SystemTap and dynamic tracing tools in general give administrators great control on their systems with the relatively little additional effort to learn the new tools. In this post you will see of how SystemTap that can be used to modify data on the fly at runtime. The outcome is a form of "live patching". Examples are provided on how to apply these ideas to Oracle SQL parsing functionality. This type of "guru mode" use of SystemTap is a corner case, but I believe it is important to know that such techniques exist and how they can be deployed, also because they can be implemented with just a few lines of code.