Author: Tim...

DBA, Developer, Author, Trainer.

Auditing in Oracle 10g Database Release 2…

I wrote/revamped an article yesterday called Auditing in Oracle 10g Database Release 2. Most of the information was already present on the site, but it was spread across several articles including an 8i article and several new features articles for 9i and 10g. Rather than write a small article on the XML audit trail in Oracle 10g Release 2, I thought I would bring the whole lot up to date.

One point I spotted was an unusual change in the AUDIT_TRAIL parameter. In 10g Release 1 there was an allowed value of DB_EXTENDED, which indicates that the audit records should go to the DB audit trail and the SQL_TEXT and SQL_BIND columns should be populated. In Release 2 this has been changed to DB,EXTENDED. Can’t see the point in this change myself. Personally, I would not have been offended by XML_EXTENDED, rather than XML,EXTENDED… 🙂

Whatever…

Cheers

Tim…

The life of a DBA…

Person: Is there a problem this morning?
DBA: A problem with what?
Person: Application “X” is throwing out errors. Do you know what’s going on?
DBA: That’s wierd, as far as I know nothing has changed on that project recently.
Person: They put some new software live yesterday, but they are sure that’s not the problem!
DBA: Which server are they seeing the problem on?
Person: Server “Y”.
DBA: The applications on that server don’t connect directly to the database. It doesn’t even have an Oracle client loaded.

So let me see:

  • The specific application does not, and has never, connected to the production database.
  • Some new software went live yesterday.
  • The problems they are seeing must be related to the production database. It can’t possibly be due to the new software put live yesterday!

I’m sure there is logic somewhere there, but I’m just too stupid to see it 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

WordPress…

After reading this article (Blog Software Smackdown: The Big 3 Reviewed) I decided to have a little dabble with WordPress and I’m very impressed. WordPress was first brought to my attention when I started to read Andy C‘s blog. My interest was rekindled when I read this post of his (a short history of Oracle blogging).

The installation was simple, there are loads of themes and pluggins and the administration side of it is very straight forward. Within 15 minutes I had downloaded it, installed it, picked a new theme and imported all my Blogger posts. It was that simple.

For the moment, I’m not going to jump ship from Blogger, but if I do, I think it will be to WordPress.

Cheers

Tim…

New article and a little surprise for me…

Somebody asked me how to install Oracle9i on Red Hat 4.0, so I wrote quick how-to. Personally, I can’t see the point. Why run an old version of Oracle that requires you to make RHEL 4 think it’s RedHat 9? Each to their own I guess.

A number of bloggers have mentioned the new Oracle blogs site, so I thought I’d check it out. I was more than a little surprised when I found my blog listed there. I’m a very “off-topic” blogger and my opinion of Oracle is not always flattering. I guess I slipped through the quality control net…

Now, who do I need to bribe in order to get one of those little ACE images? 😉

Cheers

Tim…

Taking Linux Window-Shots…

I been capturing a large number of window-shots on Linux servers recently. To do this I’ve been doing a screen-shot by hitting the “Print Screen” key (or Actions > Take Screenshot…), then manually chopping out the relevant window from the screen-shot. Needless to say it’s a complete pain in the butt.

After wasting quite some time doing this I thought I’d google round for a quicker solution. Almost instantly I hit upon the ImageMagick package. It’s on the RedHat/CentOS/Fedora CDs and if you have the “Graphics” option installed you probably have it already.

The two command line options of interest to me were:

import -window root /mypath/screenshot.jpg
import /mypath/windowshot.jpg

The first option captures the whole screen and saves it as the specified. The second option captures the contents of the next window you click on and saves it as the specified file. The window frame is not captured, just the contents.

Unfortunately, I’ve completed most of my current batch of window-shots, but next time around life will be alot easier and quicker 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Google Adwords…

My hosting provider has given me £30 of free Google Adwords advertising, so I’ve started a “Campaign” on adwords. It costs £5 to activate the account and I’ve told it to stop advertising as soon as I’ve spent £25. I would be interested to know if anyone sees an advert on their travels.

Fun, fun, fun…

Cheers

Tim…

VMware News…

It seems VMware are releasing yet another free product. This times it’s VMware server:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/02/03/vmware_goes_free/

VMware is a cool product. I was first introduced to it approximately 5 years ago. We had a big (for the time) server running Red Hat 7.1 as the guest operating system, which was subsequently split into 5 Windows NT virtual servers. These were used as development servers for a number of projects, including Oracle projects. I’ve been a fan of it ever since.

This free release should open the door for many more people. It’s really cool not having to mess with your main OS when you want to try out a new Oracle installation, or a new upgrade process.

The article also mentions Xen, which I’d not heard about before. Looks like it will be included in the next release of RHEL and SUSE. Sounds well worth a try.

Cheers

Tim…

Installation frenzy…

I’ve modified my “Linux Articles” page to show a matrix of all my installation articles. It makes finding stuff a little easier than reading the text long-hand. For the most part, these are installations I’ve practiced for work, or needed for home, so I doubt I’ll try too hard to fill in the gaps.

There are a couple of draft articles for Fedora Core 5 (FC5). It’s still in beta, so these will need some amendments by the time the final version is released.

Fun, fun, fun 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

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