Automatic Startup for Oracle on Linux

A few years back, I worked with a junior DBA who was asked to create a new instance on a brand new machine. He created the instance using DBCA and everything went smoothly – or so he thought. A few weeks later, after the system became production, a planned maintenance rebooted that Linux server, and once the machine came back up – the database and listener processes were nowhere to be found.

So that junior DBA, stressed because he thought the database was lost called me in the middle of the night. My first sleepy question for him was “did you even start the database?” and his panicked reply was “of course not – it should be done automatically, I used DBCA!”…

Well, one of the things new DBA’s find hard to realize is that after installing and creating a database (even if we’re using DBCA), it will not start automatically. I’ve seen too many new DBA’s being puzzled by the logic behind automatic startup of Oracle databases on Linux (and UNIX in general) than I care to admit so I decided to put it here for their reference…

In this article I will describe the building blocks for automatic startup, and in my next post I will show the Linux commands needed to put everything together.

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Fine-Grained Audit and ORA-28134 Error

I have been working on a customer database hardening. Database security isn’t really my cup of tea but it seems to be very popular these days. One of the requirement from the customer was the ability to monitor the database operation (which is very easy with the simple Oracle Audit features).

After we did that, the customer needed another auditing. He has sensitive data in one of the tables and he wanted some kind of auditing of the table access. This is one of the more central of his application so he asked the application should be excluded from the monitoring.

My first thought was to use the simple auditing for that but a short research showed that once an object is being monitored, there is no exclude feature to it. Another solution that came to mind is to use the ancient Fine-grained audit (DBMS_FGA). I know I’m coming a bit late to the party, and I know Oracle 12c has new and exciting ways of auditing but the customer was using Oracle 11.2.0.3 and is not planning on upgrading soon.

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Oracle Data Redaction

Here is a real treat: my good friend and colleague, Oracle ACE Director Oded Raz has agreed to publish couple of his high-end content about database security in my blog.
This time, Oded tells us about Data Redaction.
Enjoy!
Zohar

Sensitive data is everywhere in our organization’s systems. Today, organizations are required to protect sensitive data; these requirements come from regulations, laws and the necessity of the organization to protect its own data and customer’s information from falling to the wrong hands.

Data masking can dynamically or statically protect sensitive data by replacing it with fictitious data that looks realistic to prevent data loss in different use cases, understanding the difference between Static Data Masking – SDM and Dynamic Data Masking – DDM is crucial for implementing the right solution for each situation.
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Oracle Week 2015: Oracle Advanced PL/SQL Presentation

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As I said in my earlier post about Oracle Week 2015, this is one of the biggest database related educational (non-sale oriented) convention in Israel. None of the session is designed for selling any products (but consultant use it to showcase their abilities hoping to sell some professional services :)). Yesterday was my second daylong session in this convention this year . This time we talked about advanced features in PL/SQL and some new features of Oracle 12c.
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Oracle Week 2015: Oracle Database Advanced Querying Presentation

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Oracle week is one of the biggest Oracle related events in Israel which has going on yearly for the past 22 years (!).
It’s a 5 days long event with about 2000 participants in total over 80 different day-long seminars.
The seminars are around 8.5 hours (9am to 4:30pm) and are basically a day long course on various Oracle technologies which is nothing like the 45-90 minutes sessions I’m used to in the OUG sessions.
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Moving a 3TB Database Datafiles With Only 2 Minute Downtime

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In the last week, I had couple of my customer ask me the same question: how can we move our data files between disks with minimum downtime?

This is actually a really good question. When we want to move a database around (let’s say to a new storage or a new disk device) we will need to do it when the files are closed (offline or database down) in order to keep them consistent.  We can do it tablespace by tablespace or the entire database but at the end, it all depends on the size of the files that needs to be transferred. By the way, in Oracle 12c this problem is obsolete since there is an online move command

In the example I’m giving here, the customer had a 3 TB database with most of it in the same tablespace. The downtime allowed by the customer SLA to his customers was around 5-7 minutes so we obviously couldn’t take the database down or take the tablespaces offline. We needed another solution.

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