How to check if fine-grained auditing (FGA) is enabled in your database

SELECT  POLICY_NAME,ENABLED,AUDIT_TRAIL
FROM  DBA_AUDIT_POLICIES;

Result:

POLICY_NAME	ENABLED	AUDIT_TRAIL
MY_FGAPOLICY_1	YES	DB+EXTENDED
MY_FGAPOLICY_2	YES	DB+EXTENDED
MY_FGAPOLICY_3	YES	DB+EXTENDED
MY_FGAPOLICY_4	YES	DB+EXTENDED

Find audit information about dropped users

If you have created your database with dbca, or have manually run the secconf.sql script after your database was created, the "DROP USER" is audited by default in Oracle 12c.
This is a part of what Oracle calls default auditing which I have written about in another post.

Here is how you can find information about dropped users:

select os_username,username,userhost,timestamp,obj_name,action_name,priv_used
from dba_audit_trail 
where action_name='DROP USER'
and to_char(cast ( timestamp as date),'dd.mm.yyyy') > '08.02.2019'
AND OBJ_NAME IN ('JIM','DWIGHT')
order by timestamp desc;

Result:

OS_USERNAME	USERNAME	USERHOST	TIMESTAMP	OBJ_NAME	ACTION_NAME	PRIV_USED
root	SYSTEM	hostname1.mydomain.com	12.02.2019 11:31:05	JIM	DROP USER	DROP USER
root	SYSTEM	hostname1.mydomain.com	12.02.2019 11:28:10	DWIGHT	DROP USER	DROP USER

What is the 100046 trace event anyway?

The 100046 event is a Process Trace event. These trace certain system operations continuously until the tracing is canceled. The results are written to a trace files.

When do I start running 10046 events, then?

* When a process is having problems that can be identified, and you can control which session (or sessions) need to be traced without impacting other things.
* When users can clearly point to processes that need help, and you cannot clearly see what it is other means (statspack, v$sqlarea, etc)


Source: Burlesson Consulting

Syntax for using the dbms_stats.gather_index_stats procedure

How to analyze an index using dbms_stats:

BEGIN
  SYS.DBMS_STATS.GATHER_INDEX_STATS (
     OwnName           => 'SCOTT'
    ,IndName           => 'STATUS_IDX_1'
    ,Estimate_Percent  => DBMS_STATS.AUTO_SAMPLE_SIZE
    ,Degree            => DBMS_STATS.DEFAULT_DEGREE 
    ,No_Invalidate     => DBMS_STATS.AUTO_INVALIDATE);
END;
/

Official documentation here

How to solve ORA-02017: integer value required when trying to adjust parameters

I was trying to rectify an issue where the alert log of the database kept throwing errors like this:

ORA-01013: user requested cancel of current operation
ORA-00600: internal error code, arguments: [KGL-heap-size-exceeded], [0x114890D28], [6], [1263979496], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []

Reading Doc ID 330239.1 "Memory Notification: Library Cache Object loaded into SGA / ORA-600 [KGL-heap-size-exceeded]", I realized that these errors are not causing any failure, as they are simply warnings that Oracle implemented to alert DBAs about potential large occupants of database memory.

There are two hidden parameters which control these messages:

set lines 200
col name format a40
col description format a80
col KSPPSTVL format a20
 select
 nam.ksppinm NAME,
 nam.ksppdesc DESCRIPTION,
 val.KSPPSTVL
 from
 x$ksppi nam,
 x$ksppsv val
 where nam.indx = val.indx and nam.ksppinm like '%kgl_large_heap_%_threshold%';

NAME                                 DESCRIPTION                                                        KSPPSTVL
-----------------------------------  ------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------
_kgl_large_heap_warning_threshold    maximum heap size before KGL writes warnings to the alert log      524288000
_kgl_large_heap_assert_threshold     maximum heap size before KGL raises an internal error              524288000

These are the default values, 50M. Not very much. Instead, I want a warning to be written to the alert log at 1500M, and an ORA-00600 error to be thrown at 2G.

The first instruction works just fine:

alter system set "_kgl_large_heap_warning_threshold"=1572864000 scope=spfile;

System altered.

The secoond fails with:

alter system set "_kgl_large_heap_assert_threshold"=2147483648 scope=spfile;

ERROR at line 1:
ORA-02017: integer value required

Why?

The answer was found in the document Doc ID 2049098.1 Setting Parameter SORT_AREA_SIZE Throws error ORA-2017: "Integer Value Required", which states

"The parameter SORT_AREA_SIZE has a 2G limit"

and points out that instead of setting the value to 2147483648 bytes, it should be lowered to a value below 2G.

So the solution was to reduce the value by one single byte, from

alter system set "_kgl_large_heap_assert_threshold"=2147483648 scope=spfile;

to

alter system set "_kgl_large_heap_assert_threshold"=2147483647 scope=spfile;

and Oracle happily accepted the new value.

How to solve ORA-01031: insufficient privileges when creating a cross-schema fk constraint

Scenario:
you want to create a cross-schema Foreign key constraint:

 ALTER TABLE JIM.TRANSACTION
 ADD ( CONSTRAINT TRANSACTION_FK 
       FOREIGN KEY (TRANS_ID) REFERENCES 
       DWIGHT.TRANSACTION_HISTORY(TRANS_ID)
     );

In order to accomplish this, user JIM needs the REFERENCES system privilege on DWIGHT's table:

GRANT REFERENCES ON DWIGHT.TRANSACTION_HISTORY TO JIM;

How to remove a job from the job queue

Today I saw the following error message in the alert log of my database:

2019-02-12T13:27:30.506714+01:00
Errors in file /u01/oracle/diag/rdbms/proddb01/proddb01/trace/proddb01_j000_20661.trc:
ORA-12012: error on auto execute of job 98
ORA-30967: operation directly on the Path Table is disallowed

This error was connected to a procedure I had made earlier, in this post.

In short, the procedure creates a job using dbms_jobs, and executes it thereafter. Because an error occured during job execution, the job appeared to be jamming connections to the database. The job needed to be dropped immediately.

To remove the job, use either the dbms_job.remove procedure, like this:

sqlplus username/password

begin
  sys.dbms_job(98);
  commit;
end;
/

If you do not have the password for schema owning the job, Use the undocumented procedure sys.dbms_ijob, like this:

sqlplus / as sysdba
begin
  sys.dbms_ijob(98);
  commit;
end;
/