Recovering a Dropped Table using RMAN Backup

There are different ways to recover back a dropped table i.e. recovering from recycle bin if it is set to on, using flashback, importing from an export backup of the table, or using RMAN backup. In this article I will explain how to recover a table using RMAN backup. Database must be running in archivelog mode with RMAN backup available. Backup should have been from the time when table existed. Using this method, we can also recover tables to a previous state (keeping existing version of table) by providing SCN or timestamp.

Finding High CPU Consuming SQLs with Multiple Plans

 In a DBA’s life this is very common to see high CPU usage of a server. If this is happening most of the time and occurrence is common, you may think of increasing the number of CPUs of the system. This CPU busy rate may be observed in CPU usage percentage or CPU load average matrics. But if this is not a very commonly occurring issue of your system and someday you suddenly see high CPU usage, you may immediately want to kick out the sessions that are consuming high CPU to avoid a system hang and reboot (or node eviction in case of RAC).

How to Invalidate a Cursor to Load a New Plan

If an SQL is frequently in use and has different SQL plans historically for execution, there might be a scenario that current execution plan in use is a bad one. In that case you might want to get rid of this current plan so that optimizer could possibly load a better plan for next executions. In this case, you would need to invalidate the current cursor in shared pool. Following is the way how we invalidate a SQL cursor from share pool.

Moving Accidentally Created Datafile on Local File System in RAC to the Shared File System

 ORA-01157 is a common incident that happens when a DBA accidentally creates a datafile for a cluster database on the local file system of one of the nodes instead of creating on a shared file system or ASM. In this case, all instances other than the instance/node where fiel was locally created would report ORA-01157 and ORA-01110. Alert log file would show entires similar to the following.