Pete Finnigan's Oracle Security Weblog

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 "Inner look on Oracle latches". This points at a paper titled "Inner look on Oracle latches" and is written by David Gornshtein and Boris Tamarkin of 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.