Perl – Writing to file outputting in UTF-16 instead of UTF-8

Recently I needed to write a perl script that ran on Cygwin. My default setting means that any files written by perl were being written in UTF-16. This led to what appeared to be a lot of Japanese writing, making it completely illegible and unusable.

After a lot of digging around on the internet, I managed to hack together the following code:

open my $SH, ">>:raw:encoding(UTF16-LE):crlf:utf8", "test1.txt";;
print $SH "\x{FEFF}";
print "Some test writing \n";
close ($SH);

This code tells perl we’re going to pass “characters” to this file handle instead of bytes. Next transform \n into \r\n to give DOS line endings. Next apply the UTF16-LE, so that 0x0A becomes 0x0A 0x00. This stops perl writing a byte order mark (BOM) at the beginning of the file. Finally, the raw:encoding removes the default ctrf so that it is not in the wrong place.

Now the file is being opened with the correct coding, we need to write the BOM to the beginning of the file to tell readers of this file what endianness it is. We do this by printing \x{FFF} to the file.

Oracle – Find consuming sql from process id

If you find an oracle process is consuming a high amount of CPU, you can find the sql_text that is related to that process id using the following code:

SELECT SQL_TEXT
FROM v$sql
WHERE sql_id = (SELECT sql_id FROM v$session WHERE paddr = (sELECT addr
FROM v$process
WHERE spid = '&process_id'));

You will need to find the process id using either top (linux), topas -P (aix), or task manager (windows). Equally you can use Enterprise Manager to find this information, by looking under the performance monitor and any alerts regarding tuning / high CPU consumption.