Oracle on CentOS 4.3

Just to confirm, 10g/10gR2 and 9iR2 all work perfectly on CentOS 4.3. 9iR2 needs the normal RHEL 4 patch from Metalink.

And little simple SQL query I wrote the other day.
This little sniplet shows how long ago the last archive log was applied.

select
  round((sysdate-max(completion_time))*60*24) min_ago 
from 
  v$archived_log;

I used this query to write a simple Nagios plugin to make sure our Oracle Dataguard standby machines do actually keep receiving logs.

The script in full here.

Oracle and calendering

Did a quick calendering script in Oracle, someone may find it usefull.

SELECT to_char(sysdate, 'YYYY/MM/')||lpad(rownum,2,'0')
  FROM (SELECT 1 FROM dual
        CONNECT BY LEVEL <= to_char(last_day(sysdate), 'DD')
       )
/

Will print

2006/03/1
...
2006/03/31

Latest Linux distro releases

Ok, been a busy week in the Linux community. Spent some time beta-testing Centos 4.3 last week. Works fine and of course runs Oracle without glitches. Did see some problems with libaio and up2date on x86_64 but that should be solved by now and the bad RPM's removed from the repoos.

The Fedora team also released Fedora Core 5, installed it on a test PC at work but haven't had time to install Oracle on it yet.
May not be a perfect install, FC5 has alot of new stuff that could cause problems with the Oracle install. We'll see, I haven't heard any reports where people have problems with Oracle on FC5 so it may just as well work fine.

Visited Level 3's co-location facility in London today. Quite impressive place, built in the old Gordons Gin factory by Old Street. Security was massive, we hardly got in. :-)

Haven't had a music recommendation in a while... time for one really good one now

The Sounds - Dying to Say This to You