Pythian Group

Martin Berger suggested to create this page to keep track of blog posts related SLOB IO testing. Here it is Martin ;)

If you are seriously interested to get a good understanding of your IO subsystem performance characteristics then one of the tools that you may consider for putting your system IO on stress is SLOB. See Introducing SLOB – The Silly Little Oracle Benchmark from  Kevin Closson. I did and I learned a lot on my way. A bit of warning from my side – you should be ready to invest a bit of time (days in my case) to make sure that the results you are getting are reliable. Read the rest of this entry . . .

If you are wondering what I am busy with then this post explains it.

As you may noticed I am still testing one of the Oracle systems using the SLOB framework and learning on my way. I ran several tests with the same parameters (Readers 24) and I noticed that for one reason or another awr.txt reports different runtimes: Read the rest of this entry . . .

I have a confession to make: I hate webinars. I find it difficult to concentrate on a disembodies voice. I typically get distracted and find myself checking email and blogs even during the best webinars. Watching a webinar is a bit like watching DVD of a live show – not as fun as live show, and not as polished as a music video.

But one can’t escape the fact that webinars are quickly becoming a very popular learning method. The best presenters I know are giving webinars and every DBA uses them to improve his knowledge. I’m happy to report that despite the fact that I sat alone in a room and talked to my cat about ODA performance for a full hour the presentation went rather well.

If you are interested in the topic but missed the webinar or if you want to hear it again, you can view our recording.

I also uploaded the slides to slideshare, so you can take a better look at our benchmark results and study our consolidation methods at your own pace. Unfortunately, Slideshare mangled few of the slides, so if they look unclear you can use the recorded webinar to disambiguate.

There were few questions I did not have time to address during the webinar. Interestingly enough, many of them have nothing to do with ODA but are rather about my benchmarking methods.
Read the rest of this entry . . .

It is evident and beyond doubt now that the new media technologies like Twitter and Facebook are not going to wipe-out the blogs, rather they are complimenting each other very nicely and it seems they were made for each other. This Log Buffer Edition enhances this match, and presents you Log Buffer #272.

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After completing your Oracle VM and Oracle VM Manager installation (see my previous blog posts here) you are ready to start your friendship with Oracle VM technology. However to make your life and experience even more enjoyable I would suggest you to follow a few simple steps listed bellow.

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This is just a quick post to share my first 3.1.1 Oracle VM Manager (OVMM) troubleshooting experience.

After the initial installation I rebooted the server, tried to access OVMM https://ovmmhost:7002/ovm/console and received the following error in a browser screen:

Unexpected error during login (com.oracle.ovm.mgr.api.exception.FailedOperationException: OVMAPI_6000E Internal Error: Connection refused Connection refused[[ < date > ), please consult logs for details. OVMAPI_6000E Internal Error: Connection refused Connection refused
< date >
Unexpected error during login (com.oracle.ovm.mgr.api.exception.FailedOperationException: OVMAPI_6000E Internal Error: Connection refused Connection refused[[ < date > ), please consult logs for details. OVMAPI_6000E Internal Error: Connection refused Connection refused date .

Read the rest of this entry . . .

It happens to be very short blog post as installation the Oracle VM Manager 3.1.1 under Dom0 host isn’t different from installing the previous version. For all tricks that you need to use please see my Oracle VM Manager 3.0.3 under Dom0 post. Read the rest of this entry . . .

During last couple of month I was seeing some discussion and question in different online conferences and user groups about upgrade RAC and exadata to 11.2.0.3. The questions were mostly about upgrade procedure, timing, what can happen during the upgrade and how a system behaves after upgrade.

I’ve recently upgrade couple of exadata to 11.2.0.3 and want to share the experience. I hope this short note will help someone to make the decision, calculate estimation and prepare for maintenance. I am going to talk about upgrade from the version 11.2.0.2 BP10 to 11.2.0.3 BP2.

I. Preparation:
First, you need to read thoroughly oracle support note [ID 1373255.1] (strongly recommended as a primary guidance for the upgrade), make a general plan and calculate estimation time for every upgrade step. Most of the steps can be done in rolling mode and don’t require full downtime for the environment.

The second step is about gathering information about your current system and checking if your firmware and exadata software versions fulfill the requirements for 11.2.0.3.

Read the rest of this entry . . .

I had a chance to talk to several Oracle Database Appliance users at the annual Collaborate 2012 conference last month in Las Vegas. And a common theme in this discussions, as well as discussions with Pythian clients, is an interest in using the ODA as a large-scale consolidation platform. ODA offers all the benefits of engineered systems: fast, simple setup, single-vendor support, and pre-validated configurations. At first glance, however, the fixed non-expandable capacity of an Oracle database appliance would make it look like a poor candidate for consolidation, particularly the fixed 4TB of usable disk capacity and 24-core processing capacity.
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I think the results we got so far may surprise you. At lease those doesn’t seems to be the results +Alex Gorbachev and +Kevin Closson expected to see. You can find the first related blog post over here. It will give you the necessary context for further reading. Just to recap: +Kevin Closson says “Orion may give It’s VERY easy to get huge Orion nums but reasonable SLOB” and +Alex Gorbachev “lots of the system IO bound below the CPU level so you should see similar number with Orion or SLOB.” Let see what first testing results revealed. Read the rest of this entry . . .