This weekend was most probably my longest oncall weekend ever. As part of our work at Pythian each team member covers weekends on regular basis. There are quiet weekends and weekends like this one ;)
One of the tasks that I was involved in was 700GB database emergency cloning for an important functional issue troubleshooting. It was 10.2.0.5 (10GR2) 64 Bit database on Linux. I used the following command to clone:
export NLS_DATE_FORMAT='YYYY-MM-DD:HH24:MI:SS'
rman target / nocatalog auxiliary sys/syspwd@TARGET log=dup_TERGET.log
run {
set until time "to_date('10-JAN-2010 23:05:25', 'DD-MON-YYYY HH24:MI:SS')";
allocate auxiliary channel c1 type disk;
allocate auxiliary channel c2 type disk;
duplicate target database to TARGET;
}
Every Oracle professional knows about Oracle Enterprise Manager’s extensive monitoring capability for Oracle products. However, only few realize that Oracle Enterprise Manager can be easily extended thanks to its Extensibility framework.
This presentation starts with an introduction of Enterprise Manager’s Extensibility features and walks the audience through the basics of creating a new plug-in. This session will also demonstrate some proven plug-in development steps based on the experience gained from developing MySQL management plug-in.
Session includes a demo of the plug-in development scenarios. After this presentation, attendees will be able to design and develop management plug-ins for their own applications.
The first videocast was quite popular — it has more than 300 views in couple weeks and considering no Hollywood stars were starring in that video and there were no nude scenes, I think it’s fair to say that this format was very much welcomed by the audience.
Today, I’m posting the follow up session on VIP’s (Virtual IP’s) with Oracle RAC. What I demonstrate today is a typical configuration mistake for a RAC databases created with Database Configuration Assistant (DBCA) and what’s the result of such omission.
It’s actually logged as a bug 4338578 on Metalink (thanks to Marcin Przepiorowski for reference). However, I believe it’s not a database issue but (1) misunderstanding how remote listener registration works, (2) documentation bug and (3) DBCA bug.
The init.ora parameter remote_listener defines the list of remote listeners that an instance should register with. The parameter local_listener sets the address for the local listener registration and if not specified, by default it’s hostname and the default port 1521. However, it turns out that the local_listener parameter is used not only for local registration but for something else as well… Read the rest of this entry . . .
“Seeing it once is better than hearing about it a thousand times” — I think this is the closest translation from one Russian proverb. I may add that hearing and seeing might be often better then reading so let me try to start a series of small videocasts about Oracle database technology.
One of the topics that beginners RAC DBA’s (along with network engineers supporting Oracle database infrastructure) are confused about is the Virtual IP usage in Oracle RAC starting from Oracle Clusterware 10g.
With this videocast, I will try to clarify those concerns once and for all. I have embedded the video here in a smaller window so you might want to go directly to YouTube for the full-size version of “Pythian Video: Oracle RAC – Why VIPs“.
This is an experiment for now so let’s see how it goes. Let me know if you find this format useful and don’t forger to rate it on YouTube. Note that if you don’t leave any comments here, I’d never know whether you liked it or not so don’t be shy and comment away…
Update 24-06-2010: Peter de Vaal reported that these instructions work without changes for APEX 4.0 as well. Great news!
Few days ago, I have put together the Quick Install Guide for Oracle 10g Release 2 on Mac OS X Leopard (Intel). I did mention that it would be cool to get APEX working as well but, apparently, APEX isn’t supposed to be running on Oracle 10g Release 2 Database on OS X as few people pointed our on the blogs.
Well, the release notes says that Oracle Application Express is not supported and I would imagine that it’s because Oracle HTTP Server is not supported either. I’m not a frequent user of APEX but I know that APEX 3.2 is not supposed to be configured in Oracle 10g Database using Embedded PL/SQL Gateway. However, looks like few people did manage to run APEX on 10g using Embedded PL/SQL Gateway. For example, Jeff Kemp has some APEX on 10g hints that I perused.
Long story short, I was able to install APEX successfully using the native Mac OS X Oracle 10g Database and here is how… Read the rest of this entry . . .
I was very surprised that Oracle released Oracle Database for Mac OSX, especially, version 10g now that 11g has been out for almost 2 years. Well, I guess Oracle wanted to please Mac users expecting things just work and decided that good proved 10g is the way to go. On the other hand, we’ve been supporting 11g in production for quite a while and I must say it’s much better quality compare to 10g when it came out. I’m pretty sure there was a significant customer that influenced that decision — interesting who might that be?
Anyway, there is no quick install guide for OS X but only a standard Oracle® Database Installation Guide
10g Release 2 (10.2) for Apple Mac OS X (Intel). It’s fine but if you want to install Oracle on your MacBook and not for production use then you might take some shortcuts and follow a quick instructions so I gathered my notes while installing just released Oracle Database 10.2.0.4 on my MacBook and this is what you see now. Read the rest of this entry . . .
I have enjoyed reading Sheeri’s nice MySQL “Pop Quiz” series, and, knowing that practise greatly increases the retention time of information in our minds, I thought I would start a series of quizzes of my own, only to do with Oracle.
Here’s a an easy one to begin with. How do you drop a job with job_name in lower case using DBMS_SCHEDULER on Oracle 10g?
SQL> SELECT owner,'.'||job_name||'.' job_name
FROM all_scheduler_jobs;
OWNER JOB_NAME
------- ----------
DEV .job1.
1 rows selected.
Note: The syntax '.'||job_name||'.' is used only to confirm that there are no spaces in the job name.
According to Metalink Note 161818.1 Oracle Server (RDBMS) Releases Support Status Summary, Premier Support of Oracle 10g Release 1 ends in January 2009, which means that those of us supporting Oracle 10.1 databases have less support from Oracle from now on.
If you don’t want to deal with missteps, I recommend that you test your standby database to facilitate the failover or switchover process.
This procedure is very useful when you have physical standby databases for testing and other purposes that require read-write access to the standby database. Also, it improves your checklist in the event of an error or disaster.
By using Snapshot standby databases, redo data is not applied until you convert the snapshot standby database back into a physical standby database, and after all local updates to the snapshot standby database are discarded.
Requirements
The following requirements need to be met in order to create a snapshot standby.
This post is the third of the series of ten posts that explore some of the Oracle Universal Installer (OUI), Network Assistant (NETCA), Database Creation Assistant (DBCA), Database Upgrade Assistant (DBUA) and other syntaxes you can use to script or speed up Oracle Installations. The complete series should look like this:
In the first post and second post, we focused on how to leverage these tool to perform a standard installation and apply patches on top of 10.2 and 11.1 databases. This post will dig into the cloning features of both the Universal Install (OUI) and the Database Configuration Assistant (DBCA).
Foreword
The Universal Install and Database Configuration Assistant Cloning features enable you to:
Install the database software once, apply to it all the patches you need, including Patch Set, CPU, and One-Off patches, and create a “Gold Image” of that software you’ll be able to deploy on all the servers you need as soon as they run the same Operating System.
Create a database, apply all the scripts you need including the catupgrd.sql, the cpu.sql or any other script associated with patches. You can also run any script that will create a skeleton for installing your application, create tablespaces, create objects, or set parameters. Once done, you’ll be able to create a template from that database and to use it on any servers that run the same operating system and the same database software.
How to clone Oracle database software
You can refer to the product documentation for the whole database software cloning process:
