Wordpress Fatal error: Call to undefined method PHPMailer::getCustomHeaders()

With numerous new themes and new versions of the wordpress, when you try to publish some post or page or try to send email or try to use contact form, you might get following error:

Fatal error: Call to undefined method PHPMailer::getCustomHeaders()

Opatchauto Session failed: Parameter validation failed

While applying PSU on Grid Home in 12c, due to the patch conflict, you might have to rollback few patches before you could apply the PSU.

After rolling back the patches from grid home, when you try to run the opatch analyze command again, you might encounter following error:

Step by Step Jan 2016 PSU Patch Apply on 12c Grid and RDBMS Homes in Linux

Following step by step action plan is for single instance database stored on ASM in 12.1.0.2 on Linux (OEL 6 64 bit in this case.)

Step	Description	ETA
1	Update the OPATCH utility: For Database home: $ unzip p6880880_121010_LINUX.zip -d /u01/app/oracle/product/12.1.0/db_1 $ /u01/app/oracle/product/12.1.0/db_1/OPatch/opatch version For Grid home: $ unzip p6880880_121010_LINUX.zip -d /u01/app/oracle/12.1.0.2/grid $ /u01/app/oracle/12.1.0.2/grid/OPatch/opatch version	15 min
2	Create ocm.rsp file: Note: Press Enter/Return key and don't provide any input and say Yes. $ export ORACLE_HOME=/u01/app/oracle/12.1.0.2/grid $ $ORACLE_HOME/OPatch/ocm/bin/emocmrsp -no_banner -output /stage/ocm.rsp	5 min
3	Validation of Oracle Inventory Before beginning patch application, check the consistency of inventory information for GI home and each database home to be patched. Run the following command as respective Oracle home owner to check the consistency. For database home: $ /u01/app/oracle/product/12.1.0/db_1/OPatch/opatch lsinventory -detail -oh /u01/app/oracle/product/12.1.0/db_1 For Grid home: $ /u01/app/oracle/12.1.0.2/grid/OPatch/opatch lsinventory -detail -oh /u01/app/oracle/12.1.0.2/grid If this command succeeds, it lists the Oracle components that are installed in the home. Save the output so you have the status prior to the patch apply.	5 min
4	Stage the Patch: $ mkdir /stage/PSUpatch $ cp /stage/p22191349_121020_Linux-x86-64.zip /stage/PSUpatch Check that the directory is empty. $ cd /stage/PSUpatch $ ls Unzip the patch as grid home owner. $ unzip p22191349_121020_.zip	5 min
5	One-off Patch Conflict Detection and Resolution: Run it with root user: /u01/app/oracle/12.1.0.2/grid/OPatch/opatchauto apply /stage/PSUpatch/22191349 -analyze -ocmrf /stage/ocm.rsp It will ask to rollback identical patches like this: Analyzing patch(es) on "/u01/app/oracle/12.1.0.2/grid" ... Patch "/stage/PSUpatch/22191349/21436941" is already installed on "/u01/app/oracle/12.1.0.2/grid". Please rollback the existing identical patch first. Patch "/stage/PSUpatch/22191349/21948341" is already installed on "/u01/app/oracle/12.1.0.2/grid". Please rollback the existing identical patch first. Patch "/stage/PSUpatch/22191349/21948344" is already installed on "/u01/app/oracle/12.1.0.2/grid". Please rollback the existing identical patch first. Patch "/stage/PSUpatch/22191349/21948354" is already installed on "/u01/app/oracle/12.1.0.2/grid". Please rollback the existing identical patch first. So first rollback above 4 patches by going to their directory and issuing with grid owner from grid home: opatch rollback -id 21948354 -local -oh /u01/app/oracle/12.1.0.2/grid (Repeat for all 4 patches) Note: In some cases, weirdly, I had to shutdown the has services with root user before patch rollback by using: /u01/app/oracle/12.1.0.2/grid/bin/crsctl stop has -f After this again run: /u01/app/oracle/12.1.0.2/grid/OPatch/opatchauto apply /stage/PSUpatch/22191349 -analyze -ocmrf /stage/ocm.rsp If analyze command fail then use this with root user: $ORA_GI_HOME/crs/install/roothas.pl –postpatch It will start the has services too. Then again run the analyze command as given above: It will show something like: Analyzing patch(es) on "/u01/app/oracle/12.1.0.2/grid" ... Patch "/stage/PSUpatch/22191349/21436941" successfully analyzed on "/u01/app/oracle/12.1.0.2/grid" for apply. Patch "/stage/PSUpatch/22191349/21948341" successfully analyzed on "/u01/app/oracle/12.1.0.2/grid" for apply. Patch "/stage/PSUpatch/22191349/21948344" successfully analyzed on "/u01/app/oracle/12.1.0.2/grid" for apply. Patch "/stage/PSUpatch/22191349/21948354" successfully analyzed on "/u01/app/oracle/12.1.0.2/grid" for apply. Now you are good to apply the patch. Proceed to next step.	10 min
6	Apply the Patch: (Note: This should apply patch in both GI and RDBMS Home but its unreliable in that sense so after this completes, we need to check opatch lsinventory to make sure that it also applied patches in RDBMS Home) As root user, execute the following command: # /u01/app/oracle/12.1.0.2/grid/OPatch/opatchauto apply /stage/PSUpatch/22191349 -ocmrf /stage/ocm.rsp In case if it doesn’t apply in RDBMS Home, then run: /u01/app/oracle/product/12.1.0/db_1/OPatch/opatchauto apply /stage/PSUpatch/22191349 -oh /u01/app/oracle/product/12.1.0/db_1 -ocmrf /stage/ocm.rsp Make sure the above applies both OCW and PSU patches. You can verify that from opatch lsinventory. If only OCW patch is present in output and no PSU (which is likely the case), then issue following from Oracle home with oracle database owner after shutting down database: /u01/app/oracle/product/12.1.0/db_1/OPatch/opatch apply -oh /u01/app/oracle/product/12.1.0/db_1 -local /stage/PSUpatch/22191349/21948354	60 min
7	Loading Modified SQL Files into the Database: % sqlplus /nolog SQL> Connect / as sysdba SQL> startup SQL> quit % cd $ORACLE_HOME/OPatch % ./datapatch -verbose	60 min
8	Check for the list of patches applied to the database. SQL> select action_time, patch_id, patch_uid, version, status, bundle_series, description from dba_registry_sqlpatch;	5 min

