Posts
TNS_ADMIN
By default Oracle expects tnsnames.ora to be in the $ORACLE_HOME\network\admin directory. This is not always the most convenient place, especially because that directory is usually owned by the oracle user. To get around this, you can set the TNS_ADMIN variable. This points to the directory where you have put your own copy of tnsnames.ora . Like they say on TV : darn useful.
Greece
I just spent a few days in Greece, visiting Athens, Sounio and Delphi.
The temple of Hephaistos in the ancient Greek agora in Athens
Killing an Oracle session
Every time you log into Oracle, you create a session. This is an easy way to kill these Oracle sessions, thanks to this article. First, select the session ID and serial number as such : SELECT s.sid, s.serial#, s.osuser, s.program FROM v$session s; The osuser and program field can be used to identify the session. Then you can kill the session using : ALTER SYSTEM KILL SESSION 'sid,serial#'; It’s also possible to kill the session immediately (but that’s considered rude) : ALTER SYSTEM KILL SESSION 'sid,serial#' IMMEDIATE;
Cambridge
Some pictures of Cambridge (in the UK) were added to the website. It’s near where I live these days. Some of the colleges are shown, as well as photos from a visit to Wimpole Hall. This last one is a stately home in the countryside.
King's college chapel, the symbol of Cambridge
Asking for a value in Perl
The following Perl snippet is useful if you want to ask for a value from the user. The get_new_value function takes the variable name and a default value as parameter. These are printed on screen. The default value is used if no input is given. use strict; sub get_new_value { my($param_name, $param_current_value) = @_; print "$param_name [$param_current_value] :"; chomp(my $input=<stdin>); my $new_value = $input eq "" ? $param_current_value : $input; return $new_value; } my $var = get_new_value('VAR', $ENV{VAR});