Pythian Group

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• If running 11.2.0.2, a bugfix for unpublished bug 12539000 Synchronization problem in the IPC state affects ASM rolling upgrade and is required.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.

Pythian continues to have a busy quarter with events right up to the end of the 2011 calendar year.

If you happened to miss us at a past event, email events@pythian.com to reconnect or request a copy of the any of the presentations we’ve made through 2011 or earlier.

Live events

• Ottawa, ON – Nov. 16, 2011 – The HRPA presents it’s 2011/2012 CEO Dinner series and kicks off the season with a rare appearance by Pythian CEO Andrew Waitman speaking with his unique insight on “Perspectives on Business Success and The Critical Role of HR”. If you missed this rare opportunity to hear Andrew and are interested in the subject, reach out to us to connect with him.
• Birmingham, UK – Dec. 5-7th, 2011 – Find Pythian experts at the UKOUG’s Annual User Group Conference. Founder Paul Vallee will be in attendance, along with our sales and local UK team members. Catch sessions by:
• Alex Gorbachev: Database I/O Performance, Measurement, Planning & Amazon RDS, EC2 and S3 for Oracle Databases
• Christo Kutrovsky: Oracle Exadata Hybrid Columnar Compression – Leveraging it Fully
• Marc Fielding: Oracle Exadata I/O Resource Management, Ideal Technology for Consolidation
• Maris Elsins: Concurrent Processing Performance Analysis for Apps DBAs
• Michael Abbey: RMAN Setup Best Practices & Using a Physical Standby to Minimize Downtime for Database Release or Server Change

To meet with Pythian at UKOUG send a note to us.

Web events

• Nov. 2011 – Movember Campaign: Team Pythian, both individually and collectively are adding to the “mo”mentum of the Movember “mo”vement in support of men’s health issues. Go Mo’s go!
• Nov. 22, 2011 – “Register – Introducing Oracle Database Appliance with Alex Gorbachev“
• Nov. 23, 2011 – “Register – Under the Hood of Oracle ASM – Fault Tolerance with Alex Gorbachev“
• Nov. 30, 2011 – “Register – Peering Through The Cloud – The Straight Goods on Oracle Exalogic with Marc Fielding“

Watch for Pythian across North America presenting our experience with Oracle Database Appliance in various cities and at various user group and local Oracle events in conjunction with your Oracle field sales team. If you missed us recently at TOUG, and NoCOUG – send us a note at oda@pythian.com and we’ll share our beta experience and details of the free migration offer we announced at Oracle OpenWorld 2011 where Pythian will upgrade or migrate you to ODA free of charge. Get all of your ODA questions answered candidly by our expert team, and learn how to take advantage of all Oracle Database Appliance has to offer and get upgraded to Oracle Database 11g in the process.

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.

Read the rest of this entry . . .

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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Pythian is pleased to announce our speaking schedule at this year’s Oracle OpenWorld 2011, October 2-6, 2011 in San Francisco, CA.

We’re excited to be joined by our customers Western Union, and Worldwide Technologies (WWT) as we present real-world experiences and project success. If you’re attending, don’t miss the chance to hear our team of experts. Bring your toughest questions to be answered as they relate to any of the subjects below.

• Follow Pythian on LinkedIn for up to date OOW info
• Schedule a meeting with Pythian at OOW to discuss your database needs
• Planning to attend but not yet registered? August 12, 2011 is the deadline for early bird registration. Do it now.

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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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Summer’s here, and that means it’s time to start thinking about Oracle OpenWorld 2011, October 2-6th, 2011 in San Francisco.

Pythian’s plans are well underway. We have been busily planning since March, have submitted a number of abstracts on all sorts of topics: Exadata, ASM, GoldenGate, ADR, ASM, many based on real world experiences with Pythian clients.

Some have been accepted, but we’re hoping for a few more and we’re asking Pythian fans to vote for our sessions on Oracle Mix.

It’s easy. Simply click on the topic link below, and log into your Oracle Mix account to cast your vote.

1. Evaluating Oracle Exadata: Starring Roles for the Best Technology
2. Under the Hood of Oracle ASM: Fault Tolerance
3. Oracle Database Consolidation: Practical Chargeback Methods
4. Administration of Automatic Diagnostic Repository
5. Oracle GoldenGate vs. Oracle DataGuard
6. How GoldenGate helps a company to zero downtime for the application releases
7. Exadata: Failure is Not an Option
8. Exadata: Datawarehousing challenges: Parallel Query Challenges
9. Embracing the ADR in Oracle Database 11g
10. Amazon RDS, EC2 and S3 for Oracle Databases
11. Monitoring MySQL with Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control
12. Database I/O Performance: Measuring and Planning

If you submitted abstracts that were not accepted you also have one last chance: submit a session proposal on Oracle Mix. Speakers get a free pass to OOW11.

Good luck to all submittees and thanks for supporting Pythian!

I was working on a task of 10g Active-Passive cluster design where I was supposed to migrate a database to ASM from conventional filesystem. So I thought of writing this blog.

Below are the steps which I followed to move the database to ASM and then created a spfile in ASM diskgroup in the end.

1) Set the following parameters in init.ora file.

• control_files=’+DISKGROUP’
• db_create_file_dest=’+DISKGROUP’
• db_recovery_file_dest=’+DISKGROUP’

Read the rest of this entry . . .

It is a controversial question whether use or not ASMLIB for manage disks for a ASM instance but I don’t want to start a new discussion about it in this post. I want to talk about updating ASMLIB after or before updating kernel version.
We know that the ASMLIB driver is kernel dependent and has to be updated to match the kernel version. We have to go to the Oracle site, find the proper version for ASMLIB driver, download it and install. But beginning oracleasm-support version 2.1.0 and higher we can use the embedded function “update-driver” which can help us to save time and simplify the process of updating ASMLIB driver.
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The past four days have found me very frustrated and at wits’ end while testing upgrades of standalone Oracle Grid Infrastructure (ASM) 11.2.0.1 to 11.2.0.2 on RHEL/OEL 5 VMs. The upgrade would seem to go fine, but after rebooting, I would see ASM and LISTENER running under the old (11.2.0.1) grid home directories again.

Looking at /etc/oratab, I saw this:

$ grep -i asm /etc/oratab
+ASM:/u01/app/grid/product/11.2.0/grid_1:N              # line added by Agent

grid_1 is the old grid home, I expect to see grid_2. The comment about being added by Agent led me to a path where I eventually took a look at /etc/init.d/ohasd, which is basically the master script that starts everything up. I noticed that this file hadn’t been updated as part of the patching, and contained this:

$ grep -i crs_home /etc/init.d/ohasd
ORA_CRS_HOME=/u01/app/grid/product/11.2.0/grid_1
export ORA_CRS_HOME

Read the rest of this entry . . .