Beware of unethical LinkedIn connect or view pics request

Beware of an unethical LinkedIn connect or view photos request. It could be a trap to install some stupid spam and malware softwares on your PC and which screams you later  with pesky messges. In fact, myself had fallen to this trap a few days ago when I received such request from a friend to connect on the LinkedIn social networking site After I click the connect link, a malware software had installed and started giving some very bothersome messages on my PC. Indeed it really irritated me a lot and took almost 5 hours of my time to get rid off this problem.
Ensure its a genuine connect request from the LinkedIn site before you go ahead and click the link.


Jaffar

Wishing you a happy and prosperous EID

Yet another a pleasing holy month of RAMADA ended today by the grace of almighty and a great day of EID celebration ahead! Hence, I would like take this opportunity to wish everyone out there a very happy,hale and prosperous EID. Enjoy your EID with your parents,family,friends,colleagues, relatives and etc.

Jaffar

Ad: Interested in writing? Here is your chance

Packt Publishing is planning to expand its catalogue of Oracle books and is currently inviting Oracle Fusion Middleware experts interested in becoming published authors to get in touch.

 

You don't need any previous writing experience to write for Packt. All that Packt requires from you as an author is a good knowledge of your subject, a passion to share it with others and an ability to communicate clearly in English.

 

Here are some topics that Packt finds immediately interesting:

 

•Oracle WebLogic Suite 11g
•Oracle WebCenter Suite 11g
•Oracle Identity Management 11g
•Other components of the Fusion Middleware Suite...
•and others... 

The list of topics here is definitely not exhaustive. If you are aware of areas which need Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g books, Packt is definitely keen to hear.

So, if you love Oracle Fusion Middleware and fancy writing a book, send an overview of your book idea to author@packtpub.com. If you do not have a book idea and are simply interested in writing a book, Packt will still love to hear from you!

 

More details about this opportunity are available at: http://authors.packtpub.com/content/inviting-oracle-fusion-middleware-11g-experts-write-packt

 

Best of luck..

Jaffar

PMP exam preparation course

It has been a while since I have updated my blog. Well, here is a quick update about what I was been doing past 3 weeks. I have attend an in-house PMP exam preparation course 2 hrs a day for 3 weeks duration and it is delivered by our Manager Mr. Ahmed Darwish who is PMP certified and well known PMP instructor here in Middle East.

There were nearly 30 attendees in the course and we thoroughly enjoyed the lecture. I must say, the way he presents, explains real world scenarios and answering difficult questions was quite impeccable. Personally, I have gain thorough knowledge about project management, such as, what needs to be followed for a successful project. If I come across of an opportunity to manage a project, certainly I gonna apply all those golden rules mentioned in the PMP course.

In my next blog entry, I will try to share our group picture which we took at the end of the course.

Happy reading,

KJC: Wait for msg sends to complete

To investigate a query performance issues on one of our RAC database with two instances, I have initiated the 'oradebug dump errorstack 3' command for the session which was running the query. However, after few minutes I had canceled the operation as it was taking a long time and surprisingly, I found that the session is waiting for 'KJC: Wait for msg sends to complete' event. Although the event disappeared after few minutes, but it gave me an enough nightmare by that time. I didn't find any useful info about this event, but, I have to take sometime to investigate the behavior.

happy reading,

Jaffar

Congratulations to Mr. Sabdar and Mr. Ben Prusinski

Many congratulations to my fellow Oracle ACEs,  Mr. Syed Sabdar Hussain (my brother) and Mr. Ben Prusinski (friend and co-author of my upcoming Oracle 11g RAC book) whose short interview published in Oracle Magazine's (March/April 2010 edition) peer-to-peer section.

Why alter system kill session IMMEDIATE is good

I am pretty sure that many of us come across of situations when a killed session by 'alter system kill session' command did put the session in 'KILLED' status and never released the session  for a long time on the database. It could be due to the fact that the session would be rolling back the ongoing transaction.
Whenever we are in such situation, we generally try to find out the OS pid (on UNIX OS) associated with the killed session (which is a bit difficult task, as the killed session paddr in v$session changes while the addr corresponding value in v$process does not), and kill the associated OS process with 'kill -9' command on the OS level.
I have found the IMMEDIATE option with the 'alter system kill session' is more useful as it writes the following information in the alert.log file after killing the session and also try to finish the things at the earliest possible to close the session from the database:

Wed Feb 10 11:02:39 2010 
Immediate Kill Session#: 515, Serial#: 36366
Immediate Kill Session: sess: c0000001be20d9f0  OS pid: 14686

As you see, it writes the time stamp when the session was killed, and also gives the associated OS pid of the killed session in the alert.log. As per Oracle documentation, 'Specify IMMEDIATE to instruct Oracle Database to roll back ongoing transactions, release all session locks, recover the entire session state, and return control to you immediately.'

