Jonathan Gennick

Jonathan Gennick

press my name for the menu

Writer * Book Editor * Oracle DBA * SQL & PL/SQL Developer

Father * Husband * Son * Mountain Biker * EMT

What's on this Site?

• Home

  In the beginning was the home page...

• Database Articles

  Going mad with subqueries? Need to get creative with SQL*Loader? Can't get your flight legs? Check out my articles on these and other relational database topics.

• On Writing

  Ten years of writing, and I'm finally getting some insight into the craft. Sharing helps me learn even more.

• Fun Stuff!

  Learn what it really means to think outside the box and be on the same page. Maybe you can even do both at once!

• Random Articles

  Do I have a life outside of databases? You betcha! And I even write about it.

• About Jonathan

  Are you really bored enough to read about me? Sorry to hear that. Do check out my photo-based bio though...

Oracle8i DBA Bible
Frequently Asked Questions

Why am I getting an ORA-24347: Warning of a NULL column in an aggregate function error when I try to execute the scripts on page 175?

This is the result of several related Oracle bugs that occur in release 8.1.5 and 8.1.6. As a temporary work-around, you can try removing the outer-join operators (the (+) symbols) from the WHERE clauses of the queries on this page. For some reason, doing an inner-join doesn't seem to trigger the bug. The only thing you lose when you do an inner join is that you no longer see tablespaces with zero free space and zero used space. According to Metalink, this bug is fixed in release 8.1.7. Update 22-Aug-2001: Ivor Johansson of Brisbane, Australia tells me he worked around this bug by using an earlier release of SQL*Plus. The bug may be specific to SQL*Plus, and not to the database. Ivor experienced the bug while connecting to an 8.1.6 database from SQL*Plus 8.1.5. When he connected to the same database using SQL*Plus 8.0.5 or 8.0.6, everything worked fine.

I can not find an index or table of contents for the version of the book that is in the companion CD. Can you help?

I don't know why the publisher didn't think to include an electronic copy of the index on the CD. Possibly they wanted to be sure that the CD contents weren't passed around separately from the book. In any case, I don't have an electronic version of the index either, so I can only suggest that you rely on the printed index in the book.

Why is there no coverage of rollback segments in your book?

It's the result of an oversite on my part. The Oracle8i DBA Bible is a revision of an earlier book, the Oracle8 Bible. The earlier book had some minimal coverage (less than one page) of rollback segments in the chapter on Oracle8 Recovery. Rollback segments really deserved a chapter of their own, or so I thought, so when I rewrote the recovery chapter I focused solely on recovery, omitting the rollback segment material. Unfortunately, I then forgot to add a chapter on rollback segments to the book's outline.

While trying to run the SQL script maketables.sql included on the companion CD, I get the following error after the four users are created:

ORA-12560: TNS:protocol adaptor error

The problem is likely with the CONNECT command immediately following the creation of the four users. At that point, the script uses the following command to connect as the SEAPARK user (one of the four just created):

CONNECT SEAPARK/SEAPARK
/

If you are working with a database other than the default database, in other words if you specified a net service name when you first connected using SQL*Plus, the above command will not work; the connection attempt will fail and you will get that ORA-12560 error. The solution is to append your net service name (usually from tnsnames.ora) to the end of the CONNECT command as follows:

CONNECT SEAPARK/SEAPARK@some_database
/

You will need to make the same change to the other CONNECT statements in the maketables.sql and makeobjects.sql file. In order to edit those files, you'll need to copy all the scripts from the CD to a directory on your hard-drive. Then, after editing the scripts, run them from your hard-drive.