With release 11g Oracle made many feature enhancements to the database and some of them are now down-ported into the soon-to-be-released patchset 10.2.0.4. One new feature that I just found by ‘accident’ is the easy… Read More » Oracle Patchset 10.2.0.4 – neat DBMS_STATS enhancement

In my mini-series " Mind the gap" I will try to shed some light on where the little or big differences between MaxDB and Oracle databases are and what to keep in mind when working with them. Read More » ‘Mind the gap…’ (#3 – Backup/Restore – Part 1)

Today a customer asked about how to monitor recovery activity on MaxDB. The typical questions here are: " Is it still running?" and " How long will it take?" While the last question cannot be answered easily (and most… Read More » Questions to SAP Support: “Is my MaxDB recovery still running?”

Today I got a support message to work on that I believe is of rather broad interest. Therefore, I decided to “forward” it to the SDN so that all community members can benefit from it. Read More » Questions to SAP Support: Is ODBC access to the database a good idea?

Every day I’m faced with colleagues, customers, partners or SDN members asking questions about MaxDB. How can we set up an external backup tool? Why is my index not taken by the optimizer? Can I use MaxDB as a productive… Read More » What you don’t know about MaxDB…

When faced with error messages like ORA-1578 Oracle database users just got the task to handle a database block corruption. I’ve already written about this topic before and today I’d like to share some tips and tricks to… Read More » Some hints to make handling of oracle datablock corruptions more efficient

While editing content for MaxDB Wiki here in SDN I wondered how I might return to an older version of the page. Unlike e.g. MediaWiki http://www.mediawiki.org/ the WIKI engine behind Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.org)… Read More » SDN Wiki Features – what features?

I have written some lines about database corruption and the ways to handle them in the past. The bottom line of everything I wrote (including support notes, SDN blogs, and replies in customer messages) has always been: Read More » Not my fault – whose then?

Primary key constraints in Oracle are enforced by using an index. The index does not need to be a unique index, but it has to be possible for the database to look into it and find out if a given key is already present or… Read More » How to take care of index corruptions in primary key indexes.

When I first got in contact to the possibility to bring back a database to the state it had, when a backup was taken I was not too much impressed. Read More » Point-in-time-recovery considered harmful