I will get to being lazy a some point soon. I promise.
So what to I do? I am an Oracle DBA. Mostly, I have been
relegated to the realms of physical and support work. I got
dragged there –kicking and screaming — about six years ago. All
the application design work I loved was ripped from my grasp.
Begging and pleading got me a lot of empty promises, but here I
remain. Why? Why must I here and manage this end of the
databases and instance?
Because I’m good at it.
Damn. Shot in the foot by competence yet again.
Well, perhaps I can share something with you that SOMEONE can use.
OK, what gives today? I actually had to fix a major
production issue. That makes two (or maybe three) this
month! Somebody is playing with my karma over here.
It was actually pretty simple. Citrix-deployed app lost contact
with the user but did not clean up. So a phantom session was
sitting holding a lock. The tricky part was wading through the
pile of queued up requests to find the locking session.
It would be a snap — except for an outstanding bug in my
version. An old favourite script does not work in this version
because when I try to join multiple copies of V$LOCK, I get
locked! Major bummer.
Fortunately, I reworked the script months ago. I select
everything from the views into a temporary table first, then work with
that. The bug does not get in my way; I get my answer faster than
I can notice the lag.
A few judicious “alter system kill session” commands and I get moved a
few places away from the top of the “Who to fire next?” list.
I will post the script if the following can be done:
1) I can find a place to put it
2) I can figure out how to put it there
3) I can be bothered to try (hey, I’m lazy, remember)
