Where I work, we have about 45 external Oracle Database Servers running RHEL 3. It’s a little tough keeping up with all of them day to day, so I made a quick BASH script that will check for any ORA- alerts in your Oracle alert_*.ora file. Here goes:
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#!/bin/sh

tail -500 /usr/oracle/admin/ora_sid/bdump/alert_sid.log | grep ORA- > mailoraalerts.log
wc -l mailoraalerts.log > greporacount.txt
COUNT=`awk ‘{print $1}’ greporacount.txt`
if [ $COUNT -gt 0 ]; then
mail -s “Check ” your.address@mail.net < mailoraalerts.log
fi
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So what this does is greps the last 500 lines of your alert log looking for ORA- string, and pipes that out to a log file. It then does a word count on that log file. If the word count is greater than 0 (there exists ORA- errors) then email me what the error is.

Then just schedule a cron job to run at whatever interval you desire. This probably isn’t the prettiest way to do this, I’d love to see other suggestions if anyone has any! My next step is to find out how to get Oracle to email me directly when there’s an error, instead of having cron determine when I am alerted.

Enjoy!

This year I have decided to finally go back and take a course at my local college. I already have a Computer Science Degree. I graduated in the spring of 2004. The course that I’m enrolled in, Operating Systems, I have already taken, but now that I’m an Oracle DBA and I am responsible for some Linux System Admin, I figured that retaking the course would be good for me and help refresh my memory on some concepts related to system processes, process scheduling, etc, general stuff really that can be applied to Oracle tuning. So here I am sitting in this 400 level senior course on the first day of class, looking around at my fellow classmates, and feeling grossly out of place. Feeling so, because I am the only woman in the class. Out of 31 students, I am the only woman, and to make it worse, I have already taken this course so I am not really a part of this graduating class! The first time I took the class, I distinctly remember at least 5 chicas out of 30(ish) students. Where are all the women? Did they just take the class a year early? The class is only offered once a year, so that’s even more disconcerting. Hopefully this graduating batch of women were just smart enough to take it a year earlier than what is recommended in the student handbooks. But now I’m starting to think about how my beloved Computer Science department was combined with the Industrial Technology department in 2005. Not that there is anything wrong at all with Industrial Technology, but the two fields are completely different! I am wondering if this departmental change may have scared off wonderfully potential female candidates.

Back in high school, my senior year, our math class was working on proofs. The teacher was assigning specific problems to students and they would work the problem out on the board. This one proof she let 2 students solve it on our dry-erase boards (which we had 2 of). Student 1, male, solves the problem taking up the entire dry-erase board. Student 2, also male, also solves the problem using the entire dry-erase board. I start to panic, because it only took me 3 lines to solve this proof! Did I do it wrong? So I go back and read over it a couple of times, and I just can’t see anything wrong with it. My hand shot up, and the teacher comes over. I showed her my answer, and pointed to the boards asking her, did I miss something? Am I looking at this wrong?? She takes a minute or two to look at it, and reassured me that I had not done anything wrong and that my answer was right. She was very impressed because even she didn’t see the route I took to solving the proof, until she saw my answer. It was elegant and clean. She asked me if I would put it on the board and show the class how I did it, which I was delighted to do (who doesn’t love a little ego rub). So after I wrote my 3 lines on the board, and took a few minutes to explain how I got to the solution, I looked back at my classmates to see if they had any questions, and found myself looking at wrinkled noses, tilted heads and perplexed faces (one guy actually slapped his forehead to acknowledge his realization). Slowly but surely they began to see this simple route to the answer. It is funny, because I remember the feeling of how impossible it seemed to me that out of my entire class, including my teacher, I was the only one that saw the answer this way. But it just was.

Having this memory, perhaps this is why I find it such a bitter pill that I am the only female in my class this semester. Not that I am trying to be an ultra feminist, but how are we supposed to reach simple and graceful solutions when our classes are only being represented by a majority of white males. And I certainly am not saying that white men don’t have simple and graceful solutions, just that diversity plays a very important role in everything. So I am thinking about pulling some resources (my boyfriend has plenty of statistics at his disposal since he is a Business Consultant) and doing some research on my college and the female representation in Computer Science and how that relates to my city and the women in the workforce here. I’d also like to know how these women compare with the male classmates, i.e. top of the class, middle or failing. Although, admittedly, this might be greatly skewed for inappropriate reasons. Which may or may not be discussed, depending on the relativity to this topic as I get further along with my research.

I’d love to hear from the readers as well, what are your thoughts/comments/suggestions? Is there an idea you have on what you would like to see discussed in my research?