Manually Generating AWR Report

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One of my customers asked me to check performance on his production database server but could not allow any access to the server itself. He asked if I could generate the AWR reports from his client machine and since it’s not really trivial (or hard) I created this script.

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Presentations-Presentations-Presentations

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For the last few months I’ve been presenting a lot in various venues. I presented in Oracle Open World, HROUG conference in Croatia, DOAG in Germany, Oracle Week in Israel (3 day long presentations!), MySQL User Group in Israel and in some more private conferences and private events. I was also accepted to IOUG collaborate in Las Vegas in April and I’m planning to give some Webinars soon.

I believe that educating and sharing is pretty important, and since most of my presentations are in English (the slides, but sometimes also the session itself) – I usually keep the habit of uploading it to my SlideShare for people to enjoy it.

I was talking to a customer-friend yesterday, and he told me that he’s been reading my blog for a very long time, but he’s kind of sad he can’t see all my decks there. So, I’m taking his advise and for the next few days, I’ll post all of my presentations here – a post for each of the presentations and will add the demo scripts, wherever applicable.

Feel free to ask questions and make requests – I’d love to hear you opinion and suggestions!

All of the presentation are available for download from Slideshare.
My SlideShare link: http://www.slideshare.net/zohare.

Zohar

I have seen the future and it is glorious: SQLcl the next generation of SQL*Plus

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The first time I started using commercial databases was in 1998, in my basic programming course. The course was split into segments and at the first databases lesson, if my memory serves me right, the instructor began the class with the words: “Today we will learn about databases – first, let’s connect to the database using SQLPlus”.

This amazing tool, which almost everyone who works with Oracle databases knows, is one of the simplest yet powerful command line interface for working with the database. SQLPlus has been with us for many, many years – I used to use it back when I was using Oracle 7 and that says a lot. Since this is one of the most convenient tools to understand, and while it’s not very user friendly it does work great with scripts and other automatic procedures. SQLPlus have great integration with the cluster tools – for example, if we’re using it to stop an instance (regular shutdown), the grid infrastructure is aware the shutdown was on purpose, and it will not try to start up the instance node again. It even has other Oracle tools provide its users and its capabilities often (AWR reports for example).

The fact that SQLPlus has been around for so many years could have been considered a disadvantage because we would think it might not have changed over the years but this is not the case. The tools did change over the years – features and other capabilities were added and that allows us to do cool stuff like output our result to HTML format or interact with our scripts. Unfortunately that’s pretty much everything and the basics of the tool did not change.

I Recently became aware of a new tool from Oracle which will ultimately replace SQLPlus. It’s name is SQLcl and I was really impressed.

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Oracle ANSI SQL and the WITH syntax

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SQL language has been around for so long, that some people feel it never changes. This is obviously not true – SQL is a dynamic language that changes all the time: some changes come from the vendors themselves but often this is the result of the standard changing and Oracle adopting the new standard in a later version.

Let’s start with a short history lesson. As we all know, SQL is not a unique language for Oracle. It’s a common language with standards set by ANSI. The first version of the language standardization was presented back in 1986 with the issuance of SQL86. In 1992, a revised version of the language came out (SQL-92). When Oracle tried to implement this standard at full, they noticed that some of the things there are really different from how Oracle did things so it adopted only a part of the standard in Oracle RDBMS 8 (and 8i).
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