powershell -noprofile -command "$o=New-Object DirectoryServices.DirectorySearcher; $o.SearchRoot=New-Object DirectoryServices.DirectoryEntry;$o.Filter='samaccountname='+$ENV:USERNAME;write-host ($o.FindOne().Properties.mail)" | clip

save this as “C:\WINDOWS\E.BAT”

Then, when you have to enter your email in a form or document or login screen,
[⊞+R] [e] [enter] [CTRL+V]
4 keystrokes (+ 2 mod)

Explanation :

C:\>powershell -noprofile
Windows PowerShell
Copyright (C) 2009 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

PS C:\> $o=New-Object DirectoryServices.DirectorySearcher;
### new object to browse Microsoft AD
PS C:\> $o.SearchRoot=New-Object DirectoryServices.DirectoryEntry;
### the base dn
PS C:\> $o.Filter='samaccountname='+$ENV:USERNAME;
### the search filter, your Username
PS C:\> $o.FindOne().Properties.mail
### find one (not necessarly 100% safe) and print the mail property
laurentschneider@example.com

First, load the Oracle and the .NET assemblies

[void] [Reflection.Assembly]::LoadFile("C:\oracle\product\11.2.0\client_1\ODP.NET\bin\2.x\Oracle.DataAccess.dll")
[void] [Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("Drawing")
[void] [Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("Windows.Forms")

Now, let’s retrieve EMP in a powershell array. I hope one of my reader will advise me on a better way

$connection=New-Object Oracle.DataAccess.Client.OracleConnection("Data Source=DB01; User Id=scott; password=tiger")
$connection.open()
$command=new-object Oracle.DataAccess.Client.OracleCommand("select ename from emp",$connection)
$reader = $command.ExecuteReader()
$a = @()
while ($reader.Read()) {
  $a = $a + $reader.GetString(0)
}
$connection.close()

last, let’s create a simple window (a Form) with a list (a List box) where you can select an item with a doubleclick.

Initialize the list with the array from EMP

$form = New-Object Windows.Forms.Form
$form.Text = "Select employee !"
$form.Size = New-Object Drawing.Size(640,480)
$form.StartPosition = "CenterScreen"
$listbox = New-Object Windows.Forms.ListBox
$listbox.Location = New-Object Drawing.Point(10,10)
$listbox.Size = New-Object Drawing.Size(620,460)
$listbox.Items.AddRange($a)
$listbox.Add_DoubleClick({$form.Close();})
$form.Controls.Add($listbox)
$form.Topmost = $True
$form.Add_Shown({$form.Activate()})
[void] $form.ShowDialog()

Show the result (or use it in your powershell scripts)

PS> $listbox.SelectedItems[0]
SCOTT

Pretty cool! No compiler needed, directly run from the powershell prompt

Why?

First, the character set did not support it.

select * from v$nls_parameters where PARAMETER like '%CHARACTERSET%';

PARAMETER                      VALUE
------------------------------ ---------------
NLS_CHARACTERSET               WE8ISO8859P1
NLS_NCHAR_CHARACTERSET         AL16UTF16

If you are still using WE8ISO8859P1, consider migrating to WE8MSWIN1252 using csalter

sqlplus "/ as sysdba" @?/rdbms/admin/csminst
csscan "'sys/sys as sysdba'" full=y tochar=we8mswin1252 array=1024000 process=5
sqlplus "/ as sysdba" @?/rdbms/admin/csalter.plb

It is not always that straight forward, check output from csscan (scan.*) carefully before running csalter.

Ok, now retry

H:\>set NLS_LANG=american_america.we8pc850

H:\>sqlplus.exe scott/tiger

SQL*Plus: Release 11.1.0.6.0 - Production on Thu May 10 11:28:01 2012

Copyright (c) 1982, 2007, Oracle.  All rights reserved.

Connected to:
Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition Release 11.2.0.3.0 - 64bit Production
With the Partitioning, OLAP, Data Mining and Real Application Testing options

SQL> select chr(128) from dual;

C
-
■

Not good!

