If you've ever gotten a phone call from an annoyed user whose transaction just won't go through, or from a developer who can't understand why her application sessions are blocking each other, you know how useful it can be to identify not just whose lock is doing the blocking, but what object is locked. Even better, you can identify the exact row that a session is waiting to lock.

External Tables let you query data in a flat file as though the file were an Oracle table. In 9i, only read operations were permitted; in 10g, you can also write out data to an external table, although you can't write to an existing table.

10gR1 revamped Oracle clustered database management and features. 10gR2 builds on this success with a long list of improvements and enhancements. Oracle has streamlined the installation process and provided more filesystem options, made some performance and monitoring improvements, and improved manageability with a half-dozen administration enhancements. This article will take a look at the major changes.

This article shows how materialized views can be analyzed and optimized to ensure they can be FAST REFRESHed. As tools, the DBMS_MVIEW.explain_mview procedure and the MV_CAPABILITIES_TABLE are used. In this particular case, refresh time was reduced from more than 14 hours to less than 2!

If there is a task in Oracle for which the wheel has been reinvented many times, it is that of generating database object DDL. There are numerous scripts floating in different forums doing the same thing. Some of them work great, while others work only until a specific version. Sometimes the DBAs prefer to create the scripts themselves. Apart from the testing overhead, these scripts require substantial insight into the data dictionary. As new versions of the database are released, the scripts need to be modified to fit the new requirements.

Starting from Oracle 9i Release 1, the DBMS_METADATA package has put an official end to all such scripting effort. This article provides a tour of the reverse engineering features of the above package, with a focus on generating the creation DDL of existing database objects. The article also has a section covering the issue of finding object dependencies.

Just about every DBA has had to deal with ora-1000 errors, "Maximum open cursors exceeded." This article will discuss initialization parameters that affect open cursors, the difference between open and cached cursors, closing cursors, and monitoring open and cached cursors.

Last month we talked about basic Oracle security, and set out principles for a top notch secure system. These included passwords, the principle of least privilege, and roles.

This month we journey into the fascinating world of Oracle Network Security. The topics covered will not involve the Oracle Advanced Security option: it's too big to cover here, and it is an added expense that many companies do not want. Instead, we will go over basic network security that can be implemented by anyone who uses Oracle. It is built in and so is already part of your system.

This article introduces Oracle XML DB features to the DBAs and Developers who are not actively working with XML. It offers a quick start to those who finds quite a lot of Oracle XML literature around, and who is not sure where to begin.

In the rapidly shifting world of database technology, one fact has always been, and will always remain, true: a great database is no good if it can easily be broken into. A faulty security plan is not just vulnerable to hackers; it opens your company to data theft, corruption, or even legal action.

On our quest to learn about Oracle's Data Pump utility it has often been compared to the old export and import (exp & imp) utilities that we have all grown to love (or hate). This article is where where Data Pump takes a detour from these old utilities and begins to shine. This article will explore some of the export modes available and give examples on how to export selected object types and dependencies those objects have.