Being an emergency support DBA is a job with huge stress-levels and it always provides a giant adrenaline rush for even the most experienced DBA. Senior management is in a panic, and high-level executives are continuously asking for a status update. Most of these databases are brand-new to me, and I have only a few minutes to access the situation and devise a plan to quickly relieve their bottleneck.

Oracle Database 10g has expanded the ability to globalize Oracle databases dramatically. As you can see by looking over the following list of globalization improvements, Oracle has attempted to make Database 10g the database of choice for all globally supported and utilized databases.

Oracle databases have many types of auditing features. In mandatory auditing, certain actions are always audited, regardless of the other audit options or parameters. Database activities, such as system startup and shutdown, are always recorded.

SQL tuning is one of the challenging tasks faced by DBAs and developers. It is an interesting and creative, but at the same time, daunting task. Manual tuning of SQL statements requires a high level of expertise and experience to understand and design suitable access paths to yield better response times. It is also a time consuming process. Other challenges include periodic collection of statistics and an ever-changing workload. And in a typical application, there are just too many SQL statements to tune.

This article focuses on the new features aimed at database management. Self-management, or easy management, has been the key word for Oracle 10g. The main areas of enhancements are:

• Self-Managing Database
• Simplified Configuration of Shared Servers
• Transaction Manageability
• Simplified Statistics Collection
• Extended Support for FGA (Fine Grain Audit)
• Response File Creation during database install

One of the most important responsibilities of an Oracle Database Administrator or Performance Analyst, when it comes to performance diagnostics, is to determine how users access the database. This article is an attempt to show the different ways one can activate tracing of an Oracle session for performance diagnostics. While the Oracle documentation mentions some of the methods, it doesn't cover them all. This article consolidates many methods of tracing an Oracle session, some of which are well documented, as well as methods that are undocumented and reserved.

Is there any limit to the speed of Oracle? With Oracle announcing a new record one million transactions per minute, many believe that there is nothing that Oracle cannot do.

However, what if we have a requirement for a system that must accept high-volume data loads into a single table:

• 500,000 rows per second
• 50 megabytes per second

Is this possible? Using the right tricks you can make Oracle load data at unbelievable speed. However, special knowledge and tricks are required.

Oracle Managed Files (OMF), a new feature introduced in Oracle9i, enables the Oracle Server to automatically create and delete database files using standard operating system interfaces. This
feature hugely simplifies the job of the DBA, as the DBA doesn't need to interact with the underlying operating system to create and delete files.

When an Oracle Instance is started, the characteristics of the Instance are established by parameters specified within the initialization parameter file. These initialization parameters are either stored in a PFILE or SPFILE. SPFILEs are available in Oracle 9i and above. All prior releases of Oracle are using PFILEs.

Tables can be reorganized and redefined (evolved) on-line with the DBMS_REDEFINITION package. The process is similar to on-line rebuilds of indexes, in that the original table is left on-line, while a new copy of the table is built. However, an index index-rebuild is a singular operation, while table redefinition is a multi-step process.