Watch Your FRA!

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.

Donuts and Data Backups

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.

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

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 […]

Time to Validate Your Database Backup

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 […]

Architecting to Maximize Recovery Options in Oracle

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 […]

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

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.

Privileges missing after Oracle full import

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. Privileges missing after Oracle full import. There are multiple ways to migrate a database from one version to another. One of the oldest and easiest ways is to […]

Critical Oracle Security and Stability Flaw Discovered

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 […]

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