Save some disk space - One Reminder and a Cool Windows Command

CPU Reminder

It’s the time of the year when the January CPU is released. I’d like to remind you to think about cleaning up your obsolete backups from $ORACLE_HOME/.patch_storage directory (the ones that are not needed anymore for rollback purposes).

Starting from 10g R2 Oracle backs up the affected libraries along with the rest of the affected files. Some of the libraries can be pretty big and thus after several CPUs the amount of disk space consumed by can be significant.

In order to prevent from unnecessary wasting the disk space, you could use Opatch utility using util cleanup option to remove those backups that are not needed anymore.

Below is the syntax and the options available when using Opatch tool to clean up old backups:

SYNTAX
opatch util cleanup  [-invPtrLoc  ]
                     [-jre  ] [-oh  ]
                     [-silent] [-report]
                     [-ps , this will
                       be located under ORACLE_HOME/.patch_storage/]

OPTIONS
       -invPtrLoc
              Used to locate the oraInst.loc file. Needed when the
              installation used the -invPtrLoc flag. This should be
              the path to the oraInst.loc file.

       -jre
              This option tells OPatch to use JRE (java) from the
              specified location instead of the default location
              under Oracle Home. Both -jdk and -jre options cannot
              be specified together. OPatch will display error in
              that case.

       -oh
              The oracle home to work on. This takes precedence over
              the environment variable ORACLE_HOME.

       -ps
              This option is used to specify the Patch ID with timestamp.
              This Patch ID with timestamp should be the same as in
              .patch_storage directory.

              A directory by this name will be present under
              ORACLE_HOME/.patch_storage. If this directory is specified
              and is valid, then the contents specified in the description
              will be cleaned up only for this patch. Otherwise, all patch
              related directories will be acted upon by this utility.

      -silent
              In silent mode, the cleanup always takes place.

      -report
              Prints the operations without actually executing them.

Make sure you specify the patch id (ps parameter) of the patch you want to remove.

Cool Windows Command

Few days ago I learned about forfiles command that can be used to select a set of files using some criteria (like date modified) and run command against each of them (like delete). (Something like find –exec in Unix)

I found this very useful for cleaning up the trace and log files that are not needed anymore.

It is very handy and I am really surprised that Microsoft finally came up with something like this. Before I used to write batch scripts to implement the logic that forfiles provides.

It is available on Windows Vista, Windows 2003 Server and Windows 2008 Server.

You should really take a look if you didn’t know about this one already.
Find more (the syntax and few examples) about forfiles from this TechNet Note .

Example:

Task: Delete all the trace files that are older more than 30 days

c:\app\oracle\diag\rdbms\db11g\db11g\trace>forfiles /s /m *.trc /d -30 /c "cmd /c
echo @FILE @FDATE"

"db11g_ora_13200.trc" 12/18/2008
"db11g_ora_18716.trc" 12/18/2008
"db11g_ora_18768.trc" 12/18/2008
"db11g_ora_18892.trc" 12/18/2008
"db11g_ora_3004.trc" 12/18/2008
"db11g_ora_4428.trc" 12/18/2008
"db11g_ora_6256.trc" 12/18/2008
"db11g_ora_6444.trc" 12/18/2008
"db11g_ora_6480.trc" 12/18/2008
"db11g_ora_6504.trc" 12/18/2008
"db11g_ora_6844.trc" 12/18/2008
"db11g_ora_6912.trc" 12/18/2008
"db11g_ora_6928.trc" 12/18/2008
"db11g_ora_7044.trc" 12/18/2008

c:\app\oracle\diag\rdbms\db11g\db11g\trace>forfiles /s /m *.trc /d -30 /c "cmd /c
del @FILE"


c:\app\oracle\diag\rdbms\db11g\db11g\trace>forfiles /s /m *.trc /d -30 /c "cmd /c
echo @FILE @FDATE"
ERROR: No files found with the specified search criteria.

Pretty handy, isn’t it?