Posted by Maryanne Birksted on Jan 25, 2012
Pythian is very excited to return to the much-awaited RMOUG 12 held in Denver, Colorado from February 14-16, 2012. Keep your eyes open for Alex Gorbachev, Marc Fielding, Don Seiler and Gwen Shapira in attendance. We have a fantastic line-up of speakers this year featuring a total of seven papers presented by Alex, Marc, Don and Gwen. If you have any feedback on our sessions, please send your comments directly to the speaker or to Vanessa Simmons, Pythian Director of Marketing. Please also follow this link to sign up to receive notice of future speaking engagements, webinars or Pythian news.
Be sure to stop by our booth (#3,6,7,10) to say hello to our friends from the OakTable Network, and enter our draw to win the new Amazon Kindle with software provided by Cary Millsap (MR-Trace, MR-Tools & Method-R Profiler) and a pack of digital e-book downloads courtesy of Apress. Also slated is the RAC Attack workshop, which was first offered at Oracle Open World and UKOUG, and is now in its second year at RMOUG. Pythian is co-sponsoring this event with Apress and it’s a fun and informative way to learn from our experts how and when to properly build a RAC environment.
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Posted by Marc Fielding on Jan 16, 2012
The 2012 edition of RMOUG Training Days in Denver less than a month away, running February 15 and 16 at the Colorado Convention Center in Denver. Although it’s only two days, there’s a lot of technical content there, and a refreshing reduction in marketing-oriented presentations from “product managers”. It’s not too late to register, and it’s a pretty nice excuse to get to the Rockies in ski season. I’ll be doing two presentations, and am polishing up whitepapers and presentations for the submission deadline tomorrow:
They’re right after each other in the grid, but I do get a short break for the dedicated exhibit hall time and paid vendor presentations (yes there are still a few; they have to pay the bills somehow).
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Posted by Fahd Mirza on Jan 11, 2012
With the announcement of the Oracle Big Data Appliance, Oracle also comes up with some really cool technology stack which is being termed as Oracle Big Data Connectors (OBDC). This piece of software can be used with both Oracle Big Data Appliance and other Apache Hadoop-based systems.
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Posted by Marc Fielding on Jan 5, 2012
Hot on the heels of 11.2.0.3 coming out for Exadata, there’s yet another Exadata patch schedule out: the Quarterly Database Patch for Exadata (QDPE). They’re designed to being some of the predictability of Oracle’s quarterly critical patch updates (CPU) to the Exadata world. Behind the new naming, it looks like these are ordinary Exadata bundle patches, and even have BP numbers, but will have the predictable quarterly release schedule, synchronized with the CPU schedule (quarterly Tuesday nearest to 17th of the month it appears). Ordinary bundle patches aren’t going away quite yet though: there’s still a need to get patches out more frequently, and will still come out monthly or bimonthly on top of the quarterly patches. Oracle’s patching recommendations have changed too: QDPE patches are recommended, but other bundle patches are recommended only if experiencing issues resolved by them. From My Oracle Support note 888828.1, the following patches for Oracle 11.2.0.3 are planned:
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Posted by Marc Fielding on Jan 3, 2012
Since Oracle 11.2.0.3 came out last September, there have been questions about Exadata availability. As of today, the patchset is now available.
Reviewing the upgrade document (MOS note 1373255.1) a few things that jumped out at me:
- There is already a bundle patch (11.2.0.3 BP1, patch 13343057) that must be installed directly after the DB upgrade
- If running 11.2.0.2, a bugfix for unpublished bug 12539000 Synchronization problem in the IPC state affects ASM rolling upgrade and is required. BP12/13 have it (though the installer will still complain and must be ignored on install), and there are backports for BP7 through BP11.
- A recent storage server version (11.2.2.4.0+) is required, though with the critical issues fixed in 11.2.2.4.2, An upgrade there is probably in order.
- Install happens in a new ORACLE_HOME that should not be under /opt/oracle (presumably due to storage space limitations)
- Automatic memory management must be permanently disabled in the ASM instance, in favor of fixed SGA and PGA targets. Keep in mind that AMM would have prevented ASM from using hugepages in the past, and should be explicitly disabled with use_large_pages as part of the change.
