RSS
19.05.2022

RSS memory, Oracle and Hugepages

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 […]


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KVM + TTE + VMI
15.04.2021

KVM – how to read encrypted Oracle Database blocks from Virtual Machine memory

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 […]


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KVM
30.03.2021

Cloud/KVM/VDSM/SRIOV/WTF security…

So apparently this cloud-thing is here for good. You may even say that it became endemic 😉 With cloud there is one potential problem – the bigger and heavier it is, the more possible is the leak. Cloud after all is just a virtualization in a big scale and if you go to public cloud […]


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STADO
22.01.2020

When AWR is not enough, a.k.a. Why your app is not cloud-ready. #SMARTDB

In my previous post I described a case of "enq: TX – row lock contention" that was actually a network latency problem. More and more those kinds of problems (it seems like history happens all over again) caused my friend (Radosław Kut) and me to write a simple tool to analyze SQL performance from a […]


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ODBV3 & ASM
04.10.2018

ODBV3 and ASM

At Trivadis Performance Days 2018 (awesome event by the way) I promised to deliver ODBV3 with support for ASM – and here it is! 🙂 https://github.com/ora600pl/odbv To use it, you have to have access to a user at ASM level with at least SYSDBA privilege. In the connect string you don’t have to add AS […]


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ODBV3
17.09.2018

ODBV3 – more comfortable usage

It has been crazy few months – organizing POUG2018 took a lot of energy but it was satisfying as hell! 😀 This weekend I had some time to prepare a new version of ODBV for Trivadis Performance Days 2018 where I’ll be talking about the internals of database block storage. The series of articles about […]


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SGADUMP
10.07.2018

Dumping SGA to read encrypted blocks

After my last article AMM vs security, Martin Berger wrote to me: well, even without AMM you can do it: write your own process which attaches to the same shm segments – and use its memory mapping (?) My response was that it is also possible with ASMM but AMM makes it extremely easy. And […]


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AMM
18.05.2018

AMM vs security

Most of us already know that AMM sucks. But usually, we think about disadvantages of AMM in terms of performance. Let’s see why it sucks in the terms of security 😉 Let’s create an encrypted tablespace for HR.EMPLOYEES and protect HR schema with Database Vault. Contents of sqlnet.ora Now we will use dbca to configure […]


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RICO2 & BBED
14.02.2018

Project RICO2 and the history of APEX upgrade that went terribly wrong.

In my last blog post I explained a XOR alghorithm that is used to count Oracle database block checksum. I also wrote, that sometimes you are facing problems, that are unresolvable without a low-level knowledge. This is the story of this kind of situation. The story of misread documentation. The story of haste and hex. […]


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GDB
28.01.2018

Oracle database block checksum XOR algorithm explained

Recently I’ve started to write my own clone of BBED to have something handy and useful in extreme cases when you have to go deep and fix stuff on low level (I have only like 2 such cases a year but each time it is really fun and a nice money 😉 ) When I’ll […]


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ODBV
21.12.2017

ODBVv2 – ghostdata busters

Some time ago I wrote a simple tool to learn about Oracle data block internals – ODBV. The series of articles can be found here: https://blog.ora-600.pl/?s=odbv&submit= and the github repo is here: https://github.com/ora600pl/odbv This is not a production tool but during the last session in Birmingham at UKOUG_TECH17 – where I was doing a presentation […]


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V00D00 & APUD
02.10.2017

Direct path insert and IOTs

(Please tell me that I’m not the only one who thinks "Index Organized Table" instead of "Internet Of Things" when hearing IOT…) This post is inspired by Connor McDonald and his blog post from a year ago about direct mode operations and IOTs. You can read it here: https://connor-mcdonald.com/2016/07/04/direct-mode-operations-on-iots/amp/ While writing a redo parser for […]


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VOODOO
20.09.2017

rollback internals

While researching redo log internals for V00D00 we had to face the fact, that we know shit about real transactional behavior. When I say "real", I mean – under the hood. Even with a very simple stuff like COMMIT and ROLLBACK we were constantly amazed by the internal mechanisms. Today let’s take ROLLBACK under the […]


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V00D00
21.08.2017

How Oracle stores numbers internally

Before you proceed, please check out this short article written by Tanel Poder: https://blog.tanelpoder.com/2010/09/02/which-number-takes-more-space-in-an-oracle-row/ In the documentation, you can find the following explanation about the internal numeric format: Oracle stores numeric data in variable-length format. Each value is stored in scientific notation, with 1 byte used to store the exponent and up to 20 bytes […]


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VOODOO
24.07.2017

When UPDATE becomes an INSERT

During a research for VOODOO, we came across a lot of interesting stuff inside REDO. One of my favourites is an UPDATE, becoming an INSERT 🙂 So let’s see what has happened – I performed the following update on a sample table: The regular dump of redo log with an UPDATE looks like this: In […]


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