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Beginning of Expedition Database Cleaning

The intent of these processes is to

  • Honor moratorium (i.e. remove previous expedition's data and content that new participants have no business using).
  • Establish a variety of setups required for a new expedition (project) and its personnel to do their data management jobs.

Not all of the activities discussed here are required for every expedition. The intent is to also provide history, background for exceptional cases or variations that do come up. Sometimes the process is more creative than routine. We want you to have a foundation for those times.

Q: Where should I run these processes?
A: It is recommended to conduct BOX database cleaning processes on a host other than your laptop.

  • If you think your counterpart may need to check on the process when they come on shift. Consider using a shared profile like SHIP\daq on the DEV host or the BUILD (code and dependency repositories) host.
  • If you have no counterpart consider using your Active Directory profile on the DEV host or the BUILD host.

The rationale is that some of these processes take a long time. Perhaps you don't want to tie up your laptop while waiting. Historically the processes which deleted result records and defragmented storage would run for worst cases of 9-14 hours. On current ODAs and versions of Oracle the longest processes we have take no more than 90 minutes to complete.

Q: What tool should I use to run BOX database cleaning and most other data management processes?
A: SQL Developer.

All the instructions and explicit details in the procedural notes expect that a copy of SQL Developer is configured for appropriate access via your DBA credentials--whether that be on your laptop (not recommended), or a copy of the tool installed on the DEV or BUILD hosts. It is your responsibility to be familiar when re-establishing that connectivity if it is broken. We frequently update tools like SQL Developer to keep pace with Oracle technology changes and security fixes.

Formerly these instructions were written so as to generate log files that you and your colleagues could inspect. We no longer do that in this process since Feb 2023 (Exp 398).

If you are

Q: A database process is taking too long, I want another way to check what's happening.
A:

  • Open an independent Oracle session via PuTTY or SQL Developer.
  • Run commands against the tables being operated on.

 It is not always effective due to database security and models of atomicity, completeness, independence, and durability. Amount of parallelism changes how Oracle manages this information too.

Q: My command-line login is failing. What are some less usual causes?
A:

For command-line tools--like sql, sqlplus, rman: if your password has spaces or symbol characters, you must quote the password, e.g.

> sql x@yz
Password:"@ s3cr3t fr45e"
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