Syntax:

alter system kill session 'sid,serial#' IMMEDIATE;

Regards,

Jaffar

Oracle to acquire SUN?

I have seen couple of mails today on freelist group stating about the news, 'Oracle going to acquire SUN'. Umm.. quite interesting deal, one has to wait and see what would be the reaction of HPUX, specially after their (Oracle and HPUX) recent exadata innovation and IBM reaction on this deal.

Read more at http://www.oracle.com/sun/index.html.

Happy reading

Jaffar

ORA 22 invalid session id; access denied

My colleage was badly struck with the 'ORA 22 invalid session id; access denied'  

problem while connecting to any database from an AIX machine (where Oracle client was installed).

All the links including ML note to this errors, never helped to resolve the issue.

In our case, the problem occured because the hostname of this machine was mentioned wrongly in the /etc/hosts file.

Once we corrected the hostname in the hosts file, problem has been resolved.

Regards,

Jaffar

A very happy New Year

Wishing you and your family a very happy and prospers New Year. 

May this New Year bring tons of happiness in your life.

Jaffar

Scientific methods vs Bullet Methods

Of late, there has been a lot of debate, fight, discussion (whatever you call it) in the Oracle community (I would rather say between Oracle experts) on 'which is the best method to tune a database?', a scientific method or Silver Bullets? Many DBAs across the global have expressed their opinions and views, so, I am here to express and share few incidents that I came across. If you decide that I am going to pin point someone or prove which is wrong and which is right, you would be disapointed to know that I am not, simply, becasue  you must be knowing which is the correct method.

I remembered sometime back  a DBA has told me that one of his DBA colleague has rebuild all the indexes in a production database and mailed  to their management and immediate boss stating that this is going (rebuilding indexes) to improve the database performance and also attached an URL which stated that rebuilding indexes will improve the database performance.  I had told my friend to get me the answer for the following questions from his DBA colleague:

Does he know what is the harm or side effects of doing it?

Were there any performance issues in the database, if so, are they related to indexes?

What amount of performance improvements he measured or gained after?

I am yet to get answers for the above questions. And moving on to another incident...

I know a company very personally who follws(still following) so called 'database re-org' method to re-organize their database weekly. When I questioned them why they are doing it so, their answer is that they have gained an immediate performance improvements when they did it first time and they are following this procedure in order to not to drop the performance level. It was really difficult to convience them how dangerious it would to follow this method.

Myself would definitely will not go for 'leaven an arrow in the dark' policy/method. Even if I solve something accidently, I love to spend some time to do R&D to come to a conclusion.

Last but not least, when I visit a doctor, I do expect him to do analysis of my problem and try to cure it permanently rather than giving a pain killer to relief me temporarily from the pain.

I, therefore, invite you all to discuss your wired experiences or incidents that you come across.

Happy reading,

Jaffar

HAPPY RAMADAN

Wishing you and your family a very happy RAMADAN!

RAMADAN Mubarak!

Jaffar

Fun in teaching 'Oracle Programming with PL/SQL'

I am currently teaching a 5 day Oracle training course 'Oracle 10g: Programming with PL/SQL' and its been pleasure refreshing the basic concepts once again.

There were 12 atendees on the day 1 for this class, all of them have ample of programming experience in VB and .NET technologies. Though, not many serious questions have been asked on day 1, but, I loved teaching the Programming concepts.

Today day was the first day and still 4 days to go.

Happy Reading,

Jaffar

100,000 HITS!!!

This morning my blog got 100,000 hits and its glad to see the magical number (100,000) despite the fact that my blog is not so much familiar like other Oracle Gurus blog.


Regards,

Jaffar

Now my articles appears on SSWUG.org web site - WITHOUT MY PERMISSION!!

If I remember correctly, sometime back couple of people complained that their articles appeared / published on SSWUG.ORG web site without their knowledge and permissions.

