Over the weekend, I spent four long hours resolving an issue with a particular Oracle schema. It turned out to be an issue with the special characters in the password, or you can say: I did not treat special characters specially.

I was playing with an old Perl script on my Oracle 10g enterprise edition database server,  running on Redhat Enterprise Linux Advanced Server 4 (RHEL AS4) Read more »

On one of my old CD-ROM drives, I found a old piece of Perl code that I wrote for Oracle 8i. Thought I could enhance that to work with Oracle 10g and perhaps enhance it. My test server is an RHEL AS4 box and I did install Perl when I installed the OS. My script failed due to missing DBI and Oracle DBD modules Read more »

I use the drop_cache file of the /proc pseudo file system to force the OS to relinquish the memory taken away by the clean caches, inodes and dentries. I used it few times without even paying attention to: why there is a memory shortage to begin with? After realizing that the dropping caches is not the real solution, I learned to investigate the actual reason for memory shortage (i.e, who ate my memory? Read more »