I thought I would deviate from my usual discussion on 10G technical topics for one blog. I’d like to talk about non-technical skill sets and the important role they play in our careers.

It used to be that you could get by with a total lack of interpersonal skills in our profession. Well those days are long gone. If you want to succeed, you’ll need to learn how to communicate effectively and play well with others. This blog contains a few pearls of wisdom, and a story or two, to help you become a well-rounded technician that is on the fast track to a successful career.

Let’s finish this series on 10G Data Pump by investigating the Data Pump Import utility. In this blog, we'll learn how to execute 10G Data Pump Import and take advantage of some of its more popular features.

This is part three of a series on 10G Data Pump. In part one, we reviewed a few of the new features that make Data Pump Export and Import attractive alternatives to their ancestors, Export and Import. Part two focused on the 10G Data Pump architecture. We continue the discussion in this blog by learning how to use 10G Data Pump Export to "pump" data out of an Oracle database.

Now that we have a general understanding of some of the features that 10G Data Pump provides, let’s peel back a few of the layers and see how this utility works. In this blog, we’ll take an in-depth look at the Data Pump architecture.

Describing the Oracle Export and Import utilities as slow is like saying the Titanic sprung a small leak. Stories of Export and Import executions running for hours (and sometime days) are commonplace. Oracle 10G provides a new data movement utility, called Data Pump, to increase the performance of data transfers.

Now that I've used Data Pump, I found out that the improvements go far beyond mere performance enhancements. In part 1 of this multi-part series on the Data Pump toolsets, I'll cover some of the new features and functionalities the utility provides. In upcoming blogs, we'll take a look at the data pump architecture and compare the toolset to its ancestors Export and Import.

Correctly sizing online redo log files is critical if you want to achieve ‘maximus database performis’. 10G Grid Control provides a redo log file sizing advisor that provides administrators with an initial sizing recommendation. I’ll begin this blog by showing you how to use the automatic sizing advisor and continue our discussion by explaining the manual process of determining the size of your online redo logs.

Although I provided a quick demo on how to use 10G Grid Control’s SQL Access Advisor in an earlier blog, I think it may be beneficial for us to take a more in-depth look at this powerful utility. We’ll peel back the covers to find out what the SQL Access Advisor actually does when you activate it as well as the benefits it provides. I think you will find that the SQL Access Advisor is a strong analysis tool that deserves your consideration.

In a few of my previous blogs, I provided instructions on how to use 10G Grid Control to run the SQL Tuning Advisor and the SQL Access Advisor. In this next couple of blogs, we’ll peel back the layers and find out exactly what happens when these utilities are executed.

In part one of this multi-part blog on the advisors, we take a look at how the SQL Tuning Advisor uses the optimizer to generate its tuning recommendations. We’ll also cover the types of recommendations it provides and how it comes to those conclusions.

10G provides so many automatic features that it should have been called 10A for Automatic. Over the course of this blog, I have covered many of the automated features that were introduced in Oracle's latest and greatest release. There are a couple of automatic features that I haven't covered yet that warrant further investigation. We'll discuss automatic undo retention tuning, automatic checkpoint tuning and automatically tuned multi-block reads.

Temporary tablespaces are used to store transient data, which Oracle defines as data that is only available for the duration of the session. The two main types of transient data is data stored in temporary tables and data that is generated by sort operations. Oracle provides temporary tablespaces that are optimized for storage of transient data.

Oracle10G allows administrators to group multiple temporary tablespaces together and assign them to users as a single unit. We'll begin our discussion on temporary tablespace groups by reviewing sort operations and temporary tablespaces, then continue with a discussion on 10G temporary tablespace groups.