In case you are attending Oracle Open World 2008, the biggest Oracle conference in the world, and interested in either (or both) MySQL or Oracle Enterprise Manager Extensibility — I posted a proposal for a new presentation:

Extending Oracle Enterprise Manager by Example — Creating MySQL Management Plug-In

I’ve started looking into Oracle extensibility several years ago and since then I’ve seen lots of improvements in Extensibility Guide and many new plug-ins have seen the light of the day. However, creating a new plug-in is still considered to be something special and not available to mere mortals.
In this presentation we will see how easy it is to create a new plug-in. What are the steps and the method to follow. As an example we will work with MySQL Management Plug-in that I have recently released to public.
This session includes a live demo.

If you are interested, you may as well vote for it. If there are enough interested people, Oracle might select it for the conference.

If neither this nor my previous submission make it, well, I’ll go there anyway to have some fun and meet good old and, hopefully, new friends.

Back in April I was at COLLABORATE 08 and delivered a presentation on 11g — Oracle 11g New Features Out of the Box, including Oracle 11g ASM features. The first ASM slide was about diskgroup compatibility, and I have a bit more to share than I said back then.

Every diskgroup in ASM has two compatibility attributes — compatible.asm and compatible.rdbms. In 10.2, the V$ASM_DISKGROUP view has a couple new columns added — COMPATIBILITY and DATABASE_COMPATIBILITY, but only in 11g did Oracle introduce the concept of diskgroup attributes and the V$ASM_ATTRIBUTE view. Thus, there are two ways to check the diskgroup attributes in 11g:

SQL> col COMPATIBILITY form a10
SQL> col DATABASE_COMPATIBILITY form a10
SQL> col NAME form a20
SQL> select group_number, name,
compatibility, database_compatibility from v$asm_diskgroup;

GROUP_NUMBER NAME                 COMPATIBIL DATABASE_C
------------ -------------------- ---------- ----------
           1 DG1                  11.1.0.0.0 11.1.0.0.0
           2 DG2                  10.1.0.0.0 10.1.0.0.0

SQL> col value form a10
SQL> select group_number, name, value from v$asm_attribute;

GROUP_NUMBER NAME                 VALUE
------------ -------------------- ----------
           1 disk_repair_time     3.6h
           1 au_size              1048576
           1 compatible.asm       11.1.0.0.0
           1 compatible.rdbms     11.1

Note that V$ASM_ATTRIBUTES is filled only when compatible.asm is set to 11.1. What’s important is that you can only change compatibility level upwards; there is no way to reset it back to the lower value. Compatibility attributes can be changed online one at a time:

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It’s been a while since the MySQL Management Plug-in 0.42 was released. Since then, I quietly updated it to version 1.0. The changes were very few; the biggest news was that the plug-in was certified by Oracle and added to OTN Oracle 10g Grid Control Extensions Exchange (see at the bottom).

I think the next version is due, as a few people have come back to me with some issues. The biggest was compatibility with Windows. Since I used the command line MySQL client, *nix and Windows shell incompatibilities were a major headache to solve, and I still couldn’t make it work reliably. I wanted to use DBI and DBD:MySQL, but it required installing and compiling Perl packages, which makes the deployment process very inconvenient.

Finally, I found a solution — Net::MySQL is a native Perl implementation of the MySQL client. I had to fix some bugs and add a few improvements to it, and I hope to get the author to re-introduce them back to the new CPAN distribution. Net::MySQL is dependent on IO::Socket, which is a core module that comes with the standard Perl distributed with the Oracle Management Agent.

Version 1.1 turned out to be a major rewrite for the Perl collection scripts and the net result is that compatibility across platforms is greatly improved. I have successfully tested the new version on Linux and Windows Agent hosts.

So what’s new in version 1.1 compared to 0.42?

• certified by Oracle; see OTN Extensions Exchange
• no MySQL client is required on Agent hosts. The Perl Net::MySQL package is distributed with the plug-in
• fully compatible with Windows
• MySQL client path property removed
• added support for local connection using Unix sockets
• added connection error message when target is down — can be seen in Availability History
• commands statistics skips collection for never-executed commands so less data is collected; thus, I could safely increased default collection frequency; command names are formated better
• changed default collection frequency for network, joins and sort statistics
• % command executions are collected right now — the “Questions” statistic didn’t match the total of all Com_ statistics.
• metric “Processes by Action” now excludes the plug-in’s own connection which was always adding one to “Query”
• a few minor typos fixed

Downloads, requirements, and installation instructions — as well as the datasheet — are available at the MySQL Plug-in for Oracle Grid Control home page.

