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). […]
Inspired by a little chat with Frits Hoogland about the future of programming languages I challenged myself to learn a bit of Rust and show how to create a shared library to send emails and attach it to Oracle as an external procedure (just as I did with GoLang here: https://blog.ora-600.pl/2021/05/04/golang-as-oracle-external-procedure/) The steps are actually […]
This short article is a result of the following Twitter activity: So let’s do it! First of all, you have to install GoLang: https://golang.org/doc/install Once this is done, we can create a Go program to send emails. We will use "gopkg.in/mail.v2″ to make it simple. Below you can find a simple GoLang code to send […]
Remember my post, regarding dumping the SGA to read encrypted blocks? What if I tell you, that you can do the same, while being a KVM host administrator with no credentials to a VM itself? Let’s prepare our secure database in a way I did in article AMM vs security. After enabling Oracle Wallet and […]