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Thursday, May 26, 2011

VI trick of the year

Sometimes the faster you type the slower you are.

Yesterday I was working on a configuration file, commenting and uncommenting about 10 different lines. Being a somewhat fast typist, the keyboard gymnastics required to add "--" to the beginning of 10 lines of code wasn't daunting enough to make me consider better ways to get the job done.

Those keyboard gymnastics consisted of the following 6 keypresses per line commented out:
i to insert
-- to comment the line out
ESC to go back to command mode
down arrow
then zero to go to the beginning of the line

I suppose if this had been 25 or 50 or whatever that unknowable mental threshold of "too many lines", I would have used awk or sed to get the job done.

My new coworker saw what I was doing, and asked why I didn't use the repeat command. Que? I asked?

Apparently hitting a period while in command mode will repeat the last insert/append that took place in edit mode. So simply made the change once in edit mode, then hit "." to repeat on the next line.

Ok, maybe not the "trick of the year". Maybe trick of the day is more appropriate, but I'm sure this is one of those tips that I'll be using on a daily basis -- a somewhat year changing event.

Thursday, May 19, 2011

Thanks to this blog post and metalink doc 741004.1, learned some fun stuff about how an Oracle agent determines the amount of free memory available on a Solaris host.




ORACLE_HOME=/u01/app/oracle/product/agent11g
export ORACLE_HOME
PATH=$ORACLE_HOME/bin:$PATH
export PATH

$ORACLE_HOME/bin/nmupm osLoad | awk -F"|" '{print $14}'


Now how to figure out why this would be so wildly different than vmstat...

Friday, May 13, 2011

Insert update and deleting records in a view

Recently a vendor gave me a vague request to grant "write access" to a view. Remembering an error a user had shown me in the past, I replied off the cuff that one can't simply write to a view.

I created the following test to prove that I was right, and you'll see that I proved myself wrong:

drop user u_owner;
create user u_owner identified by pass2pass;
alter user u_owner default tablespace users;
alter user u_owner quota unlimited on users;
grant create session to u_owner;
grant create table to u_owner;
grant create view to u_owner;

drop user u_viewer;
create user u_viewer identified by pass2pass;
grant create session to u_viewer;

conn u_owner/pass2pass;

create table tb_test (v_int1 int);
create view vw_test as select v_int1 from tb_test;
grant select, insert, update, delete on vw_test to u_viewer;

conn u_viewer/pass2pass;

select * from u_owner.vw_test;
insert into u_owner.vw_test values (1);
select * from u_owner.vw_test;
update u_owner.vw_test set v_int1 = 2;
select * from u_owner.vw_test;
delete u_owner.vw_test where v_int1 = 2;
select * from u_owner.vw_test;
conn / as sysdba;
drop user u_owner cascade;
drop user u_viewer;

exit;


So as it turns out you absolutely can insert / update / delete into views. Still trying to make sense of it, but it *is* possible.