Server virtualization is becoming a very hot topic out in the wild, and for good reason. This is a fantastic technology to bring to the x86 platform. When used right, it will solve a lot of problems and potentially reduce Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), while allowing many data centers to become greener by reducing power consumption, cooling requirements and waste (fewer servers = less hardware to dispose of later on). Not every server, however, is a candidate to be “virtualized.” When used in the wrong situation, virtualization can be a support nightmare.

I’m going to write a small series of posts on this topic because its something that will affect a lot of us even if you aren’t a DBA. I’m starting at the very beginning, so if you’ve already created virtual templates for all of your core applications, this post won’t have anything new for you. If you’re wondering what about “virtual” is virtual, this is the post for you to start at. Due to the number of different technologies and platforms and and lack of time on my part, I’m going to stick to Microsoft technologies (Microsoft Virtual Server 2005) and write from the perspective of an MS SQL Server DBA. Let’s get started.

What is server virtualization? (more…)

In the process of scripting a database migration, I was in need of something akin to the GNU basename utility that I know and love on Linux. basename is most famous for taking a full file path string and stripping away the leading path component, returning just the name of the file. This can be emulated in PL/SQL with calls to SUBSTR and INSTR, like this:

substr(dirname,instr(dirname,'/',-1)+1)

(Thanks to Ian Cary, who shared this logic on oracle-l)

As you can see, this simply finds the last occurence of /, which is our directory separator on *nix and Solaris operating systems. On Windows, it would be \. It then returns a substring beginning one character after that last separator until the end of the string. Voila, a basic basename routine!

Upon reading the basename man page again, I found that basename also takes an optional parameter, a suffix string. If this suffix string is provided, basename will also truncate that string from the end. For example:

(more…)

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

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.