Implementing Circuit Breaker Pattern

One of the patterns used to deal with failures of remote calls is…

Slow monitoring of Oracle tablespace free space?

I recently discovered, in our production database, that the query used to monitor free space in tablespaces was starting to show in Top SQL in performance monitoring, meaning it’s taking too much database time.

We use a fairly standard query to…

Extracting Value From Incidents With Blameless Postmortems

In any non-trivial system, failure is inevitable and incidents happen. How we deal with the incidents aftermath determines if they just cost money or we gain something from them.

Timeouts: Simple, powerful and often neglected

I am sure this has never happened to you, but try to imagine. Your on-call phone just got the message: The site is down! You open your Nagios dashboard and you are greeted by a sea of red. All Apache servers are not responding. The database…

How to build Oracle Instant client under Linux

The Oracle Intant Client is a minimalistic version of necessary runtime libraries needed to run an application which uses an OCI interface to connect to the Oracle database. In this article I will describe how to build your very own Instant client…

Collecting Oracle metrics with Reconnoiter

Oracle database makes your life, as an operator, easier by measuring and providing tons of metrics. These metrics range from wait time counters, thru I/O operations and sizes to number of failed logins. Each new version adds even more useful metrics. For…