Obviously, the PC850 client character is not good enough. Let’s switch to mswin1252 on the client.

H:\>chcp 1252
Active code page: 1252

H:\>set NLS_LANG=american_america.we8mswin1252

H:\>sqlplus.exe scott/tiger

Connected to:
Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition Release 11.2.0.3.0 - 64bit Production
With the Partitioning, OLAP, Data Mining and Real Application Testing options

SQL> select chr(128) from dual;

C
-
Ç

Well, what’s missing now? The font ! Let’s change it from “Raster Fonts” to “Lucida Console”. Either by clicking on the command com properties, or even dynamically with that gem (tested on XP) !

H:\>type Lucida.cs
using System;
using System.Runtime.InteropServices;

public class Lucida
{
  const int STD_OUT_HANDLE = -11;

  [DllImport("kernel32.dll", SetLastError = true)]
  static extern int SetConsoleFont(IntPtr hOut, uint dwFontSize);

  [DllImport("kernel32.dll", SetLastError = true)]
  static extern IntPtr GetStdHandle(int dwType);

  public static void Main()
  {
    SetConsoleFont(GetStdHandle(STD_OUT_HANDLE), 6);
  }
}

H:\>csc Lucida.cs
Microsoft (R) Visual C# 2010 Compiler version 4.0.30319.1
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
H:\>Lucida

H:\>sqlplus.exe scott/tiger

Connected to:
Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition Release 11.2.0.3.0 - 64bit Production
With the Partitioning, OLAP, Data Mining and Real Application Testing options

SQL> select chr(128) from dual;

C
-
€

PS> Add-Type -outputtype consoleapplication -outputassembly helloworld.exe 'public class helloworld{public static void Main(){System.Console.WriteLine("hello world");}}'
PS> .\helloworld.exe
hello world

Probably my first .exe this century

If you have an old license key, 9.6 or older, it may complain at installation time, just ignore. It will be fine at run time.

Enhanced TAB browsing experience, nicer and more visible colors for your connection (production=red…), read-only connections.

Currently it still requires a 32bit clients, even when running on a 64bit Operating System.

$ dbv BLOCKSIZE=8192 file=sysaux01.dbf
DBV-00201: Block, DBA 12629823, marked corrupt for invalid redo application
...
DBVERIFY - Verification complete

Total Pages Examined         : 131072
Total Pages Processed (Data) : 69691
Total Pages Failing   (Data) : 0
Total Pages Processed (Index): 28669
Total Pages Failing   (Index): 0
Total Pages Processed (Other): 15755
Total Pages Processed (Seg)  : 0
Total Pages Failing   (Seg)  : 0
Total Pages Empty            : 16957
Total Pages Marked Corrupt   : 9
Total Pages Influx           : 0
Total Pages Encrypted        : 0
Highest block SCN            : 3220271881 (11.3220271881)

For the dba number, identify the block

def dba=12585405
col block_id new_v block_id
col file_id new_v file_id
select dbms_utility.data_block_address_block(&dba) block_id, 
dbms_utility.data_block_address_file(&dba) file_id from dual;

  BLOCK_ID    FILE_ID
---------- ----------
      2493          3

From the block_id/file_id, identify the segment

col owner new_v table_owner 
col segment_name new_v segment_name
select owner,segment_name,segment_type from dba_extents where file_id=&file_id and &BLOCK_ID between block_id and block_id + blocks - 1;
OWNER
------------------------------
SEGMENT_NAME
-----------------------------------
SEGMENT_TYPE
------------------
SYS
SYS_IL0000008786C00008$$
LOBINDEX

If it is a lob, identify the column and data_type

select tablespace_name,owner, table_name, column_name, data_type from dba_lobs join
dba_tab_columns using (owner, table_name, column_name) where segment_name =
'&segment_name' and owner='&table_owner';
TABLESPACE_NAME                OWNER
------------------------------ ------------------------------
TABLE_NAME                     COLUMN_NAME
------------------------------ ------------------------------
DATA_TYPE
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SYSAUX                         SYS
WRI$_DBU_FEATURE_USAGE         FEATURE_INFO
CLOB

If you are lucky, you will find a useless segment that you will just drop. Or maybe you will be able to move all segments in another tablespace and drop the tablespace with the corrupt blocks.

