Posts

Fixing PRVF-0002 : Could not retrieve local nodename

Here is a common question I get from junior DBAs (and operating system who tries to help by installing the Oracle Home themselves). The question sometimes sounds like this: “After we installed the new database server and changed its hostname, we try to install the Oracle Home using the runInstaller but hitting the following error: PRVF-0002: Could not retrieve local nodename. How do we resolve it?”.

In terms of looks, the error message looks something like this (this is from Oracle 11g, but it also happens in other versions as well):
prvf-0002

Indeed, a problem – but what can it be?
Read more →

/1 Comment/by /Estimated Reading Time: 2 Minutes

Fixing Dataguard Wrong File Location Problem

When we add a new datafile to the primary environment of a dataguard setup, we need to add the datafile to the standby environment as well if we want the manged recover to continue working. We can do that manually if we want – but fortunately for us Oracle comes with a built in feature for automatically creating the file in the standby as well. All we need to do to set it up is to set the parameter “standby_file_management” to AUTO and create a conversion map for the files location using DB_FILE_NAME_CONVERT parameter.

All of this should be running well, until some Junior DBA (hey D., you know I’m talking about you.. 🙂 ) decides to create a new datafile in the non-default location.
Once that happens, the dataguard is unable to create the new datafile and the managed recovery will stop working.

This is a short guide I created years ago for how to identify and solve the problem.

Read more →

/1 Comment/by /Estimated Reading Time: 3 Minutes

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.

Read more →

/0 Comments/by /Estimated Reading Time: 4 Minutes

Installing Oracle 12.1.0.2 – Part 2: Creating an Instance

In the earlier post we installed the Oracle version 12.1.0.2 (software only) but still didn’t create a database instance. In this post we will go over an installation procedure of a basic CDB database instance. This will be the first instance on that database server (and I’ll explain later why this is important).

Read more →

/6 Comments/by /Estimated Reading Time: 7 Minutes

Installing Oracle 12.1.0.2 – Part 1

It’s been a few months since 12.1.0.2 came out. Here is a basic guide for installing Oracle 12c (12.1.0.2).
This is a two-part post – in the first part we will install the software and in the next part we’ll go over creating the new database instance.

Read more →

/1 Comment/by /Estimated Reading Time: 4 Minutes