exec_as_oracle_script

There might be a situation where executing some DDL in pluggable database may cause the following error:

ORA-65040: operation not allowed from within a pluggable database

This error could occur if a tablespace is being dropped from within PDB and this tablespace is a former default tablespace having some of the system objects. Even system objects cannot be moved with simple alter statements from within PDBs.

So in order to move these objects from within PDBs, you should be using procedure dbms_pdb.exec_as_oracle_script which is undocumented so far.

For example:

exec dbms_pdb.exec_as_oracle_script('alter table . move tablespace ');

From My Oracle Support, Doc ID 1943303.1 lists:

--   This procedure enables execution of certain restricted statements (most DDLs) on metadata-linked objects, from within a PDB.

Got Published in AUSOUG's Foresight Online Spring 2015

AUSOUG's Foresight Online Spring 2015 Edition is the premier publication by Australian Oracle User Group.

Following are highlights of this edition:

• President's Message
• DBA Article: Automated Testing of Oracle BPM Suite 12c Processes with SOAP UI - Peter Kemp, State Revenue Office, Victoria
• DBA Article: Best Practices for Oracle on Pure Storage
• Apps Article: Performance Review Data Capture - Brad Sayer, More4Apps
• DBA / Dev Article: Database Developers – Feeling Left Out of Agile? - D Nowrood, Dell Software
• Apps Article:  Cost-effective alternative to Oracle Discoverer and BI Suite - Wilhelm Hamman, Excel4apps
• DBA Article: DBA101 - characterset corruption - Paul Guerin, HP
• Quick Tips 1: Five Reasons to Upgrade to APEX 5.0 - Scott Wesley, Sage Computing Services
• Quick Tips 2: Last Successful login time in 12c - Fahd Mirza Chughtai, The Pythian Group

Sharding in Oracle 12c Database

Sharding for Oracle DBAs is still pretty much an alien or pretty new concept. In the realms of big data, this term is being used quite extensively though.

What is Sharding in simple words:

Sharding is partitioning. Horizontal partitioning to be exact.

Sharding means partitioning a table rows on basis of some criteria and storing that partitioned rows of table (i.e. a shard) on different database servers. These database servers are cheap low commodity servers.

The benefits include smaller data to manage, smaller backups, faster reads, and faster response time for the queries.

Just like existing partitioning option in the Oracle database, there are generally three kinds of sharding:

Range Sharding
List Sharding
Hash Sharding

The news out there on social media is that Oracle 12c next version is coming up with Sharding option. That is pretty exciting and let's see what they come up in this regard.

ORA-01917: user or role 'PDB_DBA' does not exist

I manually created a container database (CDB) 12.1.0.2.0 in my Linux 6.4 based virutal machine. After creating it, I tried to create a pluggable database but got following error:

Amazon S3 to Glacier - Cloud ILM

Falling in love with Kate Upton is easy but more easier is to be swept off your feet by information lifecycle management (ILM) in the Amazon Web Services (AWS). Simple, easily-configurable, fast, reliable, cost effective and proven are the words which describe it.

Pythian has been involved with ILM for a long time. With various flavors of databases and systems, Pythian has been overseeing creation, alteration, and flow of data for a long time until it becomes obsolete. That is why AWS's ILM resonates perfectly well with Pythian's expertise.

Amazon S3 is an object store for short term storage, whereas Amazon Glacier is their cloud archiving offering or storage for long term. Rules can be defined on the information to specify and automate its lifecycle.

Following screenshot shows the rules being configured on objects from S3 bucket to Glacier and then permanent deletion. 90 days after creation if an object, it will be moved to Glacier, and then after 1 year, it will be permanently deleted. Look at the graphical representation of lifecycle as how intuitive it is.

Last Successful login time in 12c

One cool small yet valuable feature in Oracle 12c is the display of 'Last Successful login time'. If authentication is from the OS level, then it isn't shown. A small demo is as follows:

\d in Vertica

A quick neat way to list down important and oft-needed information like names of databases, schemas, users, tables, projections etc. We can also use patterns with the '\d' to narrow down the results. Let's see it in action: