Posted by Maryanne Birksted on Jan 25, 2012
Pythian is very excited to return to the much-awaited RMOUG 12 held in Denver, Colorado from February 14-16, 2012. Keep your eyes open for Alex Gorbachev, Marc Fielding, Don Seiler and Gwen Shapira in attendance. We have a fantastic line-up of speakers this year featuring a total of seven papers presented by Alex, Marc, Don and Gwen. If you have any feedback on our sessions, please send your comments directly to the speaker or to Vanessa Simmons, Pythian Director of Marketing. Please also follow this link to sign up to receive notice of future speaking engagements, webinars or Pythian news.
Be sure to stop by our booth (#3,6,7,10) to say hello to our friends from the OakTable Network, and enter our draw to win the new Amazon Kindle with software provided by Cary Millsap (MR-Trace, MR-Tools & Method-R Profiler) and a pack of digital e-book downloads courtesy of Apress. Also slated is the RAC Attack workshop, which was first offered at Oracle Open World and UKOUG, and is now in its second year at RMOUG. Pythian is co-sponsoring this event with Apress and it’s a fun and informative way to learn from our experts how and when to properly build a RAC environment.
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Posted by Marc Fielding on Jan 16, 2012
The 2012 edition of RMOUG Training Days in Denver less than a month away, running February 15 and 16 at the Colorado Convention Center in Denver. Although it’s only two days, there’s a lot of technical content there, and a refreshing reduction in marketing-oriented presentations from “product managers”. It’s not too late to register, and it’s a pretty nice excuse to get to the Rockies in ski season. I’ll be doing two presentations, and am polishing up whitepapers and presentations for the submission deadline tomorrow:
They’re right after each other in the grid, but I do get a short break for the dedicated exhibit hall time and paid vendor presentations (yes there are still a few; they have to pay the bills somehow).
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Posted by Fahd Mirza on Jan 11, 2012
With the announcement of the Oracle Big Data Appliance, Oracle also comes up with some really cool technology stack which is being termed as Oracle Big Data Connectors (OBDC). This piece of software can be used with both Oracle Big Data Appliance and other Apache Hadoop-based systems.
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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 5, 2011
For those of you attending UKOUG today, there is a healthy dose of Pythian presentations on tap this afternoon. Actually, you can do it wall to wall 2:30pm to 6:30pm if you like.
To note:
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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 Vanessa Simmons on Nov 16, 2011
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
Web events
Posted by Michael S. Abbey on Nov 14, 2011
The presentation deadline for UKOUG is 8 days away. I have been madly preparing for 2 presentations, one on my best friend (rman) and the other on my co-best friend (the physical standby). Both of these topics have been perennial favourites for me and many of my attendees. I find with both of these items, there is always something more to learn.
Pythian has quite the presence at the UKOUG show in Birmingham England the first full week of December. I fondly remember my first trip to Europe to attend the show in Brighton in 1992. I was traveling with a senior exec from Oracle and we stayed in a very posh hotel and naturally went first class on the train to Brighton. My first day in London was, as I had heard, a typical London day:
- raining
- jumper at Green Park
- small explosion at Victoria Park station
- coal miners’ march
What more could I ask for. I was there again in 1998 for the show once it had permanently re-located to Birmingham. One of my topics this year allowed me to hone my skills with the active database duplicate in 11g. Talk about a sweet piece of technology :). I have been around IT for 25 or so years and this is one of the best I have seen. Speaking of rman … if you are lucky enough to be using it with Enterprise Edition and multi-CPU boxes (do any single-CPU boxes still exist?), the speed of the product is huge when asking it to spawn multiple channels manually or setting a degree of parallelism. Kudos to the engineers/developers who put that together.
I hunger for the opportunity to cut my teeth on some of the new-fangled stuff coming from Oracle … especially Exa-this and Exa-that not to mention ODA. I consider myself to be a strong CORE DBA and take pride in the work I do in that arena. Is it possible to teach an old dog new tricks?
While at the Apple store recently I shared a “secret” with the folks at the Genius bar to the pleasure of yours truly and the woman I was working with … want to boot Lion on Mac in 32-bit mode? Hold the 3 and the 2 key when restarting the machine. I wonder if I held down the 1 and the 9 key if it would boot in 19-bit mode :).
By the way, to my amazement I did see something once when flying into London … London! Usually it is overcast and you can’t see anything until your plane drops through a very low cloud cover. I thought I saw David Gilmour walking out of Harrod’s from seat 22F on my Boeing 767 but am still not sure.
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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