OTN downloads may not be supported!

This is certainly good to know. Of course my current production and development databases were OTN downloads, patched to 10.2.0.2 from the Metalink patchset.

Patchwork

Doug Burns wrote a great piece about how few people apply the latest patchsets and how almost no one applies the CPUs.

While my databases are all 10.2.0.2, I've only just begun looking at applying CPUs starting with the October CPU (they are cumulative).

We were also looking at finally upgrading to 10.2.0.3, then Laurent Schneider informed me that 10.2.0.4 is due out this year. Of course the reason we didn't upgrade to 10.2.0.3 when we had opportunities in the past was due to a lot of horror stories from the early adopters.

A recent conversation

The other day my nephew Owen looked up at me with this pained look. After some hesitation he finally asked "What is your job? Do you even HAVE one?"

I guess 8-year-olds just don't appreciate DBAs like they used to.

python + cx_Oracle = <3

Took some time over the past two days to deliberately use python. Much fun was had by all (where all = me).

My first creation used the subprocess module (although I had to install the older separate version since I'm on python 2.3) to call df over ssh and then again locally to make sure that my disk partitions were large enough to hold an rman duplication. Works like a champ, and hopefully I won't have long-running duplications blow up and page me at 2 AM. Subprocess is a really nice module for making system calls as well, I'll let you play around with it before thanking me.

My second creation used the cx_Oracle module to connect to Oracle as the SYSDBA and do some post-duplication tasks for my development databases. Changing flags to note that it isn't production, granting some more privileges to the developers, etc. Thanks to Anthony Tuininga for answering my newbie emails.

Want to install Oracle on CentOS 5?

yum -y install libXp

On SQL Injection

This is one of the many reasons you use bind variables.

Following Up re HALP

Just a follow-up to this post. Turns out that the problem was caused by an aborted online relayout on some disk that housed our archive log destination. Rather than actually aborting, the relayout process was left in a "paused" state. After the sys admin cleared this state, performance went back to normal, and we were bulk loading anything and everything we could throw at it with no problem.

Confio Ignite was actually pretty helpful in showing me the events that were going down and when. Mark, Dean and Jan were great in getting my head around some of what I was seeing as well (more helpful than Oracle support seemed).

Back in the Swing

Feeling in a rut lately, I decided to take the plunge and wiped WinXP of my laptop in favor of Fedora 7. Hopefully I can get World of Warcraft running under wine and things will be just peachy. I feel 300% better already being back on a linux desktop.