Advanced Oracle Utilities: The Definitive Reference by Rampant
TechPress is written by top Oracle database experts (Bert Scalzo, Donald Burleson, and Steve Callan). The following
is an excerpt from the book.
Binary Discovery
Finding the new executables is slightly more
difficult than finding new database objects.
The standard method is to use the dircmp command in UNIX to
compare two different directories and reports the differences, something
like this:
dircmp –s <directory 1> <directory 2>
The –s option of the dircmp
command tells UNIX to eliminate the matches from the output.
There is no similar command in
Windows to compare directories and it is also more difficult to access
the physical drives on separate Windows machines than UNIX machines.
If nothing else, the DIR/B DOS command can be used to list the
files in a directory and the output can be redirected to a file.
Then the two files can then be compared using any number of tools
from WinDiff to Oracle external tables.
UNIX/Linux Utilities
for the Oracle Professional
UNIX provides many extra utilities to help execute
UNIX command for Oracle:
-
Grep - The grep command is short for
Generalized Regular Expression parser.
-
Awk – The awk name is short for Aho,
Weinberger, and Kernighan, the folks who created the awk utility.
-
Sed – The sed utility is short for String
Editor. The sed utility is used to replace strings in UNIX files.
-
Crontab – UNIX program scheduler
-
Vi – text editor
Introduction to the UNIX Architecture
An operating system is the computer program that
allows the software and the hardware to work together.
The OS is the software responsible for managing all external
hardware and executing all programs.
In an Oracle database, the database software works
with UNIX to manage the interaction between UNIX and the Oracle data
files. In addition, Oracle
uses numerous UNIX structures for storing message logs, trace files and
other housekeeping.
The details of the UNIX operating system are explored
in Chapter 2, but for now, the major features of UNIX and how Oracle
interacts with UNIX will be covered.
Dialects of UNIX
Through the 1990s, UNIX continued to evolve and gain
popularity as UNIX servers moved into mainstream data processing.
Many different unique dialects of UNIX have developed, each
unique to each UNIX vendor, and today’s Oracle professional must be
fluent in many different dialects (often called flavors) of UNIX. With
the demise of DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) and its VMS operating
system, Unix and its various flavors have become the dominant operating
systems for the Oracle software.
One of the biggest problems for the Oracle DBA who
wishes to work in the UNIX environment is that there has never been a
single, unified UNIX product with total compatibility from one system to
another. Most differences have arisen from different versions developed
by three major early UNIX dialects - AT&T UNIX,
Berkeley’s BSD UNIX and Microsoft’s XENIX
product. All of these Unix
flavors are similar, but no two are exactly the same.
Today, the most popular dialects of UNIX include
Hewlett-Packard UNIX (HPUX), IBM’s
UNIX (AIX), Sun UNIX (Solaris), and the popular Linux dialects (Red Hat
Linux, SUSE Linux). This book is geared toward all versions of Oracle8i
and Oracle9i, Oracle 10g, and Oracle 11g, and included are dialects of
UNIX like HP/UX, IBM’s AIX, Sun’s Solaris, and Oracle’s unbreakable
Linux. Some commands in IRIX,
DEC-UNIX and UNIXWARE will also be shown.
