Pythian Group

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.

After covering hardware components of Sun Oracle Database Machine in part 1, our grand tour continues with a look at the software side. With the prominent exceptions of the Exadata storage server software and the Oracle database itself, the software stack is based on well-known and widely used open source products.

Database Nodes

The database nodes all run Oracle Enterprise Linux 5.3, a virtual clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3, but also including some small performance-related kernel tweaks. Version 11.2.1.3.1 of the Oracle Exadata Storage Server software contains an update to version 5.5.

The hardware drivers, notably the OpenFabrics InfiniBand implementation, are GPL-licensed open source. Stacked on top of the infiniband are the Reliable Datagram Socket (RDS) protocol and the proprietary Oracle iDB. This is what Kevin Closson said about it in his interview on our blog:
Read the rest of this entry . . .

Today I tested OracleVM (OVM) templates on their own distribution of Oracle Enterprise Linux (OEL) 5 with seeded VNC Viewer Free Edition 4.1.2 for X. All went fine, but the VNC connection to virtual machine was not painless as I expected.

[root@oram ~]# rpm -qa "vnc|xen"
kernel-xen-2.6.18-128.el5
xen-3.0.3-80.el5
kmod-gfs-xen-0.1.31-3.el5
kmod-cmirror-xen-0.1.21-10.el5
vnc-4.1.2-14.el5
kmod-gnbd-xen-0.1.5-2.0.1.el5
vnc-server-4.1.2-14.el5

On a brand new OEL5 system with virtualization support, I have created a new virtual machine with a fresh OEL4 (plain OS), and set appropriate memory for the virtual domain using the Xen management user interface commands. I also checked if the VNC port was allocated with the command virsh dumpxml:

Read the rest of this entry . . .

I decided to build my first sand box ever. I always wanted one, but there was no time or reason until now. Fortunately, hardware is ridiculously cheap these days compared to the past, so you can actually run full-blown Oracle Applications on your home PC without compromises.

I built a Dual Core box with 8G of RAM for an install of E-Business Suite R12. For OS I chose Oracle EL5U2, mainly because I’m used to the RH/OEL clones, and also because I expected it to be less painful than other distributions.

I started slowly, as time allowed, spending some time chasing various libraries and packages on the Net. Eventually it took me a week to realize how tedious it is to go the manual way. I got so frustrated by the dependencies that I gave up and purchased access to the ULN network.

Just to illustrate the type of struggle I went through, I found four distinct lists of required packages for 10g installation (in Oracle documentation and metalink combined). I’d recommend Note 421308.1 – Requirements For Installing Oracle10gR2 On RHEL/OEL 5 (x86_64), which summarizes the database part in a neat way. I also encourage you not to underestimate requirements of related Note 376183.1 – Defining a “default RPMs” installation of the RHEL OS.

Nevertheless, it’s just way more easy to use the oracle-validated package, which will download all dependencies for you. Well, almost all.

The next step was to prepare the machine. The only tricky part (from the DBA point of view) is to setup a DNS server, but even that went well. There are plenty of nice howtos on the web — search for keyword “rndc”.

Once I had all the required packages installed, users created, kernel parameters set, domain name resolution working, and Xvnc started, it was time to call a