Timothy E. Archer

One minor thing I do on all of my unix based Oracle database servers is setup the shell prompt to give me some key information. Namely, I always want to see my current directory, the user I am logged in as, the server I am logged into, and my current ORACLE_SID. Since I typically have many servers, oracle instances, and shell sessions open to manage them all, its easy to get confused as to what server and database your executing commands against.

My solution to this is to setup my shell prompt to show all of this information. The instructions I provide below will show you how to do this on a RedHat Linux AS3 system. It should work on most other Linux systems, and needs minor modifications for use on Sun Solaris systems. continue reading…

Are you looking to backup your MySQL database? My site runs with MySQL as its backend database, and as such I wanted a backup script I can just drop in.

I have found a great open source utility called AutoMySQLBackup which can be downloaded from SourceForge.net. There is no need to reinvent the wheel writing your own, this one works extremely well.

Here are the steps I followed to configure this script: continue reading…