Please help yourself to my articles and notes on Oracle database administration

My interview in Select Magazine
I had the honor of being interviewed by Select's editor Paul Dorsey for the Q3 2002 issue.

Common Oracle Database Misconceptions
Presented at Oracle Openworld 2001 in San Francisco

Backup and Recovery

Misconception: Hot backup mode stops writing to the datafiles

Misconception: Media recovery will be required in the case of instance failure during backup mode

Misconception: Always 'switch logfile' before/after online backups

Misconception: Cold backup once a week a "baseline"

Misconception: Export is a good way to back up the database

Redo and Rollback

Misconception: 'shutdown abort' is bad

Misconception: "Snapshot too old" can be avoided by using 'set transaction use rollback segment'

Misconception: Big batch jobs should use a 'dedicated' rollback segment

Misconception: Checkpoint not complete - misguided solutions

Misconception: NOLOGGING turns off redo logging

Misconception: After activating a standby, the primary requires re-copying to become the standby

General Practices

Misconception: Lots of extents are bad

Misconception: Listeners must be started before the instance

Misconception: Count (1) is better than count (*)

Other articles