Pythian Group

It sure seems from seeing and hearing about GoldenGate that it is the Cadillac (or Genesis if one is so inclined) of replication engines. It appears to offer anywhere between significantly and dramatically less overhead than many other engines. What remains to be seen as it gets more widely adopted is the features that catapult it to the front of people’s minds when considering how to replicate what and where (how far from the master site). I attended the Pythian/Western Union presentation at Oracle Open World in October, featuring Pythian’s own Shervin Sheidaei and  Western Union’s Ron Mashrouteh. There was a lot of attention and chit-chat about this solution and I for one am looking forward to experiencing it first-hand.

I have experienced a handful of Oracle’s replication solutions as far back as version 5 of the database in the mid to late 1980′s. Will GoldenGate be the golden gate? If one ends up answering in the affirmative to most of the following questions, I think so:

1. Are the mechanisms at the administrator’s disposal for conflict resolution intuitive and repeatable between interventions?
2. Is it easy to administer throughout the complete life cycle of change-capture detection on the source repository to application of data changes on the remote site(s)?
3. Are the performance gains achieved by not relying on the more traditional replication engine’s dependency on the archived redo stream dramatic?
4. Is the price point for the product capable of attracting SMB’s that now implement the existing replication solution (streams) that is off-the-shelf with the Enterprise Edition offering?
5. Can a portion of the product’s day-to-day management tasks be executed by non-technical (and sometimes less costly) personnel?
6. Is Oracle support poised to provide as robust and strategic support to the product, at a level of expertise along the lines of the more traditional solution they have been supporting for many years?

Only time will tell … I for one would look forward to the opportunity to get my hands dirty with this technology and come to grips with some of its challenges. Challenges need not always be fraught with sessions of frustrating crisis intervention. Sometimes, in a roundabout way, these very challenges provide opportunities for seasoned database administration personnel to hone their skills with new products … onward and upwards.

For the final day of UKOUG there are quite a few Pythian presentations. Unfortunately a lot of them happen at the same time, so it won’t be possible to attend them all live.

Using Oracle GoldenGate to Minimize Database Upgrade Risk

10:10, Media Suite
Marc Fielding

Even the best-planned database upgrades can leave nagging questions: what happens if my upgraded system performs unexpectedly? Is there a way I can go back to the previous version without downtime and data loss? Oracle GoldenGate allows DBAs to give affirmative answers to these questions. Drawing on upgrade experiences ranging from mid-sized databases to a large 10TB 90-CPU OLTP system, this session will show how to optimally configure Oracle GoldenGate, minimize downtime, maximize replication performance, and integrate Oracle GoldenGate into existing infrastructure such as Oracle ASM and storage-based replication.

Learn the various deployment scenarios where GoldenGate can minimize upgrade risk and delivery business value. Find out how GoldenGate can help not only during the upgrade, but after the upgrade as well. Learn how to use GoldenGate in medium- and high-volume environments. See real-world, tested GoldenGate configurations. Find out lessons learned and pitfalls to avoid.

The Answer to Free Memory Swap and Everything

10:10, Hall 8A
Christo Kutrovsky

Do I have enough memory? Why is my free memory so low? Am I swapping to disk? Can I increase my SGA (db cache) size? Can I add another instance to this server? Are my system resources used optimally? These are all questions that often haunt DBAs. This presentation is The Answer. It covers in detail the different types of memory, how to monitor memory, and how to optimally use it with Oracle. Multiple examples in the presentation demonstrate how certain actions on the database side cause different memory areas to be allocated and used on the OS side. Key underlying differences in operating systems approaches to managing memory will be highlighted, with special attention given to Linux and Solaris. Using Linux as an example throughout, this presentation explains how to effectively use tools such as “top”, “vmstat” and “/proc/meminfo” to look into into a system’s allocation and use of memory.

Amazon RDS, EC2 and S3 for Oracle Databases

11:20am, Hall 10B
Alex Gorbachev

This technical session focuses on specific recommendations and guidelines for leveraging the Amazon Web Services platform to host Oracle databases. We will looks into traditional database hosting using EC2 platform as well as recently introduced Amazon RDS on Oracle. We will look into how to configure, provision, backup, restore, monitor, and secure your databases in AWS. We will also look on how you can leverage S3 cloud storage for hybrid cloud deployments, particularly for backup and archival storage.

Backup and Recovery Roundtable

11:20am, Roundtable Area
Michael Abbey

A discussion of backup and recovery technology, problems and solutions. We will poll the attendees for an agenda on the day and proceed with an informal discussion not limited to:

RMAN, OSB, Sans, Data Guard backups, RAC backups and other topics of interest.

Concurrent Processing Performance Analysis for Apps DBAs

2:25pm, Hall 10B
Maris Elsins

Concurrent processing is one of the key elements of Oracle E-Business Suite, that’s used by most of modules for scheduling and processing background jobs. Keeping this functionality healthy is important to get maximum performance out of it. The paper describes the key metrics to estimate the performance of the concurrent managers, discusses approaches and techniques that can be used to understand how well the concurrent processing is set up, what are the bottlenecks and delays in processing of concurrent requests and provides tips on how to deal with each of the identified problem. This paper is targeted for Oracle Applications DBAs and technical consultants.

