Oracle Database&EBS General
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ORA-01555 Snapshot Too Old — The Root Cause Analysis Your Team Isn’t Doing- Let us discuss this error again!
RA-01555 is one of the most mishandled errors in Oracle production support. The fix is almost always “increase undo retention” — and teams apply it, the error goes away for a while, and eventually it comes back. This cycle repeats because the team is treating the symptom. The error comes back because the root cause… Continue reading
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Oracle Database 23ai JSON Relational Duality — One Object, Two Faces
One of the most architecturally interesting features in Oracle 23ai is JSON Relational Duality Views. The concept is elegant: define a view that exposes your relational data as JSON documents, allow applications to read and write through that JSON interface, and have Oracle handle the translation to and from the underlying relational tables automatically. Same… Continue reading
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RMAN Backup Strategy in 2025 — Are You Actually Recovering or Just Backing Up?
There’s a critical distinction between running backups and having a recovery strategy. Many production databases have RMAN jobs that run nightly, complete with exit code 0, and the DBA who set them up three years ago is confident that the database is protected. Until the day they actually need to restore. I’ve seen this scenario… Continue reading
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OCI Security Best Practices for Oracle DBAs — What You’re Probably Missing
When Oracle DBAs move their databases to OCI, they typically focus on the database itself — configurations, performance, backup. The cloud security layer often gets less attention, usually because it’s managed by a separate infrastructure team. But as a DBA, you’re responsible for your database’s data. That responsibility doesn’t stop at the Oracle listener. Here’s… Continue reading
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Oracle Multitenant — Common PDB Management Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
Oracle’s Multitenant architecture — Container Database (CDB) with Pluggable Databases (PDBs) — has been around since 12c. It’s no longer new, yet I still encounter the same management mistakes in production environments year after year. Some are minor inefficiencies. Some have caused real outages. This post covers the patterns I see most frequently and what… Continue reading
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Oracle 19c End of Premier Support in 2024 — Are You Ready for 23ai?
Oracle Database 19c has been the workhorse of enterprise Oracle deployments for the last five years. It’s been the long-term release — the one everyone migrated to from 12c, the one that proved stable enough for even the most conservative production environments. But Premier Support for 19c ended in April 2024. Extended Support runs through… Continue reading
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OCI Exadata Cloud Service — What the Sales Deck Doesn’t Tell You
Exadata is Oracle’s flagship engineered system — purpose-built hardware and software, Smart Scans offloading query processing to storage cells, Hybrid Columnar Compression reducing storage requirements dramatically, InfiniBand connecting database and storage nodes at extremely low latency. On paper, it’s the most powerful Oracle Database platform available. On OCI, it’s available as a fully managed cloud… Continue reading
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Oracle Data Guard in 2025 — Beyond the Basics, What Senior DBAs Miss
Data Guard is one of Oracle’s most mature technologies. Most DBAs know how to set it up. The documentation is thorough, the tooling in OCI is excellent, and for straightforward configurations it works reliably. But in eight years of managing Data Guard environments across dozens of customers, I’ve found that the difference between a Data… Continue reading
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Oracle 23ai Vector Search — Rethinking How We Query Data
For decades, Oracle DBAs have lived in a world of exact matches. You search for what you know. WHERE name = ‘John’. WHERE status = ‘ACTIVE’. The database finds what you ask for precisely, and that’s the contract. But AI-driven applications have fundamentally broken this contract — they don’t search for exact values, they search… Continue reading
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Oracle RAC Troubleshooting — The Inter-Node Issues That Fool You?
RAC troubleshooting is different from single-instance troubleshooting in ways that are non-obvious until you’ve been through a few incidents. The most frustrating RAC problems are those where everything looks healthy on each individual node, but the cluster as a whole is behaving badly. This post focuses specifically on the inter-node and cluster-layer problems that don’t… Continue reading
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