Oracle ASM log file is stale

ASM doesn’t write to its alert log unless it feels it needs to. If you’re worried that ASM alert log writes aren’t working, don’t worry, just do a quick check.

Thank you to Dave Herring for his suggestion on the rebalance command.

Organizing

Over time the amount of stuff on my page has grown and so I’ve re-organized things a bit to make it easier to navigate. Enjoy and learn.

Breaking two myths about rebuilding indexes in the Oracle Database

You’ll read over and over that B-tree indexes will perform fine even as rows are deleted from them. I agree that in theory this makes sense, and the vast majority of the time this holds true. In reality though, I have had to deal with severe performance issues where rebuilding indexes fixed things. Continue reading…

Weet-Bix is not Oracle, but it is part of who I am

My grandfather “Poppa” was the inventor of Weet-bix. Unfortunately this is not  recorded well in history books. Recently someone posted some incorrect information claiming it may have been one of several people. My mother created a site to refute those claims. If you’re interested in Weet-Bix, here’s some reading.

http://weetbixorigin.wordpress.com/weet-bix-origin-2/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weet-Bix

RMAN delete obsolete = ORA-19606: Cannot copy or restore to snapshot control file

This is something I’ve bumped into a few times on single instance and RAC. It is a fairly easy workaround if you know how to do it. This is how.

RMAN : ORA-06532: Subscript outside of limit

Re-registering your Oracle database in the RMAN Catalog fixes many issues, one of which I bumped into today, but hadn’t seen before. Here is the info.

A bad, bad interface vSphere

So, I’m using vSphere for the first time, and I don’t see any info where I expect it to be (actually because I didn’t have privileges to see it). So, I’m thinking maybe I just need to refresh the screen for the VM I’m looking at and click the refresh button.

Bad, bad, vSphere, don’t you know what a “refresh” button looks like? Seriously, rebooting a VM is not a good thing to do by accident and you aren’t helping with that problem by using what looks like a refresh button for a reboot button.

Am I wrong here, let me know.

Oracle addNode.sh Java heap space error, audit files, gc buffer busy acquire, and load spikes

Recently I added a couple nodes to a RAC. I got a java heap outofmemory error, Cluster waits spike, and some oddities. Here is some info on it and my cheat sheet.

Configuring HugePages for Oracle Database

Recently using HugePages came up at work. I tried it out and it definitely seemed to help. Here is a write-up from my experience.

Changing the Oracle database default maintenance window time

Have you ever noticed the Oracle AutoTask jobs chewing up CPU at the wrong time, or running when you didn’t think they did? I just had that experience thanks to our server being on UTC. Here‘s how I fixed it.