- As for other database version upgrades, the data dictionary update requires system-wide downtime, though this can be minimized using a logical standby or GoldenGate.
Hat tip to R. Kundersma’s blog for the notification.
Posted by Marc Fielding on Dec 5, 2011
For those of you attending UKOUG today, there is a healthy dose of Pythian presentations on tap this afternoon. Actually, you can do it wall to wall 2:30pm to 6:30pm if you like.
To note:
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Posted by Michael S. Abbey on Dec 5, 2011
(editor’s note: the author is talking about UKOUG, the UK’s major Oracle conference, happening this week in Birmingham)
And so it should be :). The flight over was uneventful, save for my excitement about having 3 seats to myself. Then the big challenge surfaced … a 5’8″ human trying to recline in a 4’10″ horizontal surface. I woke about a bit later with a stiff neck but the shut-eye was worth it.
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Posted by Marc Fielding on Dec 2, 2011
I was just looking at an Exadata X2-2 ordering document and noticed that it included 144GB of RAM. The sales rep pointed at the Exadata X2-2 datasheet and showed the 96GB to 144GB memory expansion option. Based on my reading of Intel Xeon (Nehalam) memory configurations, as long as each channel has a single dual-ranked module, all the memory can run at full 1333MHz speed. (Update: as noted in the comments, this is unfortunately not the case in Exadata; with the expansion unit memory runs at 800MHz). It populates the normally-empty third socket for each memory bank with an additional memory module.
It isn’t particularly cheap: $6250 per database node at US list price, but is a performance booster that doesn’t have ongoing support costs either. For OLTP environments, I like to say cache is still king, and even for those of you with pure data warehouses, 50% more PGA space can help out your sorts too.
And yes, I realize this isn’t particularly new; according to Kerry Osborne’s blog it came out (but wasn’t officially announced per se) at the same time as the storage expansion racks in the summer
Posted by Fábio Galera on Dec 2, 2011
Hello everyone !
For my first time posting here on the Pythian Blog, I would like to share some of my tips/notes about patching Oracle Exadata, based on my experiences and not less important, research and googling =).
First, the Oracle Exadata Patch has 3 different components that should be patched. As we know about Oracle Exadata, the Exadata rack has a different components, like Cisco Switch, KVM, Power Distribuion Unit, etc… and we only are responsible for patching the Database Servers (usually referenced as compute nodes), Storage Servers (usually referenced as cell nodes) and the Infiniband Switches.
We can divide the patches in 3 different parts:
Storage Server Patch
Database Server Patch
Infiniband Switches Patch
Before starting, I would like to share and note here 2 documents from My Oracle Support, aka metalink. These notes must be the first place that you need to go to review before patching the Exadata environment.
Database Machine and Exadata Storage Server 11g Release 2 (11.2) Supported Versions (Doc ID. 888828.1)
- This is for the second and third generation (V2 and X2) for Oracle Exadata, using Sun hardware.
Database Machine and Exadata Storage Server 11g Release 1 (11.1) Supported Versions (Doc ID. 835032.1)
- This is for the first generation (V1) for Oracle Exadata, using HP hardware.
Oracle usually updates these documents for every patch that is released, including different information about that.
Posted by Gwen Shapira on Oct 18, 2011
Automatic degree of parallelism, or Auto DOP, is a new feature in 11gR2 that promises to help manage systems where large subset of the workload runs with parallel processing. In this post I’ll introduce the feature and give very useful tips I got from Oracle’s Real World Performance expert Greg Rahn on how to use it. So this is worth reading even if you are familiar with the feature.
The problem is fairly well known – you system only has finite amount of resources. Only so many CPUs, only so many disks capable of delivering only so many IO/s and MB/s. A certain query may have amazing performance when running with 32 parallel processes all alone on your test system. When 5 people need to run it at once, and at the same time there are two scheduled jobs running each with its own parallel processes, there are two likely outcomes:
- You will run more parallel processes than your system is capable of serving. Resulting in long queues on the CPU and storage, and overall performance degradation.
- You limit the maximum number of parallel processes to protect the database resources, and some of the queries degrade. If you don’t detect it, the ETL process that should have finished in two hours takes 24, which means that the daily report sent to the CEO is missing some of the data. Ouch.
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