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Blogs
Toad and Database Commentaries |
Toad World blogs are a mix of insightful how-tos from Quest experts as well as their commentary on experiences with new database technologies. Have some views of your own to share? Post your comments! Note: Comments are restricted to registered Toad World users.
 Do you have a topic that you'd like discussed? We'd love to hear from you. Send us your idea for a blog topic.
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MikeA |
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Wednesday, October 18, 2006 4:54 PM |
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Providing tips, techniques and insight into management and tuning issues affecting your database systems. |
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Why Can’t Johnny Use BMF? |
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MikeA
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Tuesday, April 29, 2008 8:05 AM
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As many of you are aware Quest provides a tool known as Benchmark Factory, BMF for short. BMF is a load generation tool that also allows you to install small databases for testing. The tools out of the box can provide TPC-B, TPC-D, TPC-H, AS3AP and many other standard benchmarks as well as allowing goal and scalability tests from your own code, either manually entered or scanned from text or, in the case of Ora ...
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Landmines |
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MikeA
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Wednesday, April 23, 2008 6:20 AM
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Introduction
At the peak there were an estimated 65 million landmines planted in killing fields world wide. In the 1990’s it was estimated that while 2.5 million landmines were being deployed per year only 80,000 were being removed. According to current estimates this may have turne ...
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Goal! Success through Storage |
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MikeA
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Thursday, April 03, 2008 7:29 AM
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On March 26, 2008 I gave a webcast on physical tuning named “Goal! Success through Storage.” Due to some delays starting it overran a bit so I wasn’t able to answer questions afterward as I usually do. So, here are the answers to all the questions that weren’t handled by Darren Mallet (who handles the questions online when I am webcasting, thanks Darren!)
< ...
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An Analysis of Database Issues |
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MikeA
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Friday, March 21, 2008 9:58 AM
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In my ten plus years as a database consultant before joining Quest Software I had the opportunity to visit hundreds of client sites. At client sites I performed analysis of their environments to help them improve the performance of their database systems. In this blog I want to talk about the top ten performance-related issues that I saw over and over again.
The following table lists them in order of occurrence: ...
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First, don’t Panic! |
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MikeA
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Tuesday, February 12, 2008 9:28 AM
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I was working the other day to rebuild my Linux 32 bit cluster in preparation for doing some tests between OEM and PAO for some internal training. I planned to use raw for my cluster configuration and voting files for CRS and ASM for the rest of the shared files. The 32 bit cluster had been up and operating fine and I had completed the testing I was doing so I retasked the drives to build a 64 bit cluster. I dr ...
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Q&A from Webcast on using Indexes to Boost Performance |
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MikeA
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Thursday, January 24, 2008 2:20 PM
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I recently gave a webcast about using indexes to boost your application performance, of course at the end of the webcast we took questions, unfortunately I wasn’t able to anser all of the questions so I pulled the ones I felt were most important and decided to answer them here in my blog. For the full webcast see :
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Questions from the Instant Replay Webcast |
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MikeA
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Wednesday, January 16, 2008 10:56 AM
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Well, here I sit at 30,000 feet over the Atlantic heading for London and then on to Abu Dhabi. It seems like just yesterday I was doing a webcast for the Performance Allstars series on Instant Replay and the use of history to find problems, oh wait, that was yesterday!
During the webcast many excellent questions where asked concerning historical data c ...
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Further Travels in Betaland |
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MikeA
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Friday, September 28, 2007 3:13 PM
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Well, I decided that Linuxtown wasn’t going anywhere very fast and with the all the SRs I was leaving in my wake I soon would not be welcome by the locals so I decided I would take it on the lamb over to Windowsville for a while. Besides it was looking like the local disk array was going to pin a power supply failure on me.& ...
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Messing With 11g 32bit RAC |
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MikeA
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Wednesday, September 05, 2007 10:25 AM
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Well, the 32 bit 11g beta is officially over with the GA of the 11g 32 bit release on the Oracle download site. I replaced my beta copy with the production release and started playing about 2 weeks ago. I tho ...
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The Joys of Beta Testing |
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MikeA
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Monday, July 30, 2007 9:48 AM
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I am participating in the Oracle11g beta. The next time I tell you I am going to do a beta please lock me up until the fit passes. I have subjected myself to this abuse since Oracle8, usually tied with writing or updating a book. Maybe I am getting smarter as I get older as I am not (currently) involved in a book project although there may be one or two mor ...
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Can You Take a Hint? |
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MikeA
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Thursday, June 14, 2007 10:14 AM
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Hints in Oracle have been around since version 8. Hints are like compiler directives that tell Oracle what path to take when optimizing a SQL statement (generally speaking.) However, Oracle will ignore the hint if it can’t do it or it is formatted poorly.
