The 11g platforms are now coming out fast and furious:

Windows 64-bit
Solaris SPARC 64-bit
AIX PPC64
HP-UX Itanium

In addition to the previously-released:

Linux x86 32-bit
Linux x86 64-bit
Windows 32-bit

So download away, after checking your platform certification first, of course.

Planned future platforms:

Apple Mac Intel OSX
HP-UX PA-RISC
OpenVMS Itanium 64-bit
Linux LPAR on IBM z-series mainframes
Linux on IBM Power
Linux on Itanium
Solaris x86 64-bit

In my previous blog entry, I explained why I would expect Result Cache not to scale well. Unfortunately, at the time that blog entry was written, I had no access to hardware with more than two cores. That left me in an everything-but-the-proof state. “Theory without practice is sterile.” ©Albert Einstein.

Since then, I got a chance to re-run my test cases on a quad-core CPU, moving one step forward.

I re-executed my test cases with one to four processes against the Buffer Cache and the Result Cache in order to capture the number of lookups per second. I raised number of iterations to 1M to make the results more stable though.

Here is what I got: (more…)

Note: Installing Oracle 11gR1 on Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex is now published.

After many requests from readers, I’ve put together new, revised version of the Oracle 11g on Ubuntu recipe. This new version is a little different than the first one published: it’s based on a bare-bones install of Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) server version instead of the desktop version. As an improvement, I’ve tried to pare down dependencies to a minimal set.

Your feedback is more than welcome — it’s the main reason why I wrote a new version of this HOWTO. I’ve also tested and repeated this procedure twice. Even so, it might still have problems, so please let me know so we can improve it ¹.

(more…)

Hot on the heels of the Linux 64-bit release, Oracle 11g for Windows (32-bit only for now) is now available for download on OTN.

As usual, an x86 32-bit operating system is required. Certification for Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, and Vista is “projected for Q4″, but Windows 2000 will not be supported.

It looks like the second public platform release for Oracle 11g is (surprise, surprise) Linux x86-64. Downloads are available on OTN.

As with previous Linux releases, 32-bit Oracle with a 32-bit OS and 64-bit Oracle with a 64-bit OS are supported, but 32-bit Oracle with a 64-bit OS is not.

Note also that sqlplus does not play well with SELinux under RHEL5; workarounds are to disable SELinux entirely, or to manually change the context of Oracle libraries to textrel_shlib_t. More details are in MetaLink note 454196.1 (login credentials required).

If you are or have ever been a SQL developer, it’s very likely you’ve been asked to return the rows from two joined tables, including all the rows from both tables that do not have a corresponding row in the other table. Oracle 9i introduced the FULL OUTER JOIN syntax to better address this scenario. Now it looks as if 11g has introduced a new algorithm to handle that.

So how can you get a look at this? (more…)

I was very pleased when I heard about Oracle adding pivot functionality in select statements. Finally — we wouldn’t have to copy the data to a spreadsheet or code a ton of sum(case when col1 = 'X' then amount else 0 end) total_X for each column we would want to display.

I am basically looking for three things in a pivot-style query:

1. the ability to specify which column will be pivoted as one or more columns in the resulting query
2. row subtotals
3. column subtotals

The first item is the only one that really matters. I can work around the other two, so let’s get started.

(more…)

It seems Oracle 11g introduces a difference between count(*) and count(1). The way this happens is just the opposite of what I was thinking would happen. NB: I ran my test using “11.1.0.6 32bits” on Ubuntu Linux 7.04 (Feisty) which is not officially supported¹, and which has already lead me to some unexpected behaviors. If this difference with count() is really the 11g way and not buggy behavior related to the Ubuntu install, I’m glad to have found it.

Here’s what you can do to observe (or confirm or dispute) this.

(more…)

In the previous article, I described my observations of RC Enqueue. Now it is time to take a look at the RC latches.

Latches, being serialization devices, are scalability inhibitors. Not that they inherently prevent you from scaling, quite the opposite is true. Serialization is a must if you expect your system to produce anything apart from GIGO (Garbage In Garbage Out). Concurrency is essentially made possible through serialization of shared resources. That being said, I would expect Result Cache to beat Oracle’s buffer cache on read-only workloads, since that is what RC was designed for. That is, Result Cache should perform faster and scale better.

(more…)

Note: Installing Oracle 11gR1 on Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex is now published.

Note: I have now published “Installing Oracle 11g on Ubuntu Linux 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon)”

Note: This page focuses on Ubuntu installs. Oracle has published a web page for successfully installing Linux on unsupported platforms that you may find helpful.

I come from a MySQL background, and I have been given the challenge of learning Oracle. I can’t just play around with our customers’ databases, but I remembered that Paul Vallée said that there is nothing wrong with learning on company time. So I decided to install my own Oracle database, which I’ll be free to destroy in every way I can think of… and of course, free to bring it back to life. Recovering from crashes will probably be the most difficult part of my adventures in the Oracle world, but let’s take one step at a time, shall we?

Now, onto Oracle 11g (beta 5) on Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn). One little issue is that Ubuntu is unsupported by Oracle. So, through this text, we will trick the Oracle installer into thinking it’s actually running on a Red Hat box.

(more…)