Pythian Group

So HP Cloud is finally yielding for some beta rain since their announcement late Sep.

It started late September when I signed up for private beta testing. They sent me this when I signed up

Thanks for your interest in HP Cloud Services. We will be sure to follow up with you when access becomes available. Since we’re only accepting a limited number of customers for our private beta based on customer profiles, we cannot guarantee that every request will be accepted.

However, we will review your submission and follow-up with you directly.

Two weeks ago, I got invited to join the beta and start testing the platform. Read the rest of this entry . . .

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.

A common scenario in the life of a DBA on a linux server looks something like this:

From: Sue-the-sysadamin
To:the-dba
Date: 2011-10-28 17:54:34

Dear DBA,

We will be patching the linux systems this Friday night, October 28th at 21:00.
The list of patches is attached.

Let us know if there are any conflicts with Oracle.
BTW, we need to know by 14:00 tomorrow.

Sue

Yikes! The SysAdmin wants to apply these patches this week, and needs to know if there are any conflicts this afternoon.

So you open up the list of patches. When you see the lengthy list of patches you suddenly realize the long lunch you had planned with your sweetheart is going to be rescheduled.

I recently received several lists of patches that were to be applied to a number of different linux servers that were all running oracle, which led to this blog entry.
Read the rest of this entry . . .

Or how to have an answer other than “I don’t know” when asked “How long does that take?”.

Recently while working on a client site I discovered that it takes 30-90 seconds to make an ssh connection to one of the servers. Connections between servers for this client typically take < 1 second, so the lengthy connection time was definitely out of order.

If you are familiar with debugging ssh connections you are probably familiar with the ‘-v’ option that directs ssh to output verbose comments stating which operation is currently taking place.  You can add up to three -v options on the command line, increasing the verbosity with each one.  An example follows: Read the rest of this entry . . .

Swappiness, as the name suggests, affects the swapping in the Linux systems.

Among the features announced with the release of version 4.6 of the KDE Software Compilation is KateSQL, a SQL Query plugin for the Kate text editor providing the basic functionality of a SQL client. It leverages the Qt SQL module, allowing you to make a connection to most types of databases. Out of the box it includes support for MySQL and SQLite, and with this post I’ll show you how to get it to connect to Oracle databases as well.

Since I am an Ubuntu user (Note: you’ll need to be on 11.04 and either be running Kubuntu or have the ‘kate’ package installed) these instructions will be specific to that operating system, though they will likely also apply to other Debian-based distributions with minimal modification. However, if you are using an RPM-based distribution such as openSUSE or Fedora, you’ll need to adapt the instructions somewhat to make sure you have the necessary development packages installed.

The first thing we’ll need to do in order to get this to work is to obtain an Oracle client. This can be downloaded from the Oracle Technology Network and requires that you have a valid Oracle.com Single Sign-On account. For the purposes of this article we’re going to use the Linux x86 Oracle Instant Client and the files we’re going to download are:

oracle-instantclient11.2-basic-11.2.0.2.0.i386.rpm
oracle-instantclient11.2-devel-11.2.0.2.0.i386.rpm


The first package is the client itself, providing the files required to run OCI applications. The second is the Instant Client SDK which includes header files for developing Oracle applications with Instant Client: in our case an OCI library for the Qt SQL module.

Users of RPM-based distributions can just go ahead and install these packages while others will need to convert them to .deb format first. The best way to do this that I am aware of is with the tool called Alien. Let’s install it, convert the Oracle Instant Client packages, and install them too.

cd /path/to/oracle/instant/client/files
sudo apt-get install alien
sudo alien oracle-instantclient11.2-basic-11.2.0.2.0.i386.rpm
sudo alien oracle-instantclient11.2-devel-11.2.0.2.0.i386.rpm
sudo dpkg -i oracle-instantclient11.2-basic_11.2.0.2.0-2_i386.deb oracle-instantclient11.2-devel_11.2.0.2.0-2_i386.deb

The next step is to install all of the dependencies necessary to build the Qt SQL OCI library.

sudo apt-get build-dep qt4-x11
sudo apt-get install qt4-qmake libqt4-dev libaio1

Then we will need the actual source code for the qt4-x11 package. This can be obtained with the following command:

apt-get source qt4-x11

To recap, at this point we’ve downloaded and installed the Oracle Instant Client and all of the dependencies required to build the qt4-x11 package, and we’ve downloaded the qt4-x11 source code. Next we’re going to build the Qt SQL OCI library itself.

sudo ln -s /path/to/qt4-x11-4.7.0/src /usr/include/src
sudo cp -r /path/to/qt4-x11-4.7.0/include/QtSql/private /usr/include/qt4/QtSql/
cd /usr/include/src/plugins/sqldrivers/oci/
qmake "INCLUDEPATH+=/usr/include/oracle/11.2/client64" "LIBS+=-L/usr/lib/oracle/11.2/client64/lib -Wl,-rpath,/usr/lib/oracle/11.2/client64/lib -lclntsh -lnnz11" oci.pro
make
sudo make install

Now that the libqsqloci.so module has been built and installed, Kate should be able to connect to an Oracle database. Launch Kate (or close and re-open it if it was already running), click Settings -> Configure Kate, expand the Application tree if necessary, click Plugins, check ‘SQL Plugin‘ and click OK. Then click SQL -> Add connection to launch the connection wizard. In addition to the MySQL and SQLite database drivers, you should now also have drivers named QOCI and QOCI8 available. Choose the appropriate one, enter relevant connection details, and complete the connection wizard. You can now execute queries against the database and display result data.

Good afternoon sports fans. I’ve had a couple of requests to update my world famous blog on installing TOra. Frankly I have been wanting to get this out for a while but duties other than blogging have taken precedence. That and I think my blogging ran out of entropy and needed some other IO to get going again. Well it’s now time for you all to let out that breath you have been holding since the ‘perfect 10′ was released (on 10.10.10 no less).
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.
Read the rest of this entry . . .

Update: recordings are now available

Following up on my earlier webinar Implementing Oracle Exadata – Strategies for Success, I’ll be giving another webinar to present the results of the Exadata implementation at LinKShare. I’ll be talking about actual performance results, our zero-downtime go-live, compression experiences, and performance tuning in an Exadata environment.

The webinar will be on Thursday, November 4 at 12 noon, eastern time (the time in your timezone).

Registration link

Being in the remote administration business is a strange beast and offers lots of challenges, but when you are working for multiple clients sometimes connecting to the servers can be challenging enough. Here’s a little idea that I had this morning that may save someone some grief, so I thought I would jot it down for all to see.

One of the issues I have connecting to some clients revolves around my linux desktop. Sure I can connect to many VPN devices using vpnc or other tools, but in some cases client policy prohibits such reasonable behaviour due to a) single vendor plugins; b) bad java or plugin issues; c) host checking software or; d) Antivirus requirements that do not recognize linux agents. My problem is that I do not want to administer Unix servers from a Windows system, it’s just … wrong. Like, fundamentally wrong. (on cue, someone I know is calling me a zealot)
Read the rest of this entry . . .