Pythian Group

When preparing for the the IOUG Collaborate 12 deep dive on deploying Oracle Databases for high Availability, I wanted to provide some feedback on what hardware components are failing most frequently and which ones are less frequently. I believe I have reasonably good idea about that but I thought that providing some more objective data would be better. I couldn’t find and results of a more scientific research so I decided to organize a poll. This blog post shows the results and I promised to share it with several groups.

The results are also in the presentation material but it might be hidden deep into 100+ slides so here is the dedicated blog with some comments on the results.
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While doing my high availability deep dive at Collaborate 12 few weeks ago, I stated that storage replication qualifies for the cold failover licensing rules (see slide #128).

During collaborate I spoke to one person at Oracle who definitely knows the rules. Simon Haslam also reached out to me by email pointing out that things might not be that rosy. Also Arjen Visser from Dbvisit noted to me after my session that they’ve seen Oracle sales pushing for different strategy.
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These are my personal rules that I’ve been following moderating the public forums on LinkedIn. I’ve posted on that topic in the discussion on IOUG Exadata SIG forum. As I’m passing RAC SIG group to the next folks on the board (I’m the RAC SIG president until end of August) I needed to hand over my forum management duties too. I decided that it might be useful to the wider audience so why don’t I just publish this on the blog?
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Quick blog post from Collaborate 2012 in Vegas. I’m only doing one session this year but it’s a very long session — I’ve just done a deel dive on deploying Oracle Database 11gR2 for High Availability. It’s a broad topic and my plan was to focus a lot on basic concepts and how they are working. I marked this session for beginners for that very reason but I did go in-depth in few areas such as RAC nodes eviction and ASM failure handling and redundancy levels. In the beginning, I also focused a lot on how people should think about High Availability and plan for it. I tried to be practical so I hope folks liked it even though it might have been the most boring part of the session — I think it was the most important part as I definitely don’t see others talking nearly enough about it.
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Just a quick heads up to the ODA customers — there is a critical patch 2.1.0.3.1 out that is applied on top of ODA patch bundle 2.1.0.3.0. This patch has an important fix for a bug causing ODA servers to shutdown in some situations when an ASM disk is lost.

The patch number is 13817532 and it’s applied online on both nodes without any downtime. The patch contains the update of Oracle Appliance Kit (OAK) component only and basically restarts oakd daemon only without touching the database instances, ASM or Grid clusterware.
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The biggest objection to Oracle Database Appliance (ODA) we hear from customers is about 4TB usable space limit (tripple mirrored 12TB of raw storage). I think most of the times this is more a perceived barrier rather than objective — more along the lines of being afraid to hit the limit if the system grows a lot. Nevertheless, Oracle has been always listening customers’ concerns when it comes to purchasing barriers. Of course, this time is no exception.

4TB is limit no more

NFS was always a good option to store your ODA database backups. Now there is a simple way to go beyond 4 TB storage limitation — ODA is now fully supporting read-write NFS-mounted external storage for database files. The recommendation is to use Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance (ZFSSA) since this is what Oracle has been testing extensively with. However, there is no reason why it can’t work with other NAS storage.
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Stumbled upon this Dell’s article from 2001 — The Oracle Database Appliance by Dell: Architecture and Features. The idea of appliance-like platform for Oracle database is obviously not new but the latest implementation of Oracle Database Appliance makes the most sense from all previous attempts (comments are open below to disagree if you’d like).

What Dell called an appliance back in those days is basically suggested architecture based on several devices from Dell — the server, the database storage and the backup storage — coupled with Oracle 8i Database:
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Quick post congratulating Gwen Shapira on becoming Oracle ACE Director. Gwen has be an Oracle ACE for a while by now and been very active in the community. Widely recognized in the conferencing circles and a frequent blogger, Gwen has recently been focusing a lot on Big Data and many of her recent articles have become widely known and popular. Gwen has also been volunteering her time on the board of NoCOUG user group for four years now.

When it comes to Gwen’s technical skills, she has proven she knows right things and can do real stuff — just over a year after joining Pythian as a DBA, Gwen has moved to Pythian Consulting Group as a top notch consultant. This is something that only very few achieve.

Thanks Gwen for being so passionate and energized about technology and Oracle community — lots of us appreciate your contributions and Oracle ACE Director recognition is just one way to show it — thanks to Oracle Technology Network for that recognition.

So… Congratulations Gwen! Now we expect even more from you — I’m not sure how you will manage it but you signed up for it! ;)

If you are not familiar with Oracle ACE Program read more about it in Oracle ACE Program F.A.Q.

If you are using Oracle Database Appliance (ODA) then this patch is very important to apply. The patch bundle 2.1.0.3.0 has been published just this week and the most important fix from my perspective is the new BIOS version 12010304.

Intel CPUs have a feature called Software Controlled Clock Modulation that allows programmatically control of clock modulation duty cycle, which basically reduces working clock frequency for the CPU. It’s intended to control CPU power consumption and often works along the line of thermal control mechanism. CPUs have Model-Specific Registers (MSRs) and there is MSR IA32_CLOCK_MODULATION that control clock modulation duty cycle. There are many other MSRs. For example, there are MSRs that gives you access to on-die thermal sensors like IA32_THERM_STATUS. For more information about IA32_CLOCK_MODULATION MSR see section 14.5.3 of Intel® 64 and IA-32 Architectures Software Developer’s Manual, Volume 3B.
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This is a quick announcement that Method-R is organizing the online class reunion for the participants of their Mastering Oracle Trace Data classes. Cary Millsap and Ron Crisco will entertain us with stories and useful tips around processing and analyzing Oracle 10046 traces.

Having Method-R done special training for Pythian about a year ago, I know that it’s pretty cool and interesting to attend. It’s also something new that I’ve never seen people do so I think it’s worth to participate and there are already quite a few people registered.

The coolest part is that this reunion is open for everybody as guest registrants so it gives you the chance to participate absolutely for free.

When: Thursday, March 1, 2012 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM EST

Where: Online — register

I should be there myself so looking forward to see some of you at this online reunion.