If you are pretty unlucky like me today, you will find sys segments in system or sysaux.

Either you export all users data and import them again in a new database (but this means downtime), or you start moving the segments in another tablespace. Or dropping and recreating them.
Check Tablespace maintenance tasks

Once dropped or moved or emptied, you may still see the corrupted blocks. Do not forget to purge the recyclebin, either with PURGE DBA_RECYCLEBIN or PURGE TABLESPACE tbs1 USER usr1

Even then the corruption may belong to no more segment but still appear in dbverify. One workaround is to fill the tablespace (check it does not extend) with a dummy table

create table t(x number, y varchar2(4000) default lpad('x',4000,'x')) tablespace tbs1;

exec while true loop insert into t(x) select rownum r from dual connect by level<10000;commit;end loop

exec while true loop insert into t(x) select rownum r from dual connect by level<100;commit;end loop

exec while true loop insert into t(x,y) select rownum r,'x' from dual;commit;end loop

exec while true loop insert into t(x,y) values (null,null);commit;end loop

drop table t;

Run dbv again and again until you get completly rid of errors. If you drop and recreate sys objects, or even if you simply move them out of the sys tablespace, dictionary corruption and ora-600 is possible. But well, you had corruption anyway …

[int](get-date).dayofweek and (Get-WmiObject Win32_LocalTime).dayofweek both refer Sunday as day 0.

PS> get-date
Wednesday, 11. April 2012 18:31:52
PS C:\svn> [int](get-date).dayofweek
3
PS C:\svn> (Get-WmiObject Win32_LocalTime).dayofweek
3

Consistently and unfortunately for me, the week does start on Sunday. And not on Monday.

To get week ending on Sunday, lets add 6 for Monday (5 for Tuesday, and so on) to dayofweek and get the 7-modulo

PS> (6+(get-date).dayofweek)%7
2

Substract it from day of month to truncate to Monday

PS> (get-date).day - (6+(get-date).dayofweek)%7
9

First day of current week is Monday 9th

Now add 5 to get the first Day of month between 0 and 6
Divide by 7…
add 1 to get first week=1 (and not 0).

Truncate

PS> [math]::floor(((get-date).day - (6+(get-date).dayofweek)%7 + 5)/7)+1
3

Which slicely differs from weekinmonth when 1st of month is Sunday !

PS> (Get-WmiObject Win32_LocalTime).weekinmonth
2

Pfeww…

SQL> select + 'x' from dual;

+
-
x

it does not convert to number as 0 + ’1′ would do

expected behavior, Linux

$ TZ=NZST-12NZDT,M10.1.0/2,M3.3.0/3 date
Sat Mar 17 00:14:54 NZDT 2012
$ TZ=Pacific/Auckland date
Sat Mar 17 00:14:58 NZDT 2012

unexpected behavior, AIX

$ TZ=Pacific/Auckland date
Sat Mar 17 00:15:50 GMT+13:00 2012
$ TZ=NZST-12NZDT,M10.1.0/2,M3.3.0/3 date
Fri Mar 16 23:15:52 NZST 2012

The consequence : date, and all other unix commands like ls, who, ps that display the date in human readable format, and all programs that use ctime are affected

$ TZ=NZST-12NZDT,M10.1.0/2,M3.3.0/3 perl -e 'use POSIX;print ctime(time)'
Fri Mar 16 23:19:51 2012

Reference and link to the fixes : www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=isg3T1013017

In Toad 11.5.0.38. Greatly replace the “right-click” + “close tab”