DBA Maestro - Helpful DBA tips

I was recently involved in DR testing involving two standby databases.  For the testing, I simply converted the 2 standby databases from physical standbys to snapshot standbys.   After the testing had ended from an application perspective, I started to convert the standby databases from snapshot standby back to physical standby.  In the process of doing so, I received the following ORA-0600 error. SQL > ALTER DATABASE CONVERT TO PHYSICAL STANDBY * ERROR at line 1: ORA-00600: internal error code, arguments: [krhahws_02], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [] Oh no!  Never fear, I thought...  I went to Oracle Support to research this issue and found the following resolution: 1. set disk_asynch_io=FALSE in the init.ora (this setting is just going to be temporary for repeating the "flashback database"). 2. shutdown then "startup mount" the database, to pick up the new parameter setting for disk_asynch_io 3. verify the disk_asynch_io

I recently ran across this issue with a client that I was working while they were performing DR testing with their physical standbys.  I converted their DR databases into snapshot standby mode (11g new feature).  Everything was going well until the following errors occurred.   Here were my findings. When trying to send an email using UTL_MAIL can result in the following error: ORA-29261: bad argument ORA-06512: at "SYS.UTL_TCP", line 17 ORA-06512: at "SYS.UTL_TCP", line 267 ORA-06512: at "SYS.UTL_SMTP", line 161 ORA-06512: at "SYS.UTL_SMTP", line 197 ORA-06512: at "SYS.UTL_MAIL", line 395 ORA-06512: at "SYS.UTL_MAIL", line 608 This error can result if SMTP_OUT_SERVER is not set as a database parameter or if the SUBJECT parameter in the UTL_MAIL call is omitted. SQL> sho parameter smtp_out_server NAME                                 TYPE        VALUE ------------------------------------ ---

One of the many valuable benefits of Oracle 12c Database Data Guard. Zero data loss protection and application continuity at any distance.  More to come...

To configure Oracle TDE (Transparent Data Encryption) wallet on a RAC, you need to do a few things to ensure that each database has its own wallet independent of each other.  Here are the steps that I completed in order to configure this: 1.  Set the environment variable ORACLE_UNQNAME on the OS in the .bash_profile. (In my case, it was Linux as this was 11.2.0.3 RAC on Linux).  This env variable should be set to the database unique name (not instance name). Please note: this needs to be configured in a way in each time the environment is sourced (. oraenv), the ORACLE_UNQNAME env variable will also be re-sourced. export ORACLE_UNQNAME=`$ORACLE_HOME/bin/srvctl config database |grep -w ${ORACLE_SID%?}` 2. Set the environment variable also via srvctl. srvctl setenv database -d RAC-HR -T "ORACLE_UNQNAME=RAC-HR" 3.  Create wallet directory. mkdir /u01/app/oracle/admin/${ORACLE_UNQNAME}/wallet 4. Configure sqlnet.ora as follows (example): ENCRYPT