Joe Blog

Maine - 2009

2009-09-04T18:24:00.001-07:00

Edison laugh

2009-09-01T08:44:00.000-07:00

Maine / New Hampshire - August 2009

2009-09-01T02:02:00.000-07:00

Maine/ New Hampshire 2009

India trip - 2009

2009-09-01T00:59:00.001-07:00

India Trip - May 2009

Plimouth Plantation

2008-07-11T17:58:00.001-07:00

Plimouth Plantation

Baby Edison Pictures

2008-07-06T19:35:00.001-07:00

Oh boy, It's a boy! We're flying high... We are delighted to introduce Baby Edison, born July 2nd, 2008 9.09am weighing 7.4 pounds (3.35 kg). Mother and baby are doing fine. Some pictures here.

Baby Edison

December trip to India

2008-01-17T09:15:00.000-08:00

My Trip to India was really great. No emails or databases to manage :)

What has changed in these two years is the most important new reality about India: the growing wealth, strength and confidence of Indian technology. Other than that lot of new cars and cell phones. Coverage is better than verizon !! lol.. Unfortunately, pollution rises as economies grow!!

See my trip in Pics.

Joseph

December trip to India

Green Pony

2006-10-29T07:14:00.000-08:00

Marc T gave us this green pony. My daughter loves it. Only complaint, I don't fit in it..lol. Thanks Marc for being generous.(Press play button to play the video)

Querying for global database name in Oracle

2006-10-21T17:53:00.000-07:00

Querying for global database name in Oracle.

select * from global_name;

some other useful commands.

ALTER SYSTEM SET LOG_ARCHIVE_DEST_1 =
'location=/oracle/product/10.1.0/flash_recovery_area/ORCL/ARCHIVELOG/';
ALTER SYSTEM SET LOG_ARCHIVE_FORMAT =
'arch_%d_%t_%r_%s.LOG' scope=spfile;

CONFIGURE CHANNEL DEVICE TYPE DISK FORMAT
'/ORACLE/PRODUCT/10.1.0/FLASH_RECOVERY_AREA/ORCL/backupset/BACK_%T_%d_%s_%t.BAK';

CONFIGURE CONTROLFILE AUTOBACKUP FORMAT FOR DEVICE TYPE DISK TO
'/ORACLE/PRODUCT/10.1.0/FLASH_RECOVERY_AREA/ORCL/AUTOBACKUP/CTL_%F.BAK';

A trip to Stony Brook Wildlife Sanctuary

2006-10-11T08:13:00.000-07:00

Stony Brook Wildlife Sanctuary offers a beautiful, natural and peaceful area for Norfolk and Franklin residents. This Sunday after a heavy lunch from B & T's house we headed to Stony Brook for little extra walk. The parking lot was full but we did see a few turtles, geese and ducks. Lily definitely enjoyed seeing the birds and walking with us.

I took a few amateur pictures. Guess what, I am not in any of the pcitures.

Stony Brook Wildlife Sanctuary

My silent PC (allmost)

2006-10-11T07:19:00.000-07:00

Yes, my computer was noisy with 4 fans inside and I wanted to do something about it. My XFX 6800 GT stock fan was too noisy and decided to replace it with an after market cooler. Last week I ordered an Accelero X1 for gfx and Freezer 64 Pro for CPU from newegg. I have to say my Graphics card is very silent now with the Accelero X1. The installation was not very difficult but took an hour. I can hear the noise from the CPU Freezer 64 Pro, but it's certainly acceptable. Here are some pictures for your viewing pleasure.

Silent PC

Picking a good coconut..

2006-09-05T07:40:00.000-07:00

Picking a good coconut.

Well, the other day my friend asked how to pick a good coconut from the store. Finding a good quality coconut needs little practice. The challenge lies in finding a good coconut without seeing what is inside. Here are some tricks I learned when I was a young boy.

. Feel the weight. Good-quality coconuts would be heavy with thick meat inside.

. Try a few and pick the one that feels the heaviest with firm eyes or softspots.

. Check to be certain that the shell and its three softspots are dry, not moldy or wet.

. Don't buy if they are moldy or has any leakage.

. Be able to hear the liquid sloshing inside when the fruit is shaken.

. For firm coconut meat, select mature coconuts with little or no liquid inside. They are really good to make coconut milk.

SQL Plus autocomplete and comamnd history using rlwrap.

2006-08-31T07:52:00.000-07:00

Real DBAs love command line!! just kidding... but a lot can be accomplished using command line irrespective of what platform you are using. The real power of command line comes when you remotely administer your server over an SSH connection or using one of the mobile devices. rlwrap is generic wrapper program for *nix platforms to extend the features of GNU readline library. You can use rlwrap with sqlplus for command history, auto completion etc. This also works with RMAN and listener programs. You can download it from here.

http://utopia.knoware.nl/~hlub/uck/rlwrap/

after installing the rlwrap add these lines to .bashrc (if you are using bash ), where sql.dict contains the oracle commands for auto completion.

alias sqlplus='rlwrap -b "" -f $HOME/sql.dict sqlplus'
alias rman='rlwrap -b "" -f $HOME/sql.dict rman'
alias lsnrctl='rlwrap -b "" -f $HOME/sql.dict lsnrctl'

If you don't have permissions to install programs or don't know how to install programs from source , ask your administrator to do that for you.(P.S ask them politely, if you really need thier help:).

