(Marc Fielding) This document is for those who have an RMAN backup and want to restore it without the headaches of setting up a recovery catalog, crosschecking backupset pieces, and all the other hoops RMAN usually puts you through. It is a convenient way to restore a database in a disaster situatio

(Jim Czuprynski) With the possible exception of having to rebuild a database server from a “cold metal” starting point, I have to admit that the scenario that holds the most dread for me as an Oracle DBA is to run out of disk space for a production database’s datafiles or tempfiles. Though, in most

(Steve Muench) This column ventures beyond the single-table examples of the past few columns to study the basics of working with data in two or more related tables. I’ll show you how to navigate the web of relationships in the data at runtime, how to join data from multiple tables, and how to presen

(Steve Callan) Part 2 of this series covers the mechanics of installing a patch. Overall, installing a patch is quite easy, but depending upon the platform and version, the number of steps may be different. The base version used as the example is Oracle 9.2.0.1 (for Windows NT/2000/XP) – exactly wha

Educational institutions worldwide are undergoing fundamental shifts in how they operate and interact with their “customers”: students, alumni, donors, faculty, and staff. During the mid-1980s and the late 1990s, many colleges and universities began restructuring and re-engineering their operating

(James F. Koopmann) Within Oracle 10g we are given the opportunity to move operating system files without ever ‘physically’ logging into the operating system itself. This in itself provides us, as DBAs, many options when doing common database administrative tasks that we will typically do. These

(Natalka Roshak) Oracle’s COM automation feature lets Oracle PL/SQL or Java developers leverage any of the thousands of pre-existing COM components, as well as any pre-built, in-house COM components (See Sidebar 1: A Primer on COM). This article first demonstrates an install of the COM option, and t

(Tarry Singh) Since the last article, I have received several e-mails requesting a description on the installation of Clusterware on a 2-node windows 2003 server with VMWare. We will cover the installation issue on RHEL4 Release 2 (Nahant) as well, in a later article.

(Frank Pantaleo) This script was born out of a desire to replicate data from production while minimizing the effect on production. The best way to do this was to leverage APIs that Oracle made available in 8i. Some or all of this logic provided becomes unnecessary in 9i with the advent of Oracle Str

(Matt Kern) Since the early days PHP has been able to talk to Oracle—but it wasn’t easy. Deploying PHP with Oracle was complicated at best, requiring developers and administrators to find, download, compile, link and configure multiple applications and packages. Unfortunately, this fact was counteri