I wanted to get some data off an agent listing website and into a spreadsheet. I’d been meaning to play around with python for web scraping and this was the perfect excuse: There were just enough results that it would take longer to manually copy and paste them than to write a little python program. (I never want to automate something that will take less time to do than to automate, as long as I’m only going to do it once or twice…)
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Category: Scripts
What’s in a name? or rather, in the SSA Names data
One of the amazing things about being a DBA/developer in 2016 is the sheer amount of freely available, downloadable data to play with. One fun publicly available data sets is the American Social Security Administration names data. It contains all names for which SSNs were issued for each year, with the number of occurrences (although names with <5 occurrences are not included to protect individual privacy).
“What do you mean there’s line breaks in the address?” said SQLLDR
I had a large-ish CSV to load and a problem: line breaks inside some of the delimited fields.
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Tip of the day: Always put this in your .bashrc
if you like to scp:
# If not running interactively, don't do anything [[ $- == *i* ]] || return
Otherwise scp will fail without error – it’s a known bug.
My .bashrc
A RAC DBA needs to keep at least two sets of environment variables handy: one for the Grid/ASM home, and one for the database home. Here's how I set up my .bashrc to make that easy.
Find your current background process trace files
In my work for Oracle RAC Support, I have noticed that people sometimes identify the wrong background process trace files… for example, uploading an old LMON trace file instead of the current one. Here are some one-liners to identify the current background traces. Read more