SSTS Blog

This is one of those tasks that you tend to forget. After you create reports in Microsoft SSRS you need to assign assess to users in your domain. A common way of accomplishing this is to assign these via a Windows domain user or group. Most users will need the Browser role that allows them to view your reports. You can assign this at a folder...

ok, this one has burned some of my time a couple times now.
When you are configuring Enterprise Manager in a Windows environment you need to modify the Windows Local Security Policy to "Allow Logon as Batch" for whatever user is running the Oracle DB Console service. Otherwise, you will be unable to assign preferred credentials and thus will be...

If you are running Oracle on Windows and are using a Windows domain account subject to password expiry you need to remember a few follow up tasks after your password has been changed.

• Make sure any Windows scheduled tasks have the new password. You should only need to change one scheduled task and all get the change
• Go into EM/DBConsole preferences...

Saw an interesting article on this tool that runs  top of SQL Profiler. It aggregates trace data for easier analysis.
http://www.scalesql.com/cleartrace/download.aspx...

I've been looking into Open Source Data Profilers of late.
These allow you to get some basic info on your data quickly.
The 2 I like the most so far are the Talend Open Profiler
and another called Data Cleaner. Talend is more graphical and
Data Cleaner is a bit more intuitive so they both have their merits.
http://www.talend.com
http://datacleaner.eobjec...

At some point between Apex 2 and 3 Oracle decided tighten the security on calling stored procedures. I had a procedure that was being used to download documents from the database to the browser. This worked fine in Apex 2, but was broken after the upgrade. Upon clicking on the document link I was receiving a "Forbidden" message. This indicated a...

Today I successfully used RMAN switch to copy to swap out my 500GB drives for a 1.5TB drives with minimal downtime. I have a simple setup where data resides on an E: drive and backups on the F: drive. The process was relatively simple.
1) Within RMAN execute backup as copy database
2) Shutdown the database
3) startup mount
4) Within RMAN execute switch...

This handy bit of Powerscript code allows you to save attachements in your Outlook inbox to disk:
You need to pass a file name, not just a destination directory to SaveAsFile.The attachment has a FileName property.
This code groups attachments with same name and saves the first attachment in each group, if the attachment is corrupt or if it can't...

I think I have settled on a good backup option for my desktop at home. I have an external hard drive connected to my desktop. Previously, I had installed rsync via cygwin which I have successfully used in the past. However, every few days I would find the process hung and had to reboot the machine. It appeared that this was not a common problem...

Sometimes you receive data in scientific notation. The way to handle this when using sql loader is to utilize the FLOAT EXTERNAL directive in the sql loader controlfile.
ex
STD_DEV FLOAT EXTERNAL...

Over the past year I have begun to support Oracle in a Windows environment. This experience hasn't been as horrifying as expected, however there still have been some nuances. here's my list:

• Windows password changes suddenly prevent EM jobs from running. This is something you need to dicover as soon as possible
• Restoring a database on Windows with...

RMAN has a neat feature that allows you to switch the database to run on a backup copy (after recoverying it)
Setup:
-------
In order to set this up you need a datafile copy backup setup in RMAN.
example:
BACKUP FOR RECOVER OF COPY DATAFILECOPY FORMAT='T:\ImageCopies\ORCL\%d_%I_%N_%f' WITH TAG '%d_image_copy' DATABASE;
Make sure T:\ is independent from...

I encountered a problem with a listener running on a windows machine that had a 10G Oracle database and companion installed in separate ORACLE_HOMES. The ons.log file was HUGE under the companion install. And the listener was consuming the CPU. I found some posts on OTN compaining of the same. It turned out that there was a config problem with...

Over the coming year I am planning on extending my consulting services company into the area of managed services and support. More and more I am seeing companies that would like to bring these services on board to either supplement their existing staff or to bring these skills to the table for the first time. Let's face it - deep skills in...

Learned something new recently while having the task of manipulating large files from a data provider. You see, I needed to gather several years of financial information for several thousand companies (at the daily level). There were about 30 attributes so this process needed to be run about 30 times with 30 resulting files. After it was done it...