pleasure of a day trip to London to attend the Mastering Oracle Trace Data session with Cary Millsap. The day got off to a great start as I arrived at the railway station in Leeds very early to find my train waiting for me at the platform. Excellent! I got on and 20 minutes before departure time, we headed on out of Leeds for London. WTF? The announcement that this was the 06:40 to London Kings Cross and not the 07:00 cleared things up a little.

On Sunday past, I took 11 full & capped super frames of lovely honey from the original hive, and checked the new hive. They are a bit behind and have not yet capped anything off. Hmmm, what are they up to I wonder? The original hive got another full set of super frames to draw out and fill up. Seeing as how it’s getting late on in the year, I’m not sure we’ll get much more, if anything off of them - but you never know.

Great news! (At least for us Oracle types anyway.) Jonathan Lewis has a new book coming out. The working title appears to be “A look at the internal mechanics of the important bits of Oracle for people who aren’t planning to become rocket scientists but who do want to do a little more than just push buttons in OEM” but this will probably change by November when it is due to be published, all going well.

Except, it’s not! WTF is it all about? You open a report, or a book and see a page with no text on it except this page intentionally left blank. Except, because of that bit of text, it’s no longer blank is it? So why do they bother? Does the author/publisher think we readers are too stupid to realise that a page is blank without being told? Is it because they think we might assume that somehow, the printing process has mysteriously failed for that one page in particular and we may be missing some highly important information?

Ever wanted to parse /etc/oratab but ignore all the comments and blank lines? So did I. Here’s how … I can’t claim all the credit for this, it is based on something I was doing plus a bit of “stolen” code from SLES. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 OLDIFS=$IFS IFS=: grep -v '^\(#\|$\)' /etc/oratab |\ while read ORASID ORAHOME AUTOSTART do ## Do what you like here with ## $ORASID, $ORAHOME and $AUTOSTART ## done IFS=$OLDIFS Cheers,

Me too. Took ages to hit the “duh” moment, then it became pretty obvious! The file /etc/init.d/oracle also known as rcoracle to root users can be used to do a number of things such as starting the databases, starting the (default LISTENER) listener, CRS etc but, as I eventually found out, you have to configure it to do so! The configuration file is /etc/sysconfig/oracle. Most of the options are defaulted to off, except for the setting of kernel parameters (SET_ORACLE_KERNEL_PARAMETERS="yes") which is very useful.

After a server reboot, your (windows) database stays down, even though you have it set to come up automatically - why? The services have started, just not the database. The following is a clue: 1 sqlplus "/ as sysdba" 1 2 3 4 5 SQL*Plus: Release 10.2.0.3.0 - Production on Tue Jun 21 07:29:08 2011 Copyright (c) 1982, 2006, Oracle. All Rights Reserved. ERROR: ORA-01031: insufficient privileges You now have two options to check, and both must be confirmed:

Mine did, not any more though. Read on. I was just a tad annoyed at the sudden increase in s-l-o-o-o-o-w responses after starting OpenSuse 11.4 up. I noticed that the hard drive indicator LED was continually lit for about 5-10 minutes after bootup. Performance was abysmal during this time. Top showed almost no CPU being used, so I looks ad vmstat instead. This was the result, on an idle (and slow) system:

One of Alison’s ex work colleagues, Andy, keeps bees. So far this year he has had 4 swarms! We took advantage of his generosity and restocked our recently dead hive with one of his swarms, and then, a couple of days later we obtained another of his swarms in a (borrowed - thanks Peter) nucleus box. We now have two and a half hives. Our own hive, looks to have requeened itself - my last inspection showed no red queen, and what appeared to be an unmarked queen laying.

How hard can it be? Well, as it turns out, not very. The steps are as follows: Install, or check, that you have wine (latest version) installed. The command wine --version gives details, assuming that you already have it installed. Download “Kindle for PC” from Amazon’s web site. Double-click the Kindle exe file to install it under wine. If you see errors about “winesetup encountered an error” just ignore them. You will have a new entry in your applications menu for Kindle.