Yong Huang's Computer Page

Freeware

Oracle Session Statistic Watcher © 2013-
A tool to watch all Oracle sessions for a given statistic.
Old work
- topio for Solaris, Windows, HP-UX, and Linux © 2002-2011
  UNIX top command sorts processes by CPU or memory usage, but not by I/O. My topio program fills the gap.
- Windows oerr for Oracle © 2000-2009,2013
  Windows version of the well-known oerr program previously only available in UNIX
- pstats for Windows © 2004
  Windows Task Manager process list cannot list processes on a remote computer. My pstats program makes up for this shortcoming.
- HPL and HCPL © 1998-2008
  Helps you track books checked out of Houston Public Library and Harris County Public Library
- ckweb © 2000-2004
  Checks web site availability, unique in that it allows you to easily extend its functionality to the limit of your understanding of HTTP protocol, as long as you know the Expect programming language
- DOSCSR © 1996
  Enables use of mouse in DOS, written in assembly when most people were still using Windows3.1 or DOS
- Script archive

Oracle Database

Miscellaneous Oracle Notes © 1999-
My own study notes. Files are named with the most relevant word at beginning (like a book index).
Quick Tips on Linux HugePages © 2015-
Tips on quickly setting up Linux HugePages and on checking its usage in many ways, including new features in 12c. PDF version as published in IOUG's 2015 Tips & Best Practices Booklet.

Oracle Function Call List

Oracle Executables © 2002-
List of executable programs under $ORACLE_HOME/bin directory with descriptions and comments.

Managing Shared Database Environment © 2012
Tips on managing a database that hosts data for many disparate applications. Slightly modified version published in IOUG's SELECT Journal. [Update 2013-07] Oracle 12c multitenancy has addressed many issues discussed in this article.
Shared Pool Purging © 2012
Various methods of purging objects from shared pool. Also published by All China Oracle User Group.
Uncommon Sense About Common Objects © 2009
Published in IOUG's SELECT Journal. Review of DBA_OBJECTS and other views, with significant expansion of what's already published.
Parameter Dependency and the STATISTICS_LEVEL Parameter (PDF version) © 2008
Published in IOUG's SELECT Journal. Dependency between initialization parameters, and statistics_level as an example.
Oracle Viewed from OS © 2008
Presentation given at M. D. Anderson Cancer Center UNIX Users Group and at Houston Oracle Users Group. Currently, OS'es are Linux and Solaris.
Perfmon: performance monitoring tool © 2008-
Process-, not system-, level performance monitoring is more useful in troubleshooting.
Old work
- Oracle Regular Expressions © 2003,2006,2009
  How to use regular expressions before 10g.
- Oracle Q&As © 2002,2003
  My answers to questions posted to comp.databases.oracle.server newsgroup, which I like to browse in spare time. If a message archived here differs from the one posted to the group, trust this one instead. Newer messages are not archived.
- Oracle Idiosyncrasies © 2000-2009
  Some of Oracle's strange but generally harmless behaviors. Mostly short items. Long items are separate articles, such as
- Oracle on Windows, strace.exe and Process Explorer © 2004
  Trying to understand the Windows system service calls made by oracle.exe.
- Oracle Process: Tracing and /proc © 2001,2002
  Same thing, but on UNIX.
- Delayed Logging Block Cleanout © 2002
  There's too much confusion about this Oracle 7.3 - 8.0.6 initialization parameter.
- Oracle and Perl © 2001,2002
  Actually not limited to Perl, this article discusses two methodologies for a programming language to access the Oracle database.
- How to Get Sequence Next or "Current" Value Without Side Effect? © 2001,2005
  Want to know the next value of a sequence but don't want to increment it?
- How Oracle Stores Integers © 2000
  A number 123 is not stored as 123 in the datafile; instead it's c2 2 18. This article tells you how to interpret this part of your datafile dump and its practical implication.
- Semantically Dependent Attributes © 2000
  A.k.a Arc Relationship. Discusses several strategies to implement this design.
- Two Types of Oracle Deadlocks © 1999-2010
  Description of two types of Oracle deadlocks and how to resolve them.
- First Normal Form Compliant Bad Design © 1999
  A verbose, possibly useless, pure academic talk about a common misconception of First Normal Form.
- Which Count Is Faster? © 2000
  Which runs faster? Count(*), count(1), count(PK) or count(rowid)?

Miscellaneous

My Web scraping projects: Book renewal notice, Dow Jones index alert, ...; Side projects may benefit others and yourself © May 2026
Old work
- Multipath © 2013
  How to read multipath -l; script to check failed paths and alert
- Running Process Environment © 2005,2006
  A general software troubleshooting tip.
- Solaris adb and crash Command Examples © 2002-2004
  Command examples from other sources (plus a script to print adb macros that don't need symbols). Only through these examples will you learn to do Solaris system debugging. I have no plan to study mdb dcmds. Sorry.
- Tips on Handling Log Files © 2002,2010
  A new way to get notification on errors in server log files; tips on handling large log files.
- Some Perl Benchmark Results © 1999
  Do you know substr is much faster than split?...etc
- "URL is Password" Security Strategy © 1999
  A fair review of this common Web security strategy.
- How to Fight Spam © 1998,2005
  This article may help you read email headers so you can identify the true origin. Spammers hide their originating point in all sorts of ways.
- How to Buy Computer Books © 1999,2007
  Where to buy cheap, how to know if it's good
  - Yong's Computer Book Reviews 2000-2006
    Every book was fully read and thoroughly cross-reference checked.
- How to Find a Computer Job Without a Computer Degree? © 1997-2001
  Greatly inspired some of my friends, and myself even today.
- HTML character entities 1-3680 © 1997,2003
  This character entity chart shows how your browser displays HTML character entities, i.e. &#some_number;.
- OS notes