In the recent month there were several Oracle community web sites created. Well, I remember I registered on one or two but I couldn’t really keep an eye on many so I decided to wait and see which one wins. Turns out that Oracle Mix came out as a winner. Maybe it’s just my impression.

But I digress… I just wanted to make a quick note that Oracle Mix organized an interesting hybrid between call for papers and abstract judging. Anyone registered at Oracle Mix can propose a session abstract to present themselves or as an idea for others. Everyone can give their votes to the proposed sessions. At the end of the voting deadline (25th of June) Oracle will select the top sessions to be included in the Oracle Open World schedule.

So what? Well, I did send mine few days ago — Demystifying Workload Management with Oracle RAC based on my Hotsos Symposium 2008 presentation. I’m not sure how wide is the potential audience for this session — it’s far from beginners session and is specific to RAC. However, I do believe that this topic is often misunderstood and there is very good potential to spread the knowledge. So if you are coming to the Oracle Open World and interested in that topic - go ahead and vote. If not mine, there are plenty of others.

PS: I managed to do 2 (!) typos in the title and can’t edit it anymore. I don’t have any error on update but the title comes back unchanged. I have already filled in a bug report - let’s see if it gets fixed.

Welcome ASH Masters!

I have already mentioned about the excellent work that Kyle Hailey did around Active Session History (ASH). Kyle has also created ASHMON.

The latest news — there is a new web site — ashmasters.com. This is the place where you can leave your comments and questions about ASH and ASHMON. Wondering how you can query ASH data? There are some ready to use queries. Have a cool idea how to use ASH and query ASH data? Share it there and have it added to the ASH Masters queries toolkit.

I hear, some of you say - “Right… ASH… 10g… Diagnostic Pack…” No panic, there is poor man’s ASH — ASH Simulation. This is the way to get some benefits of ASH while still running Oracle 9i or Oracle 10g without Diagnostic Pack.

Sounds exciting? It does, indeed!

Here is the question that was posted on OTN Forum Grid Control Extensibility (not the topic of the forum!) yesterday:

I recently moved south to Bangalore and I am working for a large software integrator. My project team is working on a JEE application project that uses test driven development methodologies. We are planning to use a host of new breed technologies such as Enterprise 2.0, Ajax, Drools, JDO, Hibernate,and mashups. Are you able to point me to online and offline resources/trainings that can help our team get up to speed with these latest technologies.

All the help that group members can provide in this regard is much appreciated.

My first reaction was — how stupid one should be to post such absolutely irrelevant question in that forum? I do see from time to time some questions that are about Grid Control but not about Extensibility and, assuming I have a minute, I might suggest to ask it in the neighboring forum instead. However, this time it seemed absurd to choose this place.

I was even more surprised that someone actually tried to provide a sensible response, I was thinking to blog about it to re-iterate the point that Tom Kyte expressed recently but I couldn’t find the thread anymore. I thought it was moved by a wise admin to a more appropriate place. I did a quick search on OTN forums and found it in… well, many other OTN forums. So it seems that it was simply deleted from Extensibility forum.

Google showed that OTN forums are not the only one appearance of this request. Is this an absolute stupidity or an example of plain scam?

Well, I just needed that rant.

I guess I have only one and a half posts about COLLABORATE 08 this year. It’s a bit unfortunate that I couldn’t make the whole conference, but only last day-and-a-half. In addition, I’ve been speaking at the two lasts slots of the conference so it’s been quite busy for me.

As I mentioned already, the scheduling for my presentation got a bit screwed-up due to the last minute call to participate in the speaker panel — “To RAC or Not To RAC: What’s Best for HA”. Thanks to Dan Norris, my session was finally moved to 11:00, which is right after the panel. On the other hand, 11:00 slot is the last IOUG session of the conference. This fact, coupled with last minutes re-scheduling, brought the number of participants down. Even though there were about 30 people and the hall (Korbel 1C) was small enough not to seem empty.

Back to the RAC speaker panel, I enjoyed the discussion and especially the fact that speaker’s opinions on how wide RAC adoption should be were a little different. I took the liberty of starting the discussion with a quite provocative quote — “complexity is the enemy of availability”. Interesting that the other panel speakers seemed to disagree to it to some extent by countering it — use knowledge to fight complexity. Not that I don’t agree with it (on the contrary) but my point was rather, “why make it complex when you can keep it simple?” Some of the reasons for over-complicating systems can be found here.

