Simon Krenger

As many of my colleagues, I have been eager to try out the new Pluggable Database (PDB) feature of the newly released Oracle 12c Database. I installed the software, created the database using my default CREATE DATABASE statement I have lying around and then tried to create a pluggable database by issuing the following command:

SQL> create pluggable database kdb121p1 admin user simon identified by tiger file_name_convert = ('/pdbseed/','/kdb121p1/');
create pluggable database kdb121p1 admin user simon identified by tiger file_name_convert = ('/pdbseed/','/kdb121p1/')
                          *
ERROR at line 1:
ORA-65090: operation only allowed in a container database

It turns out a database explicitly needs to be created as a Container Database (CBD) in order to be able to create new PDBs!

During a silent Oracle 12c Release 1 database installation on a newly set up Oracle Enterprise Linux box, I encountered the following error when performing the installation:

[oracle@pandora database]$ ./runInstaller -silent -responseFile /home/oracle/database/response/kdb.rsp 
Starting Oracle Universal Installer...

Checking Temp space: must be greater than 500 MB.   Actual 45136 MB    Passed
Checking swap space: must be greater than 150 MB.   Actual 4031 MB    Passed
Preparing to launch Oracle Universal Installer from /tmp/OraInstall2013-06-27_12-11-01AM. Please wait ...
[oracle@pandora database]$ [FATAL] PRVF-0002 : Could not retrieve local nodename
A log of this session is currently saved as: [..]

But when I checked the hostname, everything seems to be just fine, I even get the FQDN:

Alright, it seems that as of yesterday evening, Oracle 12c Release 1 is available for download for the Linux x86-64 platform!

Now excuse me, I’m off to test out the new release…

So I get many visits for my post on Oracle Full Datapump Export Batch, so here is the same export script for UNIX systems.

Before using this script, please read my advice:

Ok, so here is a problem that a developer brought up. I thought that this problem is quite interesting and also a bit confusing. Obviously, according to Oracle, this is not a bug – it’s a feature!

When issuing a CREATE MATERIALIZED VIEW statement for a different schema (as DBA), one might encounter the following error:

dba@KDB01:SQL> CREATE MATERIALIZED VIEW simon.simon_mv AS SELECT * FROM dual;
CREATE MATERIALIZED VIEW simon.simon_mv AS SELECT * FROM dual
                                                         *
ERROR at line 1:
ORA-01031: insufficient privileges

For our setup let’s assume we have two users:

When you install the InstantClient binaries, you often want to use your existing TNSNAMES.ORA file containing all your databases. So how do you specify the location of your TNSNAMES.ORA file?

The Oracle website has the answer:

Whenever one has to move large amounts of data from one database to another, storage space might become an issue. An option to circumvent this problem is to use a database link with Oracle Datapump to move the data from one database to another. This way, the data is exported across the network and imported directly into the target database.

In this post, I will provide an example on how to move data via a Oracle Datapump and a database link. This post is based on the excellent entry in Oracle FAQ and basically comments all the steps mentioned in the article.

So here is another post I keep mainly for my own reference, since I regularly need to gather new schema statistics. The information here is based on the Oracle documentation for DBMS_STATS, where all the information is available.

So if you want to COMPUTE the statistics (which means to actually consider every row and not just estimate the statistics), use the following syntax:

So here is another post I keep for my own reference, since I keep forgetting about precision and scale, primarily which is which.

The Oracle Concepts guide states that the NUMBER datatype stores fixed and floating-point numbers. A column with the NUMBER datatype can be defined as follows:

So this happens when you try to add a privilege to an ACL that does not exist:

SQL> EXEC DBMS_NETWORK_ACL_ADMIN.ADD_PRIVILEGE ('myacl.xml', 'SIMON', true, 'connect');
BEGIN DBMS_NETWORK_ACL_ADMIN.ADD_PRIVILEGE ('myacl.xml', 'SIMON', true, 'connect'); END;

ERROR at line 1:
ORA-31001: Invalid resource handle or path name "/sys/acls/myacl.xml"
ORA-06512: at "SYS.DBMS_NETWORK_ACL_ADMIN", line 384
ORA-06512: at line 1

Oracle Database 11g introduced fine-grained access control to external network services using Access Control Lists (ACLs). This basically allows you to take control over which users access which network resources, regardless of package grants.