A lot companies consolidates databases into one appliance – like for example Oracle Exadata. So you can have a lot of different databases in one physical cluster. And what if I tell you that you can execute any OS command as an oracle user, having just access to a database user with appropriate privileges? What if I tell you that DBA=SYSDBA? And not just SYSDBA for one database but for every database in a cluster?
Let’s fuckup the cluster! Of course after this operation, the final state of the processes can look like this: The cssd service will not be able to start, because there are no voting disks: OK, so let’s try to stop the cluster services: Now we will have to start CRS in exclusive mode and start […]
I’ve wrote about privilege escalation with external tables in this post: https://blog.ora-600.pl/2014/12/23/simple-technics-of-privilege-escalation-part2-dbasysdba/ This time we will try to list all files within directory object, to which we have no EXECUTE privs. This is possible due to great new feature of database 12c that allows to use metacharacters to match multiple files in external table. I […]
Sorry for long time without post, but we are writing with Marcin Rydz a new heterogenous replication product based on archivelogs and it’s consuming a looooooot of our time 🙂 Yes I know it’s nothing new on the market. There are other cool products and I know they’ll be probably be better. But we want […]
There is a new feature in Oracle Spatial 12c, called "Spatial Vector Acceleration". According to Oracle: One of the most notable improvements with Oracle Spatial and Graph 12c can be seen in performance increases in vector data operations. Enabling the Spatial Vector Acceleration feature (available with the Spatial option) dramatically improves the performance of commonly […]
It’s time for the next article with ODBV visualisation 🙂 This time let’s examine the difference between move and shrink – this is very common question on a lot of trainings. You can find a lot of great articles in the Internet regarding this subject but I think that visualisation really helps to understand what […]
From time to time I get questions on my trainings, what is the difference between TRUNCATE TABLE and TRUNCATE TABLE DROP STORAGE… well, there is no difference because DROP STORAGE is default 😉 DROP STORAGE Specify DROP STORAGE to deallocate all space from the deleted rows from the table except the space allocated by the […]
If you work as a consultant, getting remote access to your customer is sometimes a nightmare! Even when you’ll get one, there a times when you just want to get your job done and finish this nightmare. For example, there are times when it is easier to dump a statspack repo and do offline analyzes. […]
I had a pleasure to work with my colleagues from Oracle – Radosław Kut and Krzysztof Marciniak – at comparing the performance of In-Memory queries between Sparc M7, Intel® Xeon® X5670 and Intel® Xeon® E5-2699. You can find results of our findings in this presentation: https://www.oracle.com/webfolder/s/delivery_production/docs/FY16h1/doc17/DB12c-on-SPARC-M7.pdf Following their methodology I’d like to present appropriate results […]
Let’s check, why PRAGMA UDF makes execution faster, then regular function. C function responsible for calling a PL/SQL code from SQL is called "plsql_run": Now let’s try to create a new HR session and create a simple function which will multiple values by 2: From other terminal I will connect to the HR session with […]
Thanks to suggestions made by Frits Hoogland, I made some improvements to the ODBV. The new version can be found here: http://ora-600.pl/oinstall/odbv.x86_64 The changes are: Recognition of first, second and third level bitmap block Recognition of pagetable segment header Block number ranges on the left side The blocks will be coloured properly to belonging segment. […]
Recently I wanted to demonstrate to some people on my training, how Oracle database maintains blocks in a datafile – what happens after truncate, truncate with drop storage clause, delete, regular insert, direct path insert and so on… I didn’t find any tool for that so I’ve written my own. It’s core code is based […]
So we had a doubtful pleasure of migrating a few databases from Oracle Exadata X3-2 to Oracle Exadata X7-2 Cloud at Customer. Why doubtful? Well, this a material for a whole different story with a lot of beer – let me just say, that CC gen 1 was a bit rough around the edges 😉 […]
More and more customers are using fancy security tools like CyberArk or other solutions based on Windows RDP with turned off or limited possibility of copy/paste functionalities. And I get it. Security is really important topic and we should take it seriously. But from time to time you have to solve quickly some extremely important […]
This article is true for Oracle 19.19 and 19.23 on ARM. On x86_64 there’s something funny going on with location of the buffer address in the private memory (finding appropriate register at kcbklbc call)- I need a bit more time to compare those two compilations, but the idea is the same 🙂 During my journey […]
This is a pain in the ass. You try to import something from a newer database and you hit the error that your timestamp is not good enough! Even tho you have no timestamp datatypes in the dump… The whole case was covered by Mike Dietrich: Let me show you my – a little bit […]
We are continuing our journey as an evil KVM administrator who wants to mess with a tenants virtual machines. This time we will modify a binary execution code path by changing machine code opcodes in a running process! Let’s image a simple C program, that looks like this: This short code will show "You are […]
Shit happens. We had recently another customer who can relate to that absolute truth – after a serious storage problem, they managed to restore only data files from one mount point. In theory they were lucky because it was mount point with actual data tablespaces… but they didn’t have any SYSTEM datafiles. It’s like having […]
So we continue our journey to understand the nature of buffer cache and forcing DBWR process to write our changes to disk. If you want to follow this thread – you should get familiar with at least those blog posts: Until now we have established, that DBWR will write to disk a database block changed […]
Check out those charts: During my last performance tuning audit I found out that database is consuming big amounts of CPU on parsing. One of the queries that took significant amount of time was rather a small DELETE looking something like this: Funny story tho – the table is usually empty but during the hot […]
Halloween started really scary this year – some company called us and said, that they have some problems with their Oracle Database Standard Edition. Apparently they had a storage crash six months before, which caused some blocks to get corrupted and from that time no one has noticed that RMAN is not producing any backups. […]
You may already read my articles about virtualization/cloud security: In the above articles I was impersonating an evil cloud administrator and showing you how this kind of person can access and modify even encrypted data. We will continue this fun, but this time you may also use this trick when you forget root password in […]
Recently a customer called us that there is something wrong after upgrading Oracle Database to 19.15 on RedHat. Apparently The amount of RAM consumed by DBWR and process servers became really impressive – as a proof I got screenshots looking like this: They said that before the migration it never looked like this and asked […]
Six years ago I wrote a short instruction on how to restore OCR and Votedisk in RAC 12c after a diskgroup failure. Yesterday I had a possibility of validating my procedure in 21c RAC environment and it has occurred that it is a bit more complicated. Who would have thought? 21 is just 12 backwards! […]
So you have migrated your databases to cloud and you want to feel a bit more secure – what do you do? Of course you follow the golden rule and you encrypt you tablespaces. That’s reasonable and that’s what vendor recommends. All databases created in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure are encrypted using transparent data encryption (TDE). […]