PYTHIAN NEWS

Pythian is happy to announce today the achievement of three new Oracle PartnerNetwork Specializations bringing the total to seven under our Platinum level membership of the Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) program.

Now added to the list are Oracle Exadata, Oracle Data Warehousing, and Oracle GoldenGate.

Complementing the added specializations is Pythian’s launch of new Oracle Exadata-focused products and services including an Oracle Database 11g Release 2 migration calculator, Oracle Exadata Smart Flash Cache Monitoring Tool, and an Oracle Exadata Managed Services program that extends the company’s Oracle Exadata-readiness services.

Pythian’s most recent Oracle Exadata clients include a major financial services company in New York and an e-commerce company specializing in data aggregation for the travel industry. Pythian’s Oracle GoldenGate expertise is supporting Western Union currently.

• Read the PR about our newest Specializations
• Read about our first series of Specializations
• Hear us our Specialized experts in person at OOW11

To find out how we can put our specialized Oracle expertise to work for you, contact us, send us an email or call 1-866-798-4426 ext. 2.

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.

Read the rest of this entry . . .

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!

Welcome to Log Buffer, a weekly review of the database industry. This week’s issue Log Buffer #198 is generously published by Sam DeFilippis, who manages Oracle Notes blogs, with latest postings on Oracle GoldenGate.

As always, if you’d like to host your own issue of Log Buffer, simply reach out to the Log Buffer coordinator.
Please enjoy Sam’s issue of Log Buffer #198.

Log Buffer #197 marks the middle of summer, and the fact that we’re a mere two weeks away from our 200th edition.

To begin this week’s reading, I’d like to highlight two Oracle blogs maintained by Sam J. DeFilippis: Oracle Notes, where he’s recently posted about troubleshooting GoldenGate and positioning a read of Extract/Replicat Trail file or Oracle redo log. Sam volunteered to host a future edition of Log Buffer (thanks, Sam!). You can too, by sending an email to the Log Buffer coordinator, we’re always looking for volunteer publishers.

Brad Hudson a points that PostgreSQL test servers have moved from Oracle to EnterpriseDB.
Read the rest of this entry . . .

I want to introduce several post about Oracle GoldenGate (GG), a relatively new replication software from Oracle.

We all know replication using Oracle Streams technology. Streams are improving from version to version of the RDBMS, and now it is a very well managed and reliable technology with a large set of options and capabilities. But, in the document Oracle – GoldenGate Statement of Direction (PDF), GoldenGate software was announced as the strategic replication solution for Oracle Database, and Oracle plans to direct all efforts to improve it.Therefore, I think it is time to make the acquaintance of GoldenGate.

This first post is about installating GG software and creating the simplest replication using only the “extract” and “replicat” processes.

Lets start the installation. Read the rest of this entry . . .

This is the third post in Oracle GoldenGate Extract Internals series (links to part I and part II).

In this post, we’re going to take a closer look at various queries that the Extract process uses against the database. As before, we will start by examining the strace output:

nanosleep({1, 0}, NULL)                 = 0
...
read(20, "\1\"\0\0\255\1\0\0\217\0\0\0H\200\366\256\5\24\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0"..., 1024000) = 1024000
...
write(16, "\0$\0\0\6\0\0\0\0\0\3N'\7\0\0\0\2\0\0\0`\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\7\0011"..., 36) = 36
read(17, "\0\351\0\0\6\0\0\0\0\0\6\1\"\375\2\0\0\0\0\0\2\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0"..., 8208) = 233
write(16, "\0 \0\0\6\0\0\0\0\0\3N(\10\0\0\0\2\0\0\0`\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\7\0011", 32) = 32
read(17, "\0\343\0\0\6\0\0\0\0\0\6\1\"\7\1\0\0\0\0\0\2\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0"..., 8208) = 227
write(16, "\0K\0\0\6\0\0\0\0\0\3N)\t\0\0\0\2\0\0\0`\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\7,/"..., 75) = 75
read(17, "\0\341\0\0\6\0\0\0\0\0\6\1\"\375\1\0\0\0\0\0\2\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0"..., 8208) = 225
write(16, "\0Q\0\0\6\0\0\0\0\0\3N*\n\0\0\0\2\0\0\0`\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\7,/"..., 81) = 81
read(17, "\0\254\0\0\6\0\0\0\0\0\4\1\0\0\0)\0\1\0\0\0\0{\5\0\0\0\0\n\0\0\0"..., 8208) = 172
lseek(20, 227328, SEEK_SET)             = 227328
nanosleep({1, 0}, NULL)                 = 0

File descriptors 16 and 17 are the pipes for one of the bequeath connections we have with the database. There are four queries being submitted each cycle (following the same order as those being sent to a database): Read the rest of this entry . . .

Today we continue looking at various aspects of how the Oracle GoldenGate extract process works.

One of the follow up questions to part I was about the way the Extract process reads from ASM storage. I’ve provided the answer, however, today we’re going get a detailed look at how the Extract process interacts with an ASM instance and what kind of implications may result.

Read the rest of this entry . . .