Oracle Operations —
Field Notes

What the Oracle Diagnostics Pack actually gates, what stays free, and how to build usable performance history from views that carry no licence — including why V$ACTIVE_SESSION_HISTORY is licensed despite being a V$ view, and why Statspack can only ever live in the database it monitors.

TuneVault now runs entirely on Oracle — OCI Compute, Oracle 26ai Autonomous Database, and native VECTOR search. The migration story, the technical decisions, and what Oracle-native means for DBAs.

Part 2 of installing Oracle RAC 26ai (23.26.x): the RAC database software install (GUI and silent), creating the clustered multitenant database with DBCA, failover validation, and the 26ai features that change day-two operations.

Part 1 of installing Oracle RAC 26ai (23.26.x) on Linux: the Grid Infrastructure and ASM foundation — node prep, networking, udev ASM disks, Configuration Verification, gridSetup, the OCR/voting and DATA/FRA disk groups, and the prerequisite failures you actually hit.

A production-tested, end-to-end runbook to clone an Oracle E-Business Suite 12.2 environment backed by a 2-node Oracle 19c RAC database using RMAN Active Database Duplicate — ASM, CDB/PDB, single-instance-to-RAC conversion, EBS Rapid Clone, post-clone tasks, and adding a new RAC node.

Production Oracle security hardening: configuring the DEFAULT profile, implementing unified auditing, reviewing excessive privileges with DBA_SYS_PRIVS, and the checks auditors always ask for.

Every Oracle DBA knows the 3am page. This post covers the 10 ORA errors that cause the most pain in Oracle E-Business Suite production environments: what they mean, why EBS specifically amplifies each one, the diagnostic SQL you would run to confirm it, and how TuneVault's automated health check surfaces all of them before they become incidents.

The complete Oracle 12.1/12.2 to 19c upgrade path: pre-upgrade checks, AutoUpgrade tool, post-upgrade tasks, and the compatibility issues to anticipate before you start.

Moving EBS 12.2 to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure: choosing between ZDM physical migration and traditional clone, the networking prerequisites, and the EBS-specific post-migration steps.

How to read an AWR report without getting lost in the noise: the six sections that matter, what DB Time tells you, how to interpret top wait events, and using ASH to drill into a specific window.

When to use autoextend vs fixed-size datafiles, how to monitor tablespace growth trends, and the SQL scripts to alert before you hit a full tablespace in production.

The practical EBS performance levers that actually matter: sizing Concurrent Manager queues, diagnosing OPP bottlenecks, fixing stuck WF Mailer, and SQL tuning for FND tables.

Step-by-step Data Guard switchover and failover procedures with the DGMGRL commands and SQL, verification steps, and how to recover when the switchover does not complete cleanly.

Diagnosing Oracle RAC issues: interconnect performance problems, voting disk failures, CRS evictions, and the OS-level tools that actually tell you what is happening.

The ADOP patch cycle failures you will hit in EBS 12.2: cutover timeouts, prepare phase hangs, session cleanup errors, and how to recover from each without starting over.

A production-tested guide to Oracle ZDM: architecture overview, prerequisites, response file parameters, migration phases, monitoring with zdmcli, and the fixes for the failures you will actually encounter.

Load average 120, 247 active sessions, users calling. A step-by-step methodology for diagnosing and resolving an Oracle performance crisis — from first OS command to root cause analysis.

The complete EBS 12.2 cloning procedure: pre-clone on both tiers, adcfgclone configuration, post-clone validation, and fixes for the failures that actually happen in practice.