Monthly Archives: August 2016

#OOW16, San Francisco


This year, 2016, is turning out to be an amazing year again, with #OOW16 being once again on of the apices!

Looking back

After the discovery of the Oracle community in 2012, as a result of a very first trip to downtown San Francisco in 2010 for #OOW10, an amazing chain of events was set in motion. This very first introduction in the Oracle World was as ‘a mere participant’ in this awe-inspring, large than life event.

Over these past few years I have met so many people, made so many new friends around the globe… This all literally changed my work, my life; basically everything changed.

After visiting Oracle Open World for the first time, I had the opportunity to work with Arjen Visser and the team of Dbvisit on building a strong brand for this amazing company in Europe. This also brought me back to San Francisco in 2014.
And boy, things have changed!
Not only was it a coming back, it was a fest of friendship, with so many people to meet, either brand new or in a chance to catchup once again. It was also the first time I had the opportunity to participate & share. With #RepAttack I had the opportunity to share knowledge about logical replication and the many benefits it holds for making the most out of your data.
Did I mention the utterly amazing fact of getting not only accepted by the Oracle Community, but also recognized, together with my dear friend from Belgium, Mr. Philippe Fierens, as a genuine Oracle ACE?

A new step

This edition of Oracle Open World, OOW16, again adds a brand new dimension to the visit to San Francisco!
Not only will it be as the Director Operations of Portrix Systems, supporting the Annual Swim in the bay event in cooperation with Oraclenerd Chet Justice, it will be as a selected speaker too. An opportunity I would have never anticipated to be possible.

Speaking-OOWWhen Your Database Server Crashes

I will be discussing the various aspects around the protection of data and how you can justify various investments to accomplish this.

Sunday, Sep 18, 10:30 a.m. – 11:15 a.m. | Moscone South—306

I cannot start tp imagine what the impact of this years trip shall be, I do know that I am looking forward to meeting many of you again. This year too, the OTN Lounge will be the base camp for the travels through the Open World landscape. Don’t hesitate to stop by and say hi!!

See you in San Francisco for #OOW16


SYSAUX LOB segment for auditing bug not released in Standard Edition

Last week we were struck by an issue, which turned out to be a bite from a bug!
SYSAUX table-space had quickly filled up to the “my data-file is full”-limit, which in the end was fixed by adding a data-file.

Strange thing though, that for a very small footprint database, we now have a very big SYSAUX table-space.

Some investigation brought me to the Unified Auditing being standard active in database 12c (you can read up on that background with my friend Ann Sjökvist here).
We are faced though with a different (and possibly a little more obscure) Bug 20077418 – RECLAIMING THE SECUREFILE LOB SEGEMENT IN 12.1 Standard Edition.
What this bug boils down to is the following:
There is a lot of audit data recorded by default, the ORA_SECURECONFIG profile is running out of the box. I haven’t taken the time to figure exactly out what is written, where and how, but I know it involves a LOB segment (SYS_LOB0000091833C00014$ by SYSAUD) which is, in our case in comparison to the total database size, HUGHE!! The management of this audit data, usually driven by DBMS_AUDIT_MGMT, has absolutely no effect on this segment (at least not on shrinking it).

Searching for the mentioned bug you just find to EE bugs (18109788 & 22272580) but they at least they give _some_ clues… The actual bug is undisclosed and in status 11 (being worked on).
In the end it means that auditing is fine, even in SE, but, for the moment, restrain yourself… The data you gather cannot be managed (yet). And for the rest:

If
select policy_name
from audit_unified_enabled_policies
;

yields any results, consider switching this auditing off (eg.SQL> noaudit policy ORA_SECURECONFIG;)

Hope this helps…