TABLE OF CONTENTS 1) POP QUIZ (answer at the end) 2) IOUG Live! 2005 3) Oracle Professional 4) Oracle Tip 5) In the News 6) ANSWER TO THE POP QUIZ --------------------------------------------------------- 1) POP QUIZ (answer at the end) --------------------------------------------------------- What is the Recycle bin used for in Oracle 10g? --------------------------------------------------------- 2) IOUG Live! 2005 --------------------------------------------------------- Well, it’s that time of year again! The International Oracle Users Group is holding their annual technical symposium May 1st to the 5th in Orlando, Florida this year. There will be over 40 technical sessions in addition to Keynote speaker, Juergen Rottler, Oracle’s Executive Vice President, Oracle Support and Oracle On Demand. Tom Kyte, from the popular Ask Tom forum on OTN will be there to share his knowledge along with many other Oracle experts in the field. For more information, visit: http://www.ioug.org/live2005/ --------------------------------------------------------- 3) Oracle Professional --------------------------------------------------------- In the April issue of Oracle Professional, Steven Feuerstein discusses how Compile-time warnings can be used in Oracle 10g PL/SQL. Darryl Hurley continues his discussion on Oracle Streams and explains how to advance a capture process through redo logs including the use of the DBMS_LOGMNR_SESSION package. And Bulusu Lakshman introduces us to some of the new features in PL/SQL exception handling in Oracle 10g. Here’s how you can access Oracle Professional: http://www.oracleprofessionalnewsletter.com --------------------------------------------------------- 4) Oracle Tip --------------------------------------------------------- This Month’s tip comes from Scott Dial and it relates to how to find the real memory usage on Solaris. Have you ever noticed that the top and glance Unix utilities show sqlplus connections taking up hundreds of megs of memory? Memory usage reported by top and glance show the sum of the shared memory plus the private memory. The problem is that the shared memory is counted for every process, not just one. There’s an easy way to find out how much you’re actually using. Metalink note:153655.1 has a utility called “omemuse.sh” that can be used on Solaris by passing the process ID of a sqlplus session to it and getting back the private and shared memory. The private memory is how much the process is actually using. oracle$ sh omemuse.sh P 10598 Total Private (Kb) : 4208 Total Shared (Kb) : 298512 ----- Grand Total (Kb) : 302720 If you’re using a version of Solaris that reports these numbers backwards (for example, 2.7), you can also get the information by using: /usr/proc/bin/pmap –x . Even here, Solaris has the shared and private memory in the wrong columns, but you can look for “shmid” lines that contain your shared memory and subtract that sum from the total to give you your private memory. Scott Dial is a contributor to our monthly Oracle Professional newsletter. Look for his upcoming article on the Oracle 10g new feature called Data Pump. -------------------------------------------------------- 5) In the News -------------------------------------------------------- Oracle has officially assumed control of Retek Inc., holding 92.8% of the outstanding shares of the company. Last month, Oracle agreed to acquire Retek for $669 million or $11.25 per share, outbidding rival SAP AG (SAP). Oracle expects to close the acquisition after a second offering period, which began April 6th and expires later this month. Oracle also announced recently that they will buy Oblix, a Cupertino, Calif., computer security management company for an undisclosed price. Thomas Kurian, Oracle’s Senior VP, Server Technologies, stated that Oblix’s technology complements the identity and access management solutions currently available in Oracle Identity Management and included as part of Oracle Application Server 10g. The price of the acquisition was not disclosed. * * * * Siebel Systems Inc. (SEBL) recently warned investors that the company expects to miss its first quarter targets due to sagging software sales. The company expects to lose between $7 million to $9 million, or 1 to 2 cents per share, compared to analyst’s expectations of a gain of 5 cents per share. Stiff competition from larger rivals, Oracle Corp. and SAP AG, along with newcomer, Salesforce.com, in addition to customer complaints about the complexity of Siebel's software has contributed to a downward trend in the Company’s revenues. In an attempt to assure investors and analysts, Siebel announced it plans to cut costs, though declined to comment on whether those cuts will come in the form of a layoff. The company has already trimmed 3,800 from its staff in the past 4 years. * * * * --------------------------------------------------------- 6) ANSWER TO THE POP QUIZ --------------------------------------------------------- The Recycle Bin in Oracle is akin to the Recycle Bin you use in Windows. Released in Oracle 10g along with the Flashback feature, the Recycle Bin allows you to capture and store all dropped database objects. This feature can be turned on and off through the _recyclebin parameter in the init.ora file. Once enabled, any dropped objects and substructures, like Indexes for a table, will be renamed and stored in the same user’s schema and tablespace. Oracle 10g includes a view called RECYCLEBIN, a synonym to the real view, USER_RECYCLEBIN. You can view any objects that reside in the Recycle Bin by querying this view, such as: SELECT object_name, original_name, droptime FROM recyclebin WHERE original_name = ‘Your_table_name_goes_here’; Then, using the FLASHBACK TABLE command, you can restore this table along with its data if you require. For those of you who are regular readers of our print publication, Oracle Professional, Roy Gomes wrote an article about this feature in the February 2005 edition, so if you are interested in more information on this topic, please visit http://www.oracleprofessionalnewsletter.com to find out more about Oracle Professional and sign up for a free trial subscription.