The Oracle RDBMS with the MS AD for the poor (external link)

Authenticate database user against Active Directory - the poor man's version

Ora-30372 and what to do further

The error emerges at an mview creation. In my particular case this was an mview on a synonym, which indicated a remote view. The remote view is a subject of an access policy.
The whole issue is described on Oracle Support in the article Ora-30372: Fine Grain Access Policy Conflicts With Materialized View (Doc ID 604046.1).

Small tip: moving statistics

Here there is a small experiment. A colleague of mine stated that loading statistics through impdp is a horrible thing in comparison to simple export and import with the dbms_stats package.

begin
-- on the source
dbms_stats.create_stat_table('','','');
dbms_stats.export_database_stats('','','');

-- on the target
-- first impdp stats table
dbms_stats.import_database_stats('','','');
end;
/

I give it a try and I am very glad of the results. The main problem with exporting and importing the statistics with the Data Pump is the operation duration - using dbms_stats will take a fraction of time spent on the export and import with the Data Pump technology.

11g and sys.aud$

A short and relevant article on the maintenence of the audit structures (SYS.AUD$).
Also important news on usage of DBMS_AUDIT_MGMT, which may be used instead of the procedure from the previous link.

FIle watcher (external link)

A good article on the them at Eddie Awad's Blog.

On transparent switchover (external link)

Nice article by M.Klier on transparent switchover.

SQL*Plus and useful settings

SQL*Plus has a plenty of settings, but there are few really useful for me.
For formatting the output

• PAGESIZE - this controls the numbers of rows displayed between displaying headers. Usually I set it to 1000 (which means that I have got headers only once) and for some scripts for 0 (which means no headers at all)
• LINESIZE - this controls the line width in characters in which a row is fit in. Default 80 fits to default terminal settings. The best shape of data for me is the model 1 row per line, so I often modify this to get such result
• TRIMOUT - for cutting off unnecessary spaces filling lines
• COL FOR a - for formatting character columns
• COL FOR 999999 - for formatting number columns
• LONG - for setting how much of LOBs to show on the display - very useful especially with DBMS_METADATA.GET_DDL calls
• HEAD - for turning on and off the headers - important for scripts, when we want some values from within the database - then sqlplus -s /nolog with CONNECT command

For testing purposes

• FEEDBACK - for turning on and off a message at the end of display summarizing the number of affected rows or PL/SQL command status (SUCCESS|FAILURE)
• TIME - enables time in sqlprompt, which may be used as a marker for script performance
• TIMING - returns information about performance time for operations

For scripts creating scripts

• SQLPROMPT - cool for identifying terminals, when one works on plenty of environments (especially when some of them are production ones), but even cooler as "---> " when it comes to the creation of SQL scripts - prompt messages in the spool are seen as comments

For executing scripts

• TERMOUT - this works only if one calls commands from underlying script - very important for long-running scripts with plenty of output with enabled spooling, when on terminal output we need only command and information about success or error messages.
• SPOOL - for logging
• TRIMSPOOL - useful especially with connection to wide LINESIZE - in order to remove unnecessary spaces (with them logs become very large)
• SERVEROUTPUT - for turning on|off printing from PL/SQL to screen
• ECHO - turns on|off the lines with replaced &variables