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  • Oracle Tidbits – November 2016 #oratidbit

    Oracle TidBit
    Oracle TidBits

    Oracle *daily* TidBits” (#oratidbit) published at https://www.facebook.com/oraclenotes on weekdays in November 2016. You will also see these tidbits, one tidbit at a time, for each page refresh on the right side of this blog as well… Hope you find these helpful to learn something new or to remind you of its existence and use…

    #oratidbit The orapki command line utility enables administrators to manage wallets, certificate revocation lists, and other public key infrastructure (PKI) elements from the command line. It can be used inside scripts, enabling administrators to automate many routine PKI tasks.
    #oratidbit By default, Oracle database audit trail records are written to the SYSAUX tablespace. You can designate a different tablespace by using the DBMS_AUDIT_MGMT.SET_AUDIT_TRAIL_LOCATION procedure.
    #oratidbit In #DB12c Oracle Database writes unified audit records to system global area (SGA) queues and then periodically writes them to the AUDSYS schema audit table in the SYSAUX tablespace.
    #oratidbit UNIFIED_AUDIT_SGA_QUEUE_SIZE initialization parameter sets the size of SGA area where unified audit queues are saved before writing to AUDSYS schema.
    #oratidbit Use the DBMS_AUDIT_MGMT.CLEAN_AUDIT_TRAIL procedure to manually purge the audit trail from Oracle Database.
    #oratidbit In #DB12c the READ object privilege and READ ANY TABLE system privilege are more secure than SELECT and SELECT ANY TABLE privileges. SELECT privilege includes LOCK capability on the table/rows.
    #oratidbit In #DB12c DB_WRITER_PROCESSES can be up to 100. The processes are DBW0-DBW9, DBWa-DBWz and BW36-BW99.
    #oratidbit #DB12cR2 Duties that belonged exclusively to PMON now belong to the PMON process group, which includes PMON, Cleanup Main Process (CLMN), and Cleanup Helper Processes (CLnn). This process group is responsible for the monitoring and cleanup of other processes.
    #oratidbit #DB12cR2 Optimizer Statistics Advisor analyzes how you are currently gathering statistics, the effectiveness of existing statistics gathering jobs, and the quality of the gathered statistics. Optimizer Statistics Advisor maintains rules, which embody Oracle best practices based on the current feature set.
    #oratidbit #DB12cR2 #Oracle Sharding is a scalability and availability feature for suitable OLTP applications in which data is horizontally partitioned across discrete Oracle databases, called shards, which share no hardware or software.
    #oratidbit #DB12cR2 You can relocate a PDB from one CDB to another with minimal down time.
    #oratidbit #DB12cR2 During a PDB clone operation, the source PDB no longer needs to be in read-only mode.
    #oratidbit #DB12cR2 You can create a proxy PDB, which references a PDB in a different CDB and provides fully functional access to the referenced PDB.
    #oratidbit #DB12cR2 You can use FLASHBACK PLUGGABLE DATABASE command to rewind a PDB to any SCN without affecting other PDBs in a CDB. You can also create a restore point specific for a PDB, and rewind the PDB to this restore point without affecting other PDB.
    #oratidbit #DB12cR2 A PDB lockdown profile is a security mechanism to restrict operations that are available to users connected to a specified PDB.
    #oratidbit #DB12cR2 You can configure PDB parameters to guarantee or limit SGA memory, PGA memory, sessions, CPU, and I/O rates for each PDB.
    #oratidbit #DB12cR2 You can create local, nonshared temporary tablespaces in PDB. When many read-only instances access a single database, local temporary tablespaces can improve performance for queries that involve sorts, hash aggregations, and joins.
    #oratidbit #DB12cR2 You can pre-create a pool of server processes by using the DBMS_PROCESS PL/SQL package. The new Process Manager (PMAN) background process monitors the pool of pre-created processes, which wait to be associated with a client request.
    #oratidbit #DB12cR2 Read-only and read-write instances can co-exist within a single database. To designate an instance as read-only, set the INSTANCE_MODE initialization parameter to READ_ONLY. The default value of the parameter is READ_WRITE.
    #oratidbit #DB12cR2 In the root of a CDB, you can configure a single port (known as the global port), which enables you to use EM Express to connect to all of the PDBs in the CDB using the HTTPS port for the CDB.
    #oratidbit #DB12cR2 You can capture Automatic Workload Repository (AWR) data for the PDBs in a multitenant environment. This feature enables performance tuning of PDBs in a multitenant environment.
    #oratidbit #DB12cR2 In EM Express, you can view real-time performance statistics for a standby database in the Performance Hub.

     

  • Exploring #Oracle #Cloud #DBaaS – The Start!

    Got excited to see Oracle Database 12.2 available on Oracle Cloud DBaaS, and wanted to try it out immediately. This blog is my first experience, and I will continue sharing as I learn Oracle DBaaS myself!

    Oracle has provided an excellent step by step quick start document. Though the document is not updated with 12.2 offering, it is pretty good to get started, and hopefully, by the time you read this blog, the updated content would be available.

    Reference: Oracle Database Cloud – Database as a Service Quick Start

    I followed the steps as is for the following sections in the document:

    • Create SSH Private and Public Keys
    • Creating a Service Instance
      • Invoking the Create Database Cloud Service Wizard
      • Defining the Subscription Type

    The next section is “Selecting the Software Release”, here I picked the latest and greatest.

    No specific reason why I chose “High Performance” in the next screen, it looked good 🙂

    The next screen collects a lot of information and offers choices. The “?” icon is very helpful. The DBaaS service gives not just the database, but a host too, and we can choose the host compute level.

    As you can see here, you could have the host as small as 1 OCPU (remember one vCPU is different from one OCPU – An OCPU provides CPU capacity equivalent of one physical core of an Intel Xeon processor with hyper threading enabled. Each OCPU corresponds to two hardware execution threads, known as vCPUs) and 8GB RAM; or as big as 16 OCPU and 240GB RAM.

    Service Configuration section is where you specify the database host name (service name), compute size, time zone and the SSH public key file generated in the earlier “Create SSH Private and Public Keys” section.

    In the Database Configuration section, specify the storage required for the database, administrator password, database name and the first pluggable database name.

    In the Backup and Recovery Configuration section, there are options to perform local backup, cloud backup or no backup. I chose no backup for now, will enable backup at a later time.

    In this section, there are also configuration options to choose such as needing a standby database or configuring golden gate. I think these are pretty sleek, simple to the end-user.

    Now all required information are entered, and ready to create the DBaaS instance. The confirmation screen is shown.

    Fingers crossed, and I clicked 

    Got the instance creation progress screen.

    I thought this would be quick, waited 15 minutes, progress screen did not change. There are few other places to check status, such as the “Activity” section.

    After about 45 minutes, the instance creation was complete.

    The instance information screen showed all the details I need to connect to the database.

    The instance (host) seems to be down (yellow bar). So clicked on the menu icon, and chose Start.

        

    And, there I have my host and database ready to use!

    Next, I will share how to connect to this DBaaS instance using SQL Developer.