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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Posted by Alex Gorbachev on Oct 11, 2011
While Oracle OpenWorld is still hot in our memories, I’m going to be presenting two of my OOW11 sessions at the Toronto Oracle User Group’s DD Day 2011 on 28-Oct-2011 — in just a bit over 2 weeks. Last time I presented for TOUG at their summer meeting in 2008 which makes it a tad over 3 years ago. It was a good fun and I’m looking forward to see many of you there again.
By the way, I think it’s quite a deal at $140 for non-members and $90 for TOUG members for a one day conference like that, especially if you are interested in the topics presented.
I have two sessions to present:
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Posted by Marc Fielding on Oct 5, 2011
The website for Oracle Database Cloud Services at cloud.oracle.com is now online, in conjunction with Larry Ellison’s announcement during the Oracle OpenWorld keynote going on now. It’s a hosted database service running Oracle 11gR2. The database can be accessed using a hosted Oracle application server, via JDBC across the Internet, or their own RESTful API a la Amazon. Notably lacking is Oracle’s own TNS network protocol.
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Posted by Marc Fielding on Oct 4, 2011
Update 7-October-2011: the log write caching capability has been officially announced as “Exadata Smart Flash Log”. I saw a few Oracle product management slides at OpenWorld presentations; one slide deck online is here on slide 30. A sample graph is provided, showing how the peak response times drop significantly with the additional cache.
These peaks would correspond to the times when the controller RAM cache is full. Another feature of the cache is that it returns write success status to the database when either flash or disk controller acknowledge the write, meaning tat the flash memory functions as a type of upper bound to redo write latency.
Exadata storage server software version 11.2.2.4.0 (patch link) has just been released. The readme file (My Oracle Support login required) lists 218 different changes, but one in particular sticks out:
11781936 NEED SMART FLASH LOGGING OF RDBMS REDO
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Posted by Gwen Shapira on Oct 4, 2011
Oracle announced the Big Data Appliance on Monday morning keynote. Many people, me included, were long waiting for this to happen. Others didn’t think it will ever happen. So naturally, there is a lot of buzz and excitement around the new device in Open World. The keynote announcement was very short on details and certainly did not satisfy my technical curiosity. So I went to a few presentations to hear what exactly is included in the offering.
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Posted by Alex Gorbachev on Oct 3, 2011
Oracle Big Data Appliance (BDA) is being announced at the Oracle OpenWorld keynote as I’m posting this. It will take some time for it to be actually available for shipment and some details will likely change but here is what we have so far about Oracle Big Data Appliance.
A rack with InfiniBand, full of 2U servers similar to Exadata Storage. No flash storage needed so couple sockets and a dozen of disks will do. Maybe more ram than Exadata storage cells themselves. I suspect you could have as many servers as you want in a configuration but since Hadoop clusters are usually dozens and more nodes, full rack seems reasonable with about 20 Hadoop compute nodes to start with. Real deployments should easily go into multiple racks stacked together.
Low latency, high bandwidth communication is critical for fast data loading and later data processing with Hadoop so InfiniBand will be there — same Exadata/Exalogic-like platform.
Oracle should also have its own NoSQL engine — Oracle NoSQL Database. If you know existing Oracle products, Berkley DB seems to be a reasonable foundation to power Oracle’s new NoSQL engine.
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Posted by Vanessa Simmons on Oct 3, 2011
PYTHIAN NEWS
Live from Oracle OpenWorld Pythian is thrilled to share news of our big win: Oracle North America Titan Award for Oracle Exadata solution that was planned, deployed and is currently managed for online marketing corporation LinkShare in New York.
