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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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A nice paper on latch internals



I Just wrote about a useful PL/SQL function that returns an MD5 sum of a string that I found on the DBA-Village mailing list. On the same mailing list i found an interesting pointer to a paper. The page on DBA-Village's site is titled http://www.dba-village.com/village/dvp_links.LinkDetail?LinkIdA=1949 - (broken link) Inner look on Oracle latches. This points at a paper titled http://www.wisdomforce.com/dweb/resources/docs/internals_latches.pdf - (broken link) Inner look on Oracle latches and is written by David Gornshtein and Boris Tamarkin of http://www.wisdomforce.com - (broken link) Wisdom Force technologies Inc.

This is an excellent paper that goes into some great detail on latches. There are some internal looks at X$ tables and also some examples of use of oradebug. The paper covers "what is an Oracle latch", latches and enqueues, Oracle latch internals, how processes sleep/wakeup mechanism is working for the process waiting in latch, latch contention identification and finally problems with latches.

This is a good paper and very detailed. It is not about security but I liked it because of its internals and detailed information.