Oracle has released the January 2007 Critical Patch Update (CPU). A major change for this quarter’s CPU was the release of a pre-announcement on January 11th giving an overview of the products patches and a summary of the vulnerabilities. On the surface, the pre-announcement looked pretty bad with

(Brian Peasland) At present I have a strange problem with RMAN. I recently upgraded a database from 9i to 10g. My RMAN is also 10g. When I do a full backup, at the end of the backup I get an ORA-600 error. However when I do the recovery drill it works fine. I am pretty confused — any pointers? (R

(Tony Marston) The software that I write is not intended for just one customer who is locked into a single RDBMS. Instead it can be used by virtually any customer using the RDBMS of their choice. How is this possible? I deliberately designed and built my infrastructure around the 3 Tier Architecture

(Bob Watkins) The transportable tablespace feature—copying datafiles directly between Oracle instances instead of unloading and loading data—was introduced in Oracle 8i and has grown in functionality ever since. At first, the tablespace to be moved had to have the same block size as the destination

(James F. Koopmann) Do you Do remote DBA? I have often wondered about the current status of off-site remote work. I currently am doing full-time work remotely and often joke with my friends about wearing my bunny slippers all day long.

(Brian Peasland) I want to take the structure of my database, but not the data. Is it possible in any way? (R)

(Partha S) On my machine, I have two Oracle installations : Oracle 9i Client and Oracle 10g Express Edition (server – henceforward refered to as XE).

(Rich Schwerin) Oracle’s role in open source development has been a well-kept secret. It’s also the reason for this column: To inform you about Oracle’s commitment to open source software—a commitment measured by significant investments in ongoing development and support across a wide variety of ini

(njethwa) In GL Chart of accounts, each segment can have its own hierarchy. Although in GL there is no validations done if one child is reporting to more than one parent, the onus lies on the financial users who do reporting off FSGs and other means to ensure that the hierarchy remains clean. If thi

(Elisa Gabbert) If DBAs’ wish lists for the new year have one item in common, it’s more storage. (R)