It’s usually a good idea to schedule regular refreshes of a development (dev) sql server from the production(prod) version. Ideally, the prod environment is secured from everyone except an isolated number of systems administrators requiring dev to be kept as close to the live version as possible.

While working in a development environment I came across the need to setup a clustered oracle home (Db_2) on a box with an existing single instance (Db_1). After the cluster ready services (crs) completed and I ran through the db setup I went to run netca to setup the clustered listeners. Unfortunately, the creation of the listener failed with an odd CRS error message.

I ran into a problem while attempting to apply the April 2008 Critical Patch Update. We have a 4 node RAC cluster running 10g R1. I dropped the first node out of the cluster by shutting down the instance on the first node and stopping the node apps using srvctl. The OPatch utility was patched to the requird 1.0.0.0.57 and added to the path.

In the instructions for Oracles January Critical Update database administrators might be surprised to find that downtime is required for their enviornment.

DTS's were so... simple, but with a more robust implementation comes complexity. Using Microsoft’s SQL Server Business Intelligence Studio you can create powerful automated packages known as SSIS packages which have taken the place of the DTS. To get started select new project from the File menu and choose Integrated Services project.

Recently I was working on a project that involved scrubbing data from an oracle instance for a development environment. The data needed to remain intact so that foreign key constraints would be observed, but private information needed to be randomized and/or erased to protect users.