I have a small utility, written in C, that I need to use from time to time. I wrote it back in 2009 when 32 bit systems were all the rage. It reads a certain type of data file and outputs lots of, ahem, interesting information about the contents. When I compiled it on my 64 bit laptop, it produced complete and utter rubbish! How did I fix it? The data file that the utility reads is a Firebird database file which has a number of long fields in various structs.

I have been looking at this far too long, and I’m stumped. I resolved a similar problem yesterday on another server. That was down to the ORACLE_HOME setting in listener.ora having a ‘1’ in it rather than a ‘2’. Took ages to spot that. Anyway, here the stuff you’ll need to know to sort this for me, or suggest stuff. It’s a question on Oracle L seeing as there is a lot of evidence to post.

This post is from 2013 when Internet Explorer was [still] a thing. I rather suspect nobody uses IE any more! Are you forced to use Internet Explorer at work? Are you, like me, forced to use an old, insecure, broken version of IE at work, because it’s the Government Standard version? And are you, like me, unable to upload evidence files to My Oracle Support? You need to go to Tools, then Internet Options.

Tired of trying to drop empty datafiles from a tablespace, which you know is empty? Keep getting errors telling you the data file isn’t empty? Getting frustrated with the whole thing? Me too. This link has the reason and solution.

Oh hum. An 11.2.0.3 Enterprise Edition production database has statspack taking a regular snapshot under the control of a dbms_scheduler job. For no apparent reason, the snapshot started failing with ORA-01400 Cannot insert NULL into PERFSTAT.STATS$SYSTEM_EVENT.EVENT. This was an interesting one to fix. The following is the investigative process, in brief. Test the snapshot process with a manual one - same error. Google and My Oracle Support aka MOS, were no help whatsoever.

Antonio Enrico Martini was cremated on 19th April 2013. He had been a chef for many years and one of his friends read this Address to a chef when Enrico retired in 1987. The version below, was amended from the 1987 version. Both are based on Address to a Pudding by Rabbie Burns. Address To A Chef Fair fa’ your honest sonsie face, Great Enrico o’ th’ Italian Race, Ye cam’ amang us lang years since, an’ did enthrall,

Recently, I saw a mention of an interview question for SQL developers. It was something along the lines of: There is a table with a sex column. It has been discovered that the values are swapped around and need to be corrected. How would you swap all ‘M’ values to ‘F’ and all ‘F’ values to ‘M’, while leaving the other values untouched, in one single SQL statement and without requiring the use of any temporary variables.

http://jarneil.wordpress.com/2013/04/23/recovering-from-rm-rf-on-a-datafile/ has all you need to know to help avert a total disaster. Tanel Poder, who knows these things, advises that the file should be quiesced or made read only before attempting the recovery.

Firefox starts off ok, but soon starts running slower and slower, until it eventually starts to time out on connecting to some pages. The error messages is “the server took too long to respond” however, Firefox might be telling porkies. If you attempt to access the same URL in Opera, Chrome or, if you must, Internet Explorer, you may find that it is responding quite happily and speedily, while another try in Firefox takes ages to connect or fail again.

Ever see this error? I have, just today. An interesting one to debug. I got there in the end though. The database is running on a two node VERITAS cluster. To protect the innocent, I shall refer to these as node_04 and node_05, for that is similar to their real names! The database is not RAC, it runs on one node or the other, but never both. There is one instance and one database.

Ever needed to obtain the serial number (or other details) for a remote server? Couldn’t be bothered to walk/run/drive/fly all the way there just to read a sticky label on the back or bottom of said server? Read on then. The command you want to run, as root, is dmidecode. For example, to get the make and model and serial number of a server, do this: 1 dmidecode -t system The result will be similar to:

A quickie! How do you set the correct Oracle environment in scripts? Do you hard code? You’d better not. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve ended up with, for example, a 10g database running with bits of the 9i software hanging around. It leads to monumental problems that can be hard to track down. Moral: Do not hard code Oracle environment details. This is what I usually do: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 #!

Yesterday, Saturday 2nd March 2013, I went to check on my two bee hives. They were fine and healthy with plenty feed stock when I checked them recently. Yesterday, nothing! Every single bee was dead. There was plenty food, so it seems that the recent damp, foggy, nasty, cold weather must have either killed or severely weakened them. I have no bees. :-( This is all that remains, two dead hives.