As I heard it more than once in the last months, it is the right time to write a blog post about it. I still don't know, why it happens so often at the moment (except of a lack of reading the documentation), but I know, how it will (hopefully) work for you, if you run in this problem (without reading the documentation). The typical environment where this happen is a Red Hat Linux (mostly 8.x and 9.x), but it can happen on any Linux distribution. The customers of mine all tried to install a 19c 64-bit Client on a Red Hat Linux system as the installer stopped somewhere with this message: Prepari ..read more

The question is - why does someone want to do this? Well, the business case behind this is a shortage in the power supply of a company. They do have a small battery running for some minutes which is enough time to shut down all servers. After a couple of minutes, a diesel emergency generator should have took over the power supply until the public power supply is back in a stable condition.  If this status is reached, all servers should be restarted automatically by a software - in the right order! This means, first all infrastructure servers (like AD, exchange, DNS, ...) are started, next ..read more

We got the above error running an Oracle Standard Edition Database with a Standby DB protected by Dbvisit Standby, where we have added a special service for the application that registered the service at a remote listener.  The configuration a little bit more detailed: a database Prod with the db_unique_name Prod_DC1 (datacenter 1) and a standby database with the db_unique_name Prod_DC2 (datacenter 2) - version 19c the Prod database is a CDB with a pluggable database PDB1 an additional service was created called PDB1app on the PDB1 a Windows VM is used where an application server was run ..read more

Why revoking rights is sometimes more difficult than it looks at first sight! Tests with a Common-Backup user and the consequences. The first part of the Fun-with-Common-User series focused on "Why proper rights and privileges granting is really important!". In a nutshell, it was important to use the container=all clause when granting the SysBackup privilege, otherwise it only applies to the current container. This makes no difference when backing up via CDB$ROOT, but when restoring you can fail quite badly with it. So especially in the situation where the stress level is extremely high anyway ..read more

As so often, a customer was asking for the solution of an error they have seen at the database. After creating a new Oracle 19c database with a fresh PDB in it, they found the error "Sync PDB failed with ORA-40365 while performing 'alter user sys account lock password expire'" in the view PDB_PLUG_IN_VIOLATIONS. The Oracle Support Note "Sync PDB failed with ORA-40365 while performing 'alter user sys' (Doc ID 2777162.1)" told him that this error can happen when upgrading a database to a newer version. You know how it is. Things that go differently than they are described demand analysis and d ..read more

Oracle likes you to run Oracle databases on your servers. This is maybe the reason, why you can't uninstall Oracle database version 19.11 (and 19.12) anymore.  No, obviously, this isn't the reason, I personally do think it is a bug.  We hit this bug at a customers environment who was upgrading a test database from 19.11 to 19.12 on his Linux server by migrating it into a new 19.12 Oracle software home. After that he wanted to uninstall the existing 19.11 Oracle database home.  He went to /u01/app/oracle/product/19.11.0/dbhome_1/deinstall and started the deinstallation by running ..read more

 Hi, I recently have upgraded some ODA lite servers from the appliance software 18.8 to 19.6 and afterwards to 19.9 and, as usual, there are some findings I can and want to share with you, guys. Typically I do see ODA upgrades by other Oracle consultants running perfectly - or with some small little issues. Luckily, I can learn more if things do fail and one is doing a deep dive into the root causes. And again, we have learned a lot this time - and maybe it can help you preventing to learn things by yourself.  Let's start with findings for the upgrade from appliance software 18.8 to ..read more

After migrating a spatial / gis database from standard edition 12.2 to 19c we run into a strange error. The product (in our case it was "Luxdata", but it could be any GIS/Spatial application) stopped working with the new database and throwed a number of errors. The database itself was set up like any other Standard Edition database before (as 19.6) and upgraded to a newer version (in our case Oracle Database 19c Standard Edition 2 Release 19.0.0.0.0 - Production Version 19.10.0.0.0.). The database was also migrated to pdb, so it was plugged into as a new container. Operating system is Linux, b ..read more

These days we had an incident with a 19.6 Oracle database on MS Windows. We have cloned a PDB like we have done it a lot times before using a database link. I already have written some blog posts about that (and you can download the scripts there).  The "create pluggable database XXXY from XXXX@clone_source refresh mode manual;" succeded, but when we tried to open the pdb, it failed with ERROR at line 1: ORA-44303: service name exists ORA-44775: Pluggable database service cannot be created The crazy thing is, this is the first time we tried to clone the database to this fresh and empty CD ..read more

The easiest thing is to enable the In-Memory Base level. There are only two parameters, one needs to set at the spfile/pfile.  The first is to set the INMEMORY_FORCE parameter to "BASE_LEVEL". The default value is "default", which means, this is the $$$ option of the Enterprise Edition database. The BASE_LEVEL is cost free, but also only included with the Enterprise Edition license. The good thing - as soon as the database is started with the parameter set to BASE_LEVEL, all features, that are not allowed to use with this level are DISABLED! That means you can't use them and therefore yo ..read more