Panda + Community Year in Review 2016

What a truly amazing year 2016 turned out to be. One of the main reasons for this was we gave back. In all the business coaching over the years, the most successful people/groups all give back in some way. Simple enough concept, but this past year we stepped it up, and not surprisingly the success that followed has produced outstanding results.  Here are just a few things that were done:

• Rotary Foundation – Paul Harris +1 & +2 – Helping Communities through the Annual Fund & Polio Plus
• Animal Aide – 2 Years worth of Rent for its Thrift Store.
• MS Bike Ride – London to/from Grandbend – Team Butt Ugly raised over $35,000 to end MS.
• Christmas Care St Thomas – Provided 5,000 lbs of Apples for the Christmas Hampers.
• Helped Local Hospital Raise over $60,000 at its annual gala.
• Provided hundreds of meals at local missions and through financial support.
• Supported The Canadian Wildlife Federation & World Wildlife Fund.
• Title Sponsorship of Big Brothers Big Sisters St Thomas Elgin – providing mentoring opportunities for amazing kids.
• Worked on several projects with St Thomas Railway City Rotary Club.
• Worked on several projects with Christmas Care St Thomas.
• Support of Local Legion, Salvation Army and Local Hockey.

2016 has been a huge year for us in the community.  Seeing the smiles on families and kids faces is such a reward. The impact of even the smallest thing is sometimes hard to quantify, and it’s amazing knowing that The Smart Panda Team is out there making a difference. We are really excited about working with our Local Big Brothers Big Sisters program again this year, and setting up a program with our new local STEAM center.

For Rotary 2017, in May we have the Rotary District Conference being hosted by our Rotary Club, it will be a fantastic opportunity to show off our community to all the members of Rotary District 6330. In June a large group of us are heading to Atlanta Georgia to attend the Rotary International Conference.  Combine that with Wade being Rotary President of the Railway City Rotary Club starting in July, it is going to be exciting year working with Rotary!

All the best in ’17.

Cloning Pluggable Database

Well, the first question is what is a pluggable database. In Oracle 12c, Oracle has introduced a multi-tenancy database methodology, and you will see two acronyms all the time “CDB” meaning “Container Database” and PDB is an acronym for “Pluggable Database”. A quick analogy would be to think of a train to understand the difference, you have a train with an engine “CDB” and lets say up to 250 rail cars the “PDB” as working databases. Each car has specific content targeted for specific customers and they are packed and sealed independently specific to the customer. This methodology allows for a better use of resources and controls for large Enterprise setups or to be able to run multiple large enterprise setups within the same architecture. So cloning a database within this type of environment is actually very straight forward.

The Steps:

1. Log into your container database.
2. Close the Pluggable Database you want to clone: alter pluggable database <pdb_name> close immediate;
3. Open the Pluggable Database in read only mode: alter pluggable database <pdb_name> open read only;
4. Create a new directory to place the oracle database files: /u01/newpdb
5. In SQL*Plus: alter system set db_create_file_dest=’/u01/newpdb’;
6. Now its time to clone:
   

   CREATE PLUGGABLE DATABASE newpdb FROM oldpdb
   FILE_NAME_CONVERT=(‘/u01/oldpdb/’,’/u01/newpdb/’)
   PATH_PREFIX = ‘/u01/newpdb’;

7. alter pluggable database newpdb open;

Oracle 12c – Where am I

In the good old days it was relatively easy to figure out what database you were in.  If you do a quick select on v$instance, you are good.

However, in 12c, when we introduce pluggable container databases things get a little more complicated.  When you issue a sqlplus / as sysdba, you will be placed parent container.

Once you are logged in you can change to a pluggable database by issuing:

alter session set container=<my_pluggable_db_name>;

if you issue the command:

show con_id con_name

It will report the container id & container name:

Now that you are in the pluggable database you can use the new view v$pdbs which will report information for the pluggable database that v$instance does for the container database.

If you log into the container database you can select from v$pdbs and it will report all the pluggable databases within the container.