jfw.id.au

Had my first “issue” with our Oracle server at work today. The archive log destination had filled up. I was aware that I had to keep an eye on this, and I had been actively monitoring its growth. We had one massive logging day the day after launching our new systems at work so I was paying particular attention to it.

We are running Oracle 10G and we had configured the archive log destination to have a capacity of 50Gb. There was more room than this on the volume that we were logging to, but we didn’t want to use the entire drive to the detriment of the other components that also use it. The colume of logs reached 40Gb and I moved a majority of them to another location to clear space on the archive log destination. It turns out that this was not enough for Oracle, or at least not 10G.

Apparently Oracle 10G uses a catalogue of the contents of the archive log, something that I was not aware of. This meant that when I moved the 35Gb of logs that I moved the Oracle instance thought they were still occupying space in the archive log destination. I found a process in the EM that went through and checked all the archived logs against the configured retention policy and listed any that were obsolete or expired. I assumed that this would sort out how much of the archive log destination was being used and make the server see the correct values.

I was wrong.

The server happily kept logging away until it reached its predefined maximum of 50Gb and then it just stopped. Of course it stopped at about 3pm on Saturday, or at least that was when I got the phone call. After some uncertainty I managed to talk our Network Admin through the process of increasing the size of the archive log destination and everything started up again. I was not impressed that Oracle couldn’t tell that the archived logs had been moved, but at least the problem was resolved with as little pain as possible.

Here it is, a little after 11PM on a Saturday night and I am busy trying to migrate data between old and new systems. We have been working on a major rewrite of the core systems for work and we’re up to the data migration and rollout phase.

I’ve been responsible for a fair amout of the data migration routines, and I am currently attempting to migrate all the booking information. I made an adjustment to the stored proc for this routine and neglected to update the code that calls it. This lead to none of the bookings that I was attempting to migrate actually making it accross.

My tiredness and lack of caffeinated beverages caused me to forget that the stored proc had been updated and spend the better part of an hour looking at a selection of the bookings trying to work out what had caused them not to migrate. I did not realise that none had made it across.

I eventually worked it out, and feel stupider for the experience.

So I’ve bitten the bullet and gone and installed one of the many FOSS blog packages. For those that don’t recognise it, my site is now a spiffy new WordPress site.

I have to admit that I was amazed at how complete this package is, and how much functionality it contains. It is going to take me a while to get the system set up to my complete satisfaction, but patience is apparently a virtue. Kind of ironic really, as I installed WordPress due to my impatience at the rate of development on my previous site. The developer (me!) was always too busy to get anything done on it.

I’m not 100% convinced on the current theme that I have installed, and it will most likely change several times before I settle on one. My eventual goal is to create my own theme for the site, and in the nature of FOSS and the GPL release it back for other WordPress users to download if they wish to.