RMAN Duplicate Database using Live/Active Database

RMAN duplicate command is a very useful automated way to create a copy/clone of a database rather than manually creating a clone of a database. Duplicate database can be created on the same server were source database is running or on a different server. Duplicate database can be created using RMAN backup of source database,

Heartbeat failed to connect to standby. Error is 16009

On one of my 11.2.0.4 dataguard setup on Windows 64 bit, following errors were being reported every minute, in alert log file of standby database.

PING[ARC2]: Heartbeat failed to connect to standby 'proddb'. Error is 16009. Thu Jun 25 07:01:10 2015

ORA-29701: unable to connect to Cluster Synchronization Service

On 11.2.0.3 single server grid infrastructure on Windows 2008, I faced ORA-29701 error while starting ASM instance.

C:\>sqlplus SQL*Plus: Release 11.2.0.3.0 Production on Wed Jun 17 12:44:08 2015

Killing a process using orakill.exe on Windows

If you kill an oracle session using ALTER SYSTEM KILL SESSION command, status of this session in v$session view is set to “KILLED”, and after some time you no longer see this session. Sometimes it may happen that status of this session remains “KILLED” for a very long time and resources taken by this session are still not released. I have observed this especially in

DDL Logging in Oracle

Starting Oracle 12c, DDL (Data Definition Language) command are logged in a log file which is located under <diag_location>/rdbms/<db_unique_name>/<sid>/log. In my case, it is located under c:\app\oracle\diag\rdbms\db12c\db12c\log directory, and log file name is ddl_<db_name>.log. XML version of this DDL log file is stored under