Database Blog


  • Watch Your FRA!

    Jul 10, 2020

    Reading Time: 3 minutes Now the FRA may sound like a magical area that should never run into storage-related issues—but that could not be farther from the truth.

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  • Oracle Active Data Guard Replication Error with Cisco Firewall: Root Cause and Workaround

    Apr 22, 2020

    Reading Time: 2 minutes One of our customers had issues over the past several months with Oracle Active Data Guard replication to a standby server. The database on the standby server would intermittently fall out of sync with the database on the primary server, and log files were not consistently shipping to the standby server.

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  • Test Your Disaster Recovery Strategies before Disaster Strikes

    Mar 20, 2020

    Reading Time: 2 minutes As the old saying goes, “It’s better to be safe than sorry,” and testing your disaster recovery data is essential to keeping you and your data safe!

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  • Donuts and Data Backups

    Oct 3, 2019

    Reading Time: 2 minutes This is the story of a data loss event that changed my young life and put my feet on the path of becoming a DBA.

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  • Why Your Database Management Team Should Regularly Double-Check Your Backups

    Sep 30, 2019

    Reading Time: 3 minutes I’ve blogged before about the importance of checking database backups. Over 90% of new clients that we assess have backups that are either incomplete or totally unusable (true statistic!). The following story of a backup failure that happened recently—and the successful double-check by our DBA Scott)—provides a noteworthy example of how bad backups can happen even when you think your process is working. Recently we had a client that was looking to reduce storage costs…..

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  • Time to Validate Your Database Backup

    Jul 8, 2016

    Reading Time: 2 minutes Another new client, Another bad backup I originally wrote this post in July but I am updating it today because it is so important.  Yesterday we did an initial Oracle Database Health Check for another new client and found yet again that their backups are useless. This time the client was taking backups regularly, but was not preparing the database first and was just copying the database files. Unfortunately this renders the backup useless. Here…..

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  • Architecting to Maximize Recovery Options in Oracle

    Apr 21, 2016

    Reading Time: 2 minutes I recently received a frantic call from a client that believed they have been hacked and had to quickly recover data. They said that data belonging to two or more of their customers had been lost. Our customer functions essentially as an application service provider (ASP). Their customers’ data is in an Oracle database that our client manages. Our client organizes this database such that each of its customers’ applications is served by a separate…..

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  • Do You Know If Your Data Backup and Recovery Strategy Is Working… Or Not?

    Feb 1, 2016

    Reading Time: 2 minutes To mitigate the business impacts of downtime and data loss, every Oracle database must be recoverable. This means every Oracle shop needs a strong backup and recovery strategy—one that takes into account the probabilities of hardware, software, network or procedural failure(s) in your current environment.

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  • Privileges missing after Oracle full import

    Mar 12, 2014

    Reading Time: 2 minutes While performing a migration from Oracle 10g to Oracle 11g (on new hardware) recently,  we encountered a familiar frustration that I am surprised is not resolved yet.  There are multiple ways to migrate a database from one version to another. One of the oldest and easiest ways is to create your database in the target location and then use data pump (formerly Export and Import) to bring the data out of the source database and…..

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  • Critical Oracle Security and Stability Flaw Discovered

    Jun 17, 2013

    Reading Time: < 1 minute Infoworld today announced that they have been researching a flaw in oracle that can result in the inability to restore your database. Large oracle shops with interconnected databases are most at risk. The problem revolves around oracle’s SCN (system change number). The number has a limit that if exceeded, can render a database unusable, even after restoring the database. Under normal circumstances, this limit would never be reached. However, there are two ways that the…..

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