Virtualizing the RMAN Catalog

The Oracle Recovery Catalog(henceforth, the catalog) is used by Oracle’s RMAN backup utility to store backup metadata and is included by Oracle as best practice for backup and recovery.  In this article, I will discuss about the common dilemma of maintaining the catalog and the proposition of virtualizing it.

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Developing an API with Oracle PL/SQL

Developing an API with PL/SQL can be a fun experience.  At Blizzard, I have this project to decentralize control of a database’s privilege management, so that each team’s designated “manager” will use this API to self service the granting and revoking of access to the data that they own.  This database is one where different…

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Oracle Database Standard Edition(SE): PROs and CONs

[Starting December 2015, SE and SE1 have been replaced by SE2 and have disappeared from Oracle’s Technology Price List.] With the advent of open source relational database platforms, many organizations must be looking at Oracle Enterprise Edition(EE) pricing and calling it outrageous.  Not to mention the drying up of budgets in this economy.  You can’t…

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Oracle’s 32 Character Limit in Generating Histograms

Upon Oracle’s release of 11g and noticeably with 11g Release 2, Oracle’s functionality is pretty rock solid.  What I considered the most obvious weaknesses of the Oracle database engine are now resolved.  Namely, Adaptive Cursor Sharing resolves the problem of bind peeking, and SQL Plan Management resolves plan stability issues.  But one limitation still remaining…

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