Today, I was shocked and surprised to see couple of my articles (which were written on blog) appeared on this site. I don't remember that they have ever taken my permissions to publish at their site.

Following is the link of few articles published on their web site:

Simulating 11g Snapshot Standby Database feature on Oracle 10g?
http://www.sswug.org/see/37089

Change behavior of GROUP BY clause in 10g
http://www.sswug.org/see/34897


I don't mind publishing my articles on their web site if they would have taken my permission.

Happy Reading,

Jaffar

Ad - Looking for some consulting work (specially in Saudi Arabia)

Currently I am looking for any Oracle database consultancy work or any training offer here in Saudi Arabia (even out side Saudi Arabia).

Following are my specialized ares for consultancy work:

Database installation/configuration
RAC Setup
Database Migration
Data Guard/Physical Standby Setup (Disaster Recovery)
Performance Tuning
RMAN Policies and Setup

Following are my expertise for Oracle Technology Training:

Advanced RMAN concepts - 1 day
Automatic Storage Management (ASM) - 1 day
Data Guard - 2 days
Database Concepts

Feel free to contact me on sjaffarhussain@gmail.com for further enquirers.

Happy Reading,


Jaffar

Wow! I am able to change my email ID on OTN forums.

It was a known fact that once you setup an email id on the OTN forums, it was not possible to change the email id again and many people were just surprised about this behaviour.

I don't know, how many of you aware that the changing of email id on OTN forums is possible now. I knew that many of you are least bothered about this, however, if anybody wants to change the email id, now you can do that easily and get rid off your legay email id.

How to change the profile information on OTN forums:

Once you log in on OTN forums, click 'Your Control Panel' option on right top corner which gives the facility to change the profile information, including your email id.

Happy Reading,

Jaffar

Celebrating 60th Indian Independence Day

Indian Independence Day

I wish all the Indians across the global a very happy independence day.

God bless all,

Happy Reading,


Jaffar

Oracle ACE Director - Now includes Database and Development categories

Well, sometime back, Tim had discussed about the new look and feel of Oracle ACE page on the OTN and also about Oracle ACE Director Program at his blog http://www.oracle-base.com/blog/2007/07/23/oracle-ace-director/. His question was about the Oracle ACE Directors category and point out that none of the existing ACE Directors are nor Database neither Development community. All from Fusion Middleware community.

This morning I have noticed an email from the Oracle ACE Program team stating that the Oracle ACE Director is now opened for Database and Developers community as well.

“Not only will Oracle Fusion Middleware Regional Directors now be known as Oracle ACE Directors, but we have also opened it up to include Oracle Database performance/management and application development experts.”

What this means to you as an Oracle ACE
The Oracle ACE program will continue to be managed as it has been. The new benefit is that you may be eligible for the Oracle ACE Director level. Oracle ACE Directors are well known experts in their field and have committed to participating in a dialog with Oracle and their local technical community.

Well, its good to know that Oracle is considering critics, whether it is an open letter to Larry about the AWR licencing or including database and development categories for Oracle ACE Director program and taking quick actions.

Happy Reading,


Jaffar

How to get a stack trace from a CORE file

We might have of come across of many situation where Oracle create CORE file, usually when the process has attempted perform something which Operating System does not like.

 

Since the CORE file is in binary format, it is difficult to read the contents of it and upon contacting Oracle Support, they might ask you to get the stack trace from a CORE file which will be helpful for their investigation.

 

I will shows you couple of steps using which you can produce the stack trace for a CORE file, this example is only for UNIX platforms.

 

By default, 'core' file will be generated under the directory mentioned with CORE_DUMP_DEST init parameter, or  in $ORACLE_HOME/dbs or in the directory from where you run the applicationf.

 

First step is to know which executable (program) cause core file genration.

                

               file core (make sure you are in the core file directory and execute the command).

 

Second step is to get the stack trace from the core file using one of the following command which supports to your OS:

 

                  dbx, xdb, gdb, dde, sdb, adb, debug, gdb

 

For me on HPUX Superdom, 'adb' command works.

 

Example:

                        script mystack

                        adb $ORACLE_HOME/bin/program core

                             $c

                             $q

                          exit

 

When the above commands are executed, stack trace of the core file will be in 'mystack' file and you can upload this file to the Oracle Support for their investigation.

 

 

Referecnes:

 

Note : 1812.1 Getting a Stack Trace from CORE file