Tuesday, December 06, 2005

Search engines are not Zen

I decided that I should make myself a list of questions I've never been able to resolve, or that were very difficult to research, because they don't "search" well. That is, in everything from Metalink's Search bar to Google, it's hard to come up with relevant results.

For instance,

- I'm trying to use RMAN DUPLICATE, and it does indeed produce the data files on the auxiliary database, but it doesn't create a controlfile. The documentation clearly says it should. Searching on terms like RMAN DUPLICATE controlfile not generated only brings up more pages saying that it should.

- All sorts of questions like such-and-such service DOESN'T start, program WON'T run, logfile ISN'T created. Negation - "not" - is clearly a failing of a typical search. Searching for green eggs no ham will find you 10,000 pages on green eggs AND ham, with the one page on "My green eggs came without ham!" buried anonymously as result #4,312.

I'm not sure what I'll ultimately want to do with this list. But I began to wonder, more broadly, if someone out there had already started assembling issues of unsearchable questions. Ironically, Can't Find On Google is very easy to find on Google.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I have read other people talking about problems with rman and duplicating the control files. ( Is this a new feature only with 10.2 ? ). Anyhow unfortunately I think the only way to get progress on that item is to open a tar with oracle.

Unknown said...

I hate to open TARs, but I did end up doing it this time. It turned out that, because I hadn't specified a sort_area_size and sort_area_retained_size in the auxiliary instance's init.ora, the auxiliary instance was working intolerably slow and - this is the unexplained part - died without warning or explanation as a result.

You're not supposed to need sort_area_size and sort_area_retained_size in 10g, because setting sga_max_size is supposed to handle all those lesser memory details automatically. It turns out, however, that this lovely automatic memory management (which I really do like) doesn't work under RMAN - so in this case, I needed to go back to using the old-fashioned parameters.