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Pete Finnigan's Oracle Security Weblog

This is the weblog for Pete Finnigan. Pete works in the area of Oracle security and he specialises in auditing Oracle databases for security issues. This weblog is aimed squarely at those interested in the security of their Oracle databases.

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Edwards next post in the series of catpatch.sql issues.



I just found Edward Stanglers next post in the problems with not running catpatch.sql issue entitled "Missing DROP_SEGMENTS from DBA_TAB_MODIFICATIONS". This is part of a feature added in 8i that allows monitoring to be set on a table. When the table is modified significantly (>10%) then the statistics are effectively stale. Then the DBMS_STATS.GATHER_SCHEMA_STATS can be run with "GATHER STALE" to just update those tables that have changed. This is a good performance boost. Ed explains that this data is kept in memory and flushed to a dollar table periodically. The flushing is automatic in 8i and 9i (greater frequency) and can also be done manually. Ed explains that in 9.2.0.5 the DROP_SEGMENTS was added to SYS.MON_MODS$.

This is the subject of Ed's post, the fact that catpatch.sql needs to be run to add this column. Edward then goes on to explain the problems of not running catpatch.sql. Interesting post, again it’s available here.