Encounters of an Enterprise DB Architect

In order to get the UNIX pipe character ("|") printed in blogger, do the following: Always use the "Edit Html" tab for posts containing the pipe character and NOT the Compose tab. The ASCII value for the pipe character is "& # 124 ;" (I am delibrately using whitespace in betwen the ASCII value. Please remove them before using). Thanks for Greg Houston's blog and this thread for pointing me in the right direction.

A quick question before getting started with today's subject. How does one retrieve the url of an instance? Suppose you were asked to work (or login to the front end) on an instance of which you know only the server names, how do you find the login URL? There are 2 methods (of course, there might be more but I've listed the ones that I use the most) to retrieve the login URL information: 1. Login to sqlplus as apps and query the table icx_parameters for the home_url. 2. Better still and much faster than the above method would be to issue the below command. The output would be nothing but the value for the env variable FORMS60_MAPPING. $ env | grep http I prefer the 2nd method over the 1st. Anyway, to my surprise and dismay, I found out that R12 does NOT set the above env variable. So, the quick recourse to getting the login URL is ruled out or is it? I have written a shell script to get/set the env variable. You can access it here . Let me know if you notice any errors or have ...

I have tried to collate commands to find the number of CPUs and total physical memory (RAM) size in all common flavours of UNIX in one blog entry. This certainly is not an exhaustive list and will be modified as and when I find new commands. You are also more than welcome to add to this list. Number of CPUs Sun SPARC Solaris 1. prtconf | grep cpu | wc -l 2. psrinfo | wc -l 3. psrinfo -v | grep "Status of" | wc -l 4. psrinfo -vp 5. prtdiag | grep "on-line" | wc -l 6. mpstat | grep -vi cpu | wc -l Linux 1. grep "processor"/proc/cpuinfo | wc -l HP-UX 1. ioscan -kfnC processor | grep "processor" | wc -l 2. sar -M 1 | awk 'END {print NR-5}' 3. sar -Mu 1 1 | awk 'END {print NR-5}' 4. ioscan -kf | grep -c processor 5. cat /var/adm/syslog/syslog.log | grep processor | grep "vmunix" | wc -l AIX 1. lscfg -vp | grep proc | wc -l 2. lparstat -i | grep "Online Virtual CPUs" | cut -d ':' -f2 ...

Issue “Choose Connection” is NOT seen in Discoverer Plus and Discoverer Viewer screen after installation. Symptom Installed Discoverer 10g as an OracleBI standalone installation (i.e., without associating with an OracleAS infrastructure). Associated the standalone Discoverer to Oracle Apps Database. Users are unable to see Choose Connection in the Discoverer Plus and Viewer login screen. Cause Discoverer has not been associated with an infrastructure. This happens when Discoverer 10g is installed as a Standalone without associating it with an OracleAS infrastructure. Quoting from the documentation: “An OracleBI standalone installation is not associated with an OracleAS Infrastructure, and therefore has a limited number of components available. .. .. If Discoverer is not associated with an OracleAS Infrastructure, Discoverer connections are not available to end users. For more information about associating Discoverer with an Oracle Infrastructure install, see Chapter 2, "About Orac...

Long time no blog! The reason being that I was busy performing this Discoverer 10g rehost. Without wasting much of your time, let me get into the details. Background Recently, we rehosted (i.e., moved) our production instance to a new set of production servers. Discoverer 10g is also a part of our prodcution implementation. Discoverer resided on the old production servers. Requirement Move Discoverer 10g from the old production servers to the new ones (a.k.a rehost!). Methodology After scrutinizing all the available Metalink docs, I found out that no Metalink doc existed for my requirement! I had to chart my own course here (not that no one had done this before but lack of documentation - both on the web and Metalink, was a bit of an impediment). After burrowing through all the available documentation, I surmised that I had two methods to achieve my goal: 1. Reinstallation of Discoverer 10g (including OID) 2. Cloning of Discoverer 10g ORACLE_HOME. Steps involved in both the methods is ...

In my previous post, I had talked about extracting controlfiles, datafiles and archivelogs from RMAN backupsets using the package dbms_backup_restore. In this post, I would like to throw light upon using RMAN as an alternate method that could be employed to extract controlfiles from RMAN backupsets. This method uses the RMAN command "restore controlfile from '<FULL_PATH_TO_CONTROLFILE_BACKUP>'". The RMAN method can be used in 3 scenarios. So, make sure that at least any one of the backups is indeed available. Else, you are DOOMED! I. the controlfile autobackup is turned on in RMAN. In this case the file format would be "c<DBID>-<DATE>-<COUNT>". It is turned on using the command: configure controlfile autobackup on; configure controlfile autobackup format for device type disk to '/opt/apps/vision/backup/%F'; II. the controlfile snapshot backup is configured in RMAN. It is turned on using the command: configure snapshot control...

The other day, one of my colleagues posed me this interesting and thought-provoking question/scenario: "Suppose, you were to lose both your production and your RMAN catalog databases irrevertably. You do have a full/incremental RMAN backup, however. How are you going to recover?" How indeed? I scratched my head and shone a torch upon the dark recesses of my memory to come up with an answer. The light (of the torch) did indeed reveal something - that is that a note existed in Metalink which list the method that could be used to delve into a RMAN backup set to extract the controlfile, the datafiles and also the archivelogs and Voilà, I hit the nail right on the head. I did some more digging and found a bunch of "Notes" in Metalink that pointed me to the eventual answer to the above question. The Notes that I am referring to are listed below. A summary of the procedure to be followed in such scenarios is also provided. All the notes mentioned use the package dbms_backu...