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The Cost of Poor Database Design |
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MikeA
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Wednesday, May 30, 2007 9:32 AM
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I’ve been searching for a definitive answer to the question: “What is the cost of poor database design?” No doubt you have all seen the cost/benefit graphs for fixing application problems and the pyramid showing how up to 90 percent of performance issues in a running database are SQL and ind ...
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Using Cross-Instance Parallel Query |
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MikeA
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Friday, May 04, 2007 11:23 AM
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With the use of RAC on the rise it is time to talk about the use of a feature very under-utilized in Oracle. This feature I refer to is cross-instance parallel query. Many times on site visits I see people using single-instance parallel query, but no one whose system I reviewed has used cross-instance parallel. Some weren’t aware it was available ...
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Sizing of Oracle10g Indexes |
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MikeA
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Wednesday, April 04, 2007 9:15 AM
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In my last blog entry we looked at sizing tables in 10g, of course the other side of that coin is the sizing of indexes. As with tables the Oracle8 manuals had an explanation of how to size indexes, but manuals since then have been strangely silent on the subject. In this blog I will address the sizing of normal, b-tree ...
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Sizing Tables in Oracle |
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MikeA
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Friday, March 16, 2007 9:22 AM
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On one of my first Oracle consulting assignments I had to come up with the sizing estimates for tables for a data warehouse for a telecommunications company in California. At that time, (1994) there were few products that provided sizing al ...
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How is Oracle Like Scuba Diving? |
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MikeA
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Wednesday, February 21, 2007 4:08 PM
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One of my favorite things to do (when I am not tuning and managing Oracle databases) is to don a scuba tank, mask, and exposure suit and slip beneath the waters surface. For a long time I wondered how to reconcile these two interests and then it came to me.
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Tuning UNDO Segments |
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MikeA
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Monday, January 29, 2007 9:03 PM
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Of the many databases I have examined on releases 9i and 10g, most are using the automatic undo management feature and on the whole it does a pretty good job of managing the undo segments (for you other old timers, rollback segments).
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Hidden Costs |
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MikeA
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Monday, January 08, 2007 9:40 AM
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Caveat Emptor (Buyer beware) has been around since, well, since time began. Whether barter or cash, when doing a deal the buyer has to careful, this is especially true in the complex area of software licensing.
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Tailoring Session Parameters |
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MikeA
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Tuesday, December 26, 2006 5:03 PM
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Many times I am asked how to tailor the initialization parameters for a specific process or user. Essentially the easiest way to set custom initialization parameters for a particular session is to use the ALTER SESSION SET command in a logon trigger keyed to a specific schema or schemas. For example, say we had an application where we wanted to set ...
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Removing 10g Grid Control |
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MikeA
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Thursday, December 14, 2006 12:36 PM
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I recently went on a very nice vacation to Curacao. Before I went on vacation the Oracle 10g Grid Control (10.2.0.2) I had installed on my Laptop for monitoring my home office systems was working. I took my laptop with me to allow offload of pictures from my cameras and to track email while I was away. When I returned home and hooked my laptop back up to my home network Grid Control wouldn’t start and of course ...
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Watching Your ASMM in Oracle10g |
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MikeA
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Monday, November 27, 2006 8:44 AM
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Oracle’s Oracle10g requires more memory than was ever required before. If you utilize any of the new features such as automatic storage management (ASM) and automatic shared memory management (ASMM) then you really need to pay attention to what memory is doing in 10g.
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The Brave New World of Oracle Management |
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MikeA
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Wednesday, November 15, 2006 3:50 PM
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I remember reading “Brave New World” when I was in high school, we needn’t mention the year. I was fascinated by the system described in the book that seemed so logical on the surface but needed so many props underneath to keep it going. It reminds me at times of some of the Oracle management that goes on these days. ...
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Why Can’t Johnny Tune? |
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MikeA
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Wednesday, November 08, 2006 1:46 PM
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I often see DBAs and developers who don’t know the first thing about tuning SQL. They ask “Why do I need to know that, can’t Oracle tune itself?” The truth of the matter is that Oracle is, for the most part, able to do a pretty decent job of tuning itself if it is given enough information and the queries or tuning tas ...
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Are DBA’s Obsolete? |
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MikeA
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Wednesday, November 01, 2006 3:30 PM
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With each new release of a database, be it Oracle or one of their competitors, we hear the cry that this release will make DBAs as we know them obsolete. We hear again and again how this automated feature set or that new GUI interface will automate the DBA job. So far, all of these claims of DBA obsolescence have been for naught, to mis-quote Samual Clements “The reports of the DBAs death are greatly ex ...
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Changes in SQL Tuning |
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MikeA
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Wednesday, October 18, 2006 4:54 PM
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When I started working with Oracle in 1990 there weren’t many SQL tuning tools available. At most you had the Oracle supplied tools which allowed you to capture an explain plan and minimal tracing. Most SQL tuning consisted of either encouragin ...
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