How does one change Oracle's SYS password without having to login into the database? Is it possible?
The answer is, YES! All you need is a binary fiile editor and some knowledge of Oracle's internals.

This document is to be used only for testing purposes and should not be used in a production environment. The purpose is to show the audience how hackers can gain access to your system without knowing it - and how to prevent it.

This article provides several comparative methods to avoid primary key conflicts across multiple sites.

Information

Of iPods and Indexes

And I don't think I'm alone here. Working in I.T., there's no shortage of people who can peel off a half-hour litany on their new Blackberry/IPod/Notepad/Digital Watch within a day of purchase.

A handy alert log is invaluable for troubleshooting database problems. A RAC database has multiple alert logs.
I prefer to monitor them through a single table.

"A master failing to make an entry in the vessel's official
logbook as required by this part is liable to the Government for a
civil penalty of $200.

United States Code. Title 46 - Shipping. Subtitle II -Vessels and seamen, Part G - Merchant seamen protection and relief. Chapter 1113 -Official logbooks.

How meticulously do you keep your book log, Captain?
Luckily for us, our databases are as much ships as they are first mates. They are intelligent enough to keep their own records. And those logs are as important as vessel logs of the past, because the information carried by an early 21st century database could be easily worth more than 1450 tons of tea carried by Cutty Sark in 1870 en route from Shanghai to London.

As Oracle does all the mundane work, our role becomes more creative - to inspect and properly use the gathered information.

Today I have been experimenting with the new feature of continous mining with logmnr.

My setup

• Oracle Database 10g Enterprise Edition Release 10.2.0.1.0 - Production With the Partitioning, OLAP and Data Mining options
  
• ALTER DATABASE ADD SUPPLEMENTAL LOG DATA or we don't see the funny things in the redologfiles
  

SELECT *
FROM v$Logmnr_Logs;

During a test of some backup setup with rman I ran into problem running the restore / recover command.

If you've had to change a Unix password, you know that most systems won't let you use just anything as a password - your password must be a minimum length, and must not be too easy to guess or brute-force. Oracle doesn't come with this capability installed out of the box, but Oracle 8 and above let DBAs define a custom function to complexity-check user passwords. Oracle provides a default password verification function to do some basic checking, although DBAs need to know about it and install it manually.

One of the many new features that Oracle 10g introduced is the recyclebin. When enabled, this feature works a little bit like the familiar Windows recycle bin or Mac Trash. Dropped tables go "into" the recyclebin, and can be restored from the recyclebin. OraFAQ has already published an article covering the basics; in this article, I'll cover some of the more subtle aspects of the recyclebin.

Logical vs. Physical Standby databases
Submitted By Rama Subramoniam

A Quick Primer

Standby databases, in a nutshell, acts as a failover for our mission critical production databases. When production database crashes, applications can quickly switchover to the stand by databases.

Oracle provides two types of standby databases:

1. Physical Standby Database

Standby database is called “physical” if the physical structure of stand by exactly matches with stand by structure. Archived redo log transferred from primary database will be directly applied to the stand by database.