Author Archives: Bobby

About Bobby

I live in Chandler, Arizona with my wife and three daughters. I work for US Foods, the second largest food distribution company in the United States. I have worked in the Information Technology field since 1989. I have a passion for Oracle database performance tuning because I enjoy challenging technical problems that require an understanding of computer science. I enjoy communicating with people about my work.

Lessons from RMAN restore and recovery

I was on call last week and had to recover a production database to a particular point in time to recover some data that was lost.  I had to leave the production database intact but use a development server to … Continue reading

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Renaming files for RMAN restore

Here is a script I hacked together Tuesday night to figure out how to fit all my production data files and temp files on a development server for a RMAN restore of a production backup onto a new server: DECLARE … Continue reading

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Craig Shallahamer

I’ve been thinking about how to use my blog to describe different individuals who have helped me learn about Oracle performance tuning.  I was thinking about having a single blog entry or page describing several people but have decided that … Continue reading

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Comparing Characters and Numbers in Oracle

In Oracle when you compare a character and a number in a SQL WHERE clause Oracle converts the character value to a number rather than the other way around.  I built a simple example to help me understand how this … Continue reading

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Yet Another Bind Variable Type Mismatch (YABVTM)

Hopefully this isn’t too redundant.  Saw another performance issue today caused by a type mismatch between a bind variable and the column it was compared to in a SQL statement.  I saw this in some real code and then built … Continue reading

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How to figure out disk network latency using cached blocks

I was working on some disk performance problems and came across a simple way to test the latency or delay built into the networks that connect my database servers to their disk storage.  All I have to do is read … Continue reading

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Subscribing to Oak Table blogs feed

I’ve seen some very good information posted in this feed which combines blog postings from many different Oracle performance experts who are part of what is called the “Oak Table” http://www.oaktable.net/feed/blog-rss.xml (NO LONGER EXISTS) I’ve been using Internet Explorer to … Continue reading

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inode lock contention

In my forum discussion about free buffer waits I came across a term that I didn’t understand: “inode lock contention”.  I’m pretty sure I had seen this same term years ago on one of Steve Adams’ pages on IO.  But, … Continue reading

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Interesting post on clustering factor

I just read this post about a new patch that will allow you to affect the way the optimizer calculates clustering factor and hence how likely it is to choose a particular index for a query plan. http://richardfoote.wordpress.com/2013/05/08/important-clustering-factor-calculation-improvement-fix-you/ Pretty cool.  … Continue reading

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Oracle internals web site

This is a good web site with Oracle internals information: http://www.ixora.com.au/notes/ (NO LONGER EXISTS) I’ve benefited from this one for years. – Bobby

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