11g Feature: Fine Grained Dependency Tracking (FGDT)

Hi All!
I was reviewing some features in Oracle and, basically, every single time I review them I find something new. Seems Oracle Databases’ features are near to infinite and we frequently find some that can really add value to our solutions.

So I decided to make a serie of posts with really quick notes about each one of them.
You can see all posts in this serie in my page of posts and some others more.

Ready? Here it goes:

11g Feature: Fine Grained Dependency Tracking (FGDT)

In previous versions, object dependencies were managed at the object level. This way, altering an object automatically invalidated all dependent objects.
Oracle 11g has more granular dependency management, so only changes that directly affect an object will cause an invalidation.

This is not a Feature under control of Dev or DBA, but I judged important to mention here, as per has important impact to development and deployment processes.

More details can be found here: http://www.orafaq.com/node/2683

Finding Trace Files Being Written Right Now!

Hey!
I was not sure on the title for this post, but I bet everyone, at least once, needed to know which file is being modified at this exact moment in your filesystem/server.

Some days ago I noticed something was making my filesystem full. I cleared some gigas in logs from Diag Home but the space gone 100% very quickly. What is consuming the space?
Easy:

1. Create a new file.

$ touch a.log

2. Find everything newer than this file.

$ find . -newer a.log

Here you go!

In my situation, after finding this, I noticed there was a session in a bug situation generating thousands of messages on trace file.
Killed the session, got part of the messages, cleared file. Issue solved.

Hope it helps!

11g Feature: Fine-Grained Access Control (FGAC) on Network Services

Hi All!
I was reviewing some features in Oracle and, basically, every single time I review them I find something new. Seems Oracle Databases’ features are near to infinite and we frequently find some that can really add value to our solutions.

So I decided to make a serie of posts with really quick notes about each one of them.
You can see all posts in this serie in my page of posts and some others more.

Ready? Here it goes:

Fine-Grained Access Control (FGAC) on Network Services

Oracle supplies PL/SQL utility packages such as UTL_TCP, UTL_SMTP, UTL_MAIL, UTL_HTTP and UTL_INADDR to access to network services. In 11g Oracle have enhanced security available.
Rather than public being granted execute privileges on these packages, now it’s needed to create an ACCESS CONTROL LIST (ACL) in order to use these packages. Some ACL Related Data Dictionary VIEWS are DBA_NETWORK_ACLS and [DBA/USER]_NETWORK_ACL_PRIVILEGES.

> To create ACL:

SQL> begin
DBMS_NETWORK_ACL_ADMIN.create_acl(
acl => 'example.xml',
description=>'EXEMPLE ACL',
principal=>'EXAMPLE',                        
is_grant=>TRUE,
privilege=>'connect');
End;
/

> Once the ACL is created, additional user or privileges can be added using the DBMS_NETWORK_ACL_ADMIN.add_privileges procedure:

SQL> BEGIN
  DBMS_NETWORK_ACL_ADMIN.add_privilege ( 
    acl         =>  'example.xml', 
    principal   => 'SCOTT',
    is_grant    => FALSE, 
    privilege   => 'connect', 
    position    => NULL, 
    start_date  => NULL,
    end_date    => NULL);
  COMMIT;
END;
/

* DBMS_NETWORK_ACL_ADMIN.delete_privileges can be usedto drop privileges and DBMS_NETWORK_ACL_ADMIN.drop_acl to drop ACL.

> To assign ACL to a Network Host:

SQL> begin
DBMS_NETWORK_ACL_ADMIN.assign_acl(
acl => 'example.xml',
host=>'grepora');
End;
/

See you next week!

ORA-29278 When Trying to Use SMTP with GMail

Hi all,
Some time ago I got reached by a client with this error to send SMTP emails using GMail service with a wallet.
This is a generic error, in general the string identified the error returned from email service layer.

# Generic:

ORA-29278: SMTP transient error: string

# Error I was facing:

ORA-29278: SMTP transient error: 421 Service not available

Basically it was related to some intermittence on GMail’s service and got back to normal after a while. This is also well documented in this post by Hâvard Kristiansen.
However, I couldn’t use scripts there because of my wallet. Then I found the very useful commands below, that is what I want to share with you:

# Checking for SSL Certificate:

[oracle@grepora-srvr]$ openssl s_client -crlf -quiet -connect smtp.gmail.com:587 -starttls smtp
depth=3 C = US, O = Equifax, OU = Equifax Secure Certificate Authority
verify return:1
depth=2 C = US, O = GeoTrust Inc., CN = GeoTrust Global CA
verify return:1
depth=1 C = US, O = Google Inc, CN = Google Internet Authority G2
verify return:1
depth=0 C = US, ST = California, L = Mountain View, O = Google Inc, CN = smtp.gmail.com
verify return:1
250 SMTPUTF8
^C
(return:1 means "passed".)

# Testing SMTP on Database (code):

More“ORA-29278 When Trying to Use SMTP with GMail”