Restricting Oracle database connections by configuring the Listener.

2006-08-22T17:12:00.000-07:00

By default Oracle listener places no restrictions on who can actually connect to the database server. One way to restrict the connection is to use firewall rules. Oracle Listener also provides mechanism to restrict access by IP addresses. Use the oracle Net Manager or edit sqlnet.ora file to configure Oracle net profiles, which are in fact a set of directives on the server machine.

The following are the directives available to restrictives.

* TCP.VALIDNODE_CHECKING
* TCP.EXCLUDED_NODES
* TCP.INVITED_NODES

TCP.VALIDNODE_CHECKING must be set to YES and one of the other directives must be set to control the connections. If any node is added to TCP.INVITED_NODES, then all other nodes are excluded. If any node is added to TCP.EXCLUDED_NODES, then other nodes are included automatically. If both directives are set and there is a conflict, TCP.INVITED_NODES takes precedence.

sqlnet.ora can be configures by either DNS names or IP addresses.
eg.

TCP.VALIDNODE_CHECKING = YES

TCP.INVITED_NODES = (192.168.0.240, as230machine.oracle.com)

Pictures

2006-08-21T18:21:00.000-07:00

House

Pictures

Creating a Recovery Catalog for RMAN in 10G

2006-08-14T16:19:00.000-07:00

RMAN recovery cataglog can also store RMAN stored scripts, sequences of RMAN commands for common backup tasks in addition to BACKUP information. If you decide to create a catalog instead of using the control file, you need to create a recovery catalog. Here is how to create a recovery catalog for RMAN use.

1. Create a new user with connect, resource and recovery_catalog_owner permissions.

SQL> create user rman_owner default tablespace rmanrep temporary tablespace temp
identified by rmanpass;
SQL>grant connect, resource, recovery_catalog_owner to rman_owner;

2. Connect to RMAN and create a catalog.
RMAN> connect catalog rman_owner/rmanpass;
RMAN> create catalog tablespace rmanrep;

3. Connect to the target database and register the database.
rman target /
RMAN > connect catalog rman_owner/rmanpass
RMAN> register database;

Recovery catalog is now ready to use.

ORACLE alert log.

2006-08-11T07:40:00.000-07:00

The Oracle alert log file is a chronological log of important messages and errors

These messages include

Startup messages
Shutdown messages
oracle processes startup and shutdown.
ALTER DATABASE STATMENTS.
Create, Drop statements.
and other useful error messages.

Default location of alert log is BACKGROUND_DUMP_DEST.
If BACKGROUND_DUMP_DEST is undefined, oracle creates $ORACLE_HOME/RDBMS/trace directory.

Sample trace file
----------------------
Database Characterset is WE8ISO8859P1
replication_dependency_tracking turned off (no async multimaster replicatio
n found)
Wed Aug 16 12:00:28 2006
Starting background process QMNC
QMNC started with pid=19, OS id=3821
Wed Aug 16 12:00:43 2006
db_recovery_file_dest_size of 2048 MB is 15.16% used. This is a
user-specified limit on the amount of space that will be used by this
database for recovery-related files, and does not reflect the amount of
space available in the underlying filesystem or ASM diskgroup.
Wed Aug 16 12:00:49 2006
Completed: ALTER DATABASE OPEN
Wed Aug 16 12:02:08 2006
Starting background process EMN0
EMN0 started with pid=23, OS id=5523
Wed Aug 16 12:02:08 2006
Shutting down instance: further logons disabled
Wed Aug 16 12:02:15 2006
Stopping background process CJQ0
Wed Aug 16 12:02:15 2006
Stoppin

ORA-19809: limit exceeded for recovery files.

2006-08-11T06:46:00.000-07:00

ORA-16038: log 3 sequence# 49 cannot be archived
ORA-19809: limit exceeded for recovery files
ORA-00312: online log 3 thread 1: '/u01/app/oracle/oradata/orcl/redo03.log'

What does this error mean?

This error occurs when the recovery file limit exceeds the DB_RECOVERY_FILE_DEST_SIZE specified in the ORACLE parameter file.

How do I recover from this error?

You have following choices to free up space from flash recovery area:
1. Consider changing RMAN RETENTION POLICY. If you are using Data Guard,
then consider changing RMAN ARCHIVELOG DELETION POLICY.

2. Back up files to tertiary device such as tape using RMAN
BACKUP RECOVERY AREA command.

3. Add disk space and increase db_recovery_file_dest_size parameter to
reflect the new space. The default size of db_recovery_file_dest_size is 2 GB.

4. Stop using the db_recovery_file_dest_size by unsetting the parameter in the parameter file.

4. Delete unnecessary files using RMAN DELETE command. If an operating
system command was used to delete files, then use RMAN crosscheck and
delete expored commands.

CROSSCHECK ARCHIVELOG ALL;
DELETE EXPIRED ARCHIVELOG ALL;

Now restart the database instance.