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I’m at Collaborate 08 in Denver these days. I arrived yesterday evening so I haven’t had a chance to see any sessions yet but I did have a nice dinner with a bunch of OakTable folks. The steak wasn’t great but the best part was that I could enjoy my time with people I don’t get to see very often.

Today started with some confusion. My presentation, Oracle 11g New Features Out of the Box, was originally scheduled on Thursday at 9:45 AM but due to participation in the speaker panel ,”To RAC or Not To RAC: What’s Best for HA?”, it was rescheduled to today, Wednesday, at 4:30 PM. However, this change didn’t make it to the printouts with latest changes so the options right now are either re-schedule my session to a later time tomorrow or keep it at the original schedule and pull me off the panel. I’d really enjoy that panel as it goes right along my alley but I need to make my session as well so we’ll see how it works out.

I’m off to the Carol Dacko’s presentation about DBMS_XPLAN now and looking forward to show up at the RAC SIG Birds of a Feather later today. Stay tuned - more to come…

It has finally happened! The first public release of the MySQL plug-in for Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Grid Control is out.

It’s been a while since I first started to work on this, first as part of the Grid Control Extensibility article that I wrote for IOUG SELECT Magazine in 2006 (thanks to John Kanagaraj for encouraging me to write it), and then later as part of a demo for my presentations. I was already working at Pythian and was considering further developing my example and releasing it.

In the last few months, more and more people showed interest in the potential plug-in, and even few guys from Oracle contacted me independently of each other with their own reasons to have a MySQL plug-in available. This interest accelerated the fermentation of thoughts in my brain, and I got down to work. Pythian generously sponsored my development time.

I’ve called this first release beta but as I didn’t do much testing, it should probably be called alpha. Having said that, it has been tested with MySQL 5.1 and 5.0, and it should also work with MySQL 4.1. I develop and use it with Oracle Management Agents running on the Linux platform, but I changed all the collection scripts to use the Perl that comes with the Oracle agent so it should run on Windows as well. It works quite stably for me, and I have verified it in several real-life environments.

I would probably take some more time before releasing it, but I really wanted to have the plug-in out before I leave for COLLABORATE 08 (should I also tell you the readiness level of my presentation?). I hope to get some feedback and first impressions from DBAs who try the plug-in. Bear in mind that this is the very first release — expect some rough edges. Please do report them here. We will probably set up a more structured set of pages, but for now leaving comments here is the way to go.

Here are the details. The first release version is 0.42 because that’s obviously the perfect number to start something good.

What’s implemented so far

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Since the introduction of ASM in Oracle 10g Release 1, every ASM administrator has been dreaming of a simple command line tool to copy files between ASM diskgroups and other filesystems. Oracle ASM 10g Release 2 added the handy asmcmd utility, but even though everyone expected a copy command there, it had not been implemented.

The only way to copy files to or from an ASM diskgroup was either to use RMAN, to configure XDB for FTP access, or use the DBMS_FILE_TRANSFER package. No wonder that the cp command is the most popular addition to asmcmd tool in Oracle ASM 11g: the hardest barrier to convincing my customers to use ASM has been the inability to access the files and copy them to the OS filesystem using the command-line copy command. Customers wanted to “feel” the files and be able to easily manipulate them.

While working on a Collaborate 08 presentation on Oracle 11g new features out-of-the-box, I was verifying new commands in Oracle ASM 11g’s asmcmd utility. It turned our that copying files from or to ASM is still a problem.

First, I tried to copy a single text file to an ASM diskgroup:

ASMCMD> cp /home/oracle/.bash_profile +dg2/test.file
source /home/oracle/.bash_profile
target +dg2/test.file
ASMCMD-08012: can not determine file type for file->’/home/oracle/.bash_profile’
ORA-15056: additional error message
ORA-17503: ksfdopn:DGGetFileAttr15 Failed to open file /home/oracle/.bash_profile
ORA-27046: file size is not a multiple of logical block size
Additional information: 1
ORA-06512: at “SYS.X$DBMS_DISKGROUP”, line 207
ORA-06512: at line 3 (DBD ERROR: OCIStmtExecute)

Hmm . . . Okay. Let’s try to do it in multiples of diskgroup blocks: (more…)