Suppose I want to get some information from the output from an operating system command, and use that information in a SQL statement. Is there a way to do that totally within SQL?

Most DBA's should not have physical access to the server, most of them *do not ever need it*.

if you have access to AWR (the automatic workload repository), you can find it in there – you'll see the majority of the SQL executed in a window (period of time) and the number of times it was executed during that period. If not, you'll want to install and setup and use statspack – it can give you the same.

Many SQL books and tutorials recommend that you “avoid cross joins” or “beware of Cartesian products” when writing your SELECT statements, which occur when you don't express joins between your tables. It’s true that you need to ensure that your join conditions are adequately stated so that you don’t accidentally produce this effect, but it is not true that you should avoid these types of joins in every situation.

Pointers to the material that was previously hosted on http://asktom.oracle.com/tkyte

Paper about SQL Profiles by Christian Antognini

A list of User Group presentations and articles that Joel wrote or co-authored and published in the past few years. Presentations were made to the UK Oracle User Group Conference, at DBA SIGs or both.

A list of papers Harald (co)-wrote and published over the last few years as well as presentations he created and presented at various user group meetings throughout Europe.