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!

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:

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:

After installing the Operating System (in my case usually Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Oracle Enterprise Linux) and configuring all necessary parameters, one has to install the Oracle software. It is usually a good idea to use a response file to do this.

There are a few reasons to use a response file:

There is always something that gets in the way. One problem I regularly stumble upon when installing a new Oracle 11g R2 installation is the following error when I try to start the database:

SQL> startup nomount;
ORA-00845: MEMORY_TARGET not supported on this system

So I keep this post mainly for my own reference when installing a new database on a Linux system.

This error comes up because you tried to use the Automatic Memory Management (AMM) feature of Oracle 11g R2. Well done, but it seems that your shared memory filesystem (shmfs) is not big enough. So let’s look at the steps necessary to enlarge your shared memory filesystem to avoid the error above.

In this article, I will describe the steps necessary to install Oracle SQL*Plus on a Debian host. I am using Debian 6.0.5 and will install the “Instant Client” package from Oracle (version 11.2.0.3). First, we will prepare the system for the installation, download the installation package, set all the necessary variables, start SQL*Plus and connect to an instance. So let’s get started…

Before we begin the package installation, we need to make sure the necessary prerequisite packages are installed. Oracle Instant Client requires the libaio package, so let’s install that:

In a script I was working on, the tar command always reported the following error when I tried to extract an archive:

Cannot change ownership to uid 1000 , gid 1000: Permission denied

But I was executing the script as root! The reason for this error to occur turned out to be relatively simple. Hint: It has to do with CIFS.

In a previous post I showed how to install the Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) client for Linux (wmic). In this post, I wish to show a few ways on how to query a Windows-based host using the WMI client.

Using WQL, we can query almost any aspect of the Operating System. Using the available WMI Classes (for example the WMI Win32 Classes), we can easily query performance indicators such as Memory Usage, Disk Usage or the status of a certain process.

With Debian 6, the Debian distribution made the jump to a dependency based boot sequence using LSB tags. So when you update your current Debian installation, you might encounter some problems when your scripts are not properly prepared. Such as the following message:

insserv: script vzreboot: service vzreboot already provided!

The full message reads like this: