This Log Buffer Edition covers the weekly blog posts of Oracle, SQL Server and MySQL.

Oracle:

• An Index or Disaster, You Choose (It’s The End Of The World As We Know It).
• SQL Monitoring in Oracle Database 12c.
• RMAN Full Backup vs. Level 0 Incremental.
• Auto optimizer stats after CTAS or direct loads in #Oracle 12c.
• How to move …

Yesterday I was discussing with a fellow DBA about ways to check the status of existing and/or past RMAN jobs. Good backup scripts usually write their output to some sort of log file so, checking the output is usually a straight-forward task. However, backup jobs can be scheduled in many different ways (crontab, Grid Control, Scheduled Tasks, etc) and finding the log file may be tricky if you don’t know the environment well.
Furthermore, log files may also have already been overwritten by the next backup or simply just deleted. An alternative way of accessing that information, thus, may come handy.

Fortunately, RMAN keeps the backup metadata around for some time and it can be accessed through the database’s V$ views. Obviously, if you need this information because your database just crashed and needs to be restored, the method described here is useless.

Backup jobs’ status and metadata

A lot of metadata about …