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- If running 11.2.0.2, a bugfix for unpublished bug 12539000 Synchronization problem in the IPC state affects ASM rolling upgrade and is required.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 6, 2011
On tap for Tuesday is a 2-hour master class from Michael Abbey, along with an all-day drop-in RAC attack workshop with Alex Gorbachev and the RAC SIG.
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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 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 Sep 21, 2011
Oracle Database Appliance (ODA) is in many ways similar to an Exadata quarter rack: they both use two similar compute servers in an engineered system configuration, with shared storage and flash storage. But in other ways, especially networking and storage, they differ significantly. In particular:
- Storage connectivity: ODA uses SAS direct attachment, while Exadata uses an InfiniBand backbone connected to dedicated storage servers
- Flash memory: Exadata has significantly more flash memory than ODA does. While both can store ASM diskgroups in flash, Exadata also has flash cache capability. ODA’s default configuration uses flash to store redo logs; this helps compensate for ODA’s lack of
battery-backed disk write cache in the latency-sensitive redo write workload.
- Expandability: ODA currently comes in a single 2-server, 12TB configuration. An Exadata quarter-rack configuration has
2 compute servers and a minimum of 21TB raw storage. Both compute capacity and storage are expandable virtually without limit, given sufficient number of racks and network backbone.
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Posted by Marc Fielding on Sep 21, 2011
I’ve started putting together some information about the Oracle Database Appliance in question-and-answer form. If you have an unanswered question, ask away in the comment section below.
(Update: Oracle has come out with their official FAQ as well)
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Posted by Don Seiler on Jun 16, 2011
No, this isn’t a re-post of my earlier blog about bug 1233183.1. We’ve found a fun new bug that seems to be specific to our poor standalone ASM instances when upgrading from Oracle Grid Infrastructure 11.2.0.1 to 11.2.0.2.
The bug was first brought to my attention about four days after completing the Grid Infrastructure upgrade. The client system administrator (SA) noticed that the disk holding the Oracle home directories was slowly filling, at the rate of about 1Gb per day. We identifed that core dump files being created under the new GRID_HOME/log//diskmon/ directory, at the rate of about 1 every 10 minutes, each one about 8M in size. That adds up to 1152M (or just over 1Gb) per 24-hour day. Add that to the 8Gb that was being held in GRID_HOME/.patch_storage (we had to rollback the 11.2.0.1 April 2010 PSU and apply the 11.2.0.1 July 2010 PSU just to upgrade to 11.2.0.2), and that put a bit of a squeeze on the free disk.
The good ol’ OTN forums led me to bug 10283819. The original poster there shared also that removing the old (11.2.0.1) grid home directory and restarting diskmon services stopped the core dump creation. The poster then went to question a second issue with increased diskmon.log writing. After a solution was found for that, Oracle Support closed the bug for some reason, without ever addressing the core dump creation.
I can verify that removing the old 11.2.0.1 grid home (I did a tar+bz2 first) and restarting the services did stop the core dump creation, and am pushing back to Oracle support to get the bug re-opened or a new bug filed to specifically address this. In the meantime, if you are unable or unsure about removing the old grid infrastructure home, it should be safe to have a regularly scheduled script remove the diskmon core dump directories and save you a full disk surprise late some night.
Posted by Don Seiler on Jun 16, 2011
We have a client that runs an application that, for whatever reasons, does NOT like daylight saving time. For that reason, the Oracle server is kept in Eastern Standard Time and does not change with the rest of the eastern United States when DST begins and ends every year. They accomplish this with a custom /etc/localtime file. However, they left /etc/sysconfig/clock set to “TZ=America/New_York,” which would prove fateful as I shall point out. So, with the custom localtime file, the “date” command as well as selecting sysdate or systimestamp would always return the current time in Eastern Standard Time. When it is Daylight Saving Time, as it is right now, this would be one hour behind “real” time as we consider it.
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Posted by Christo Kutrovsky on Apr 21, 2011
One of the exclusive Exadata features is the Smart Flash Cache (Oracle White Paper PDF). On a full rack, there is 5 TB of flash cache, which can store a significant amount of data. Quite often it’s several times more than the working set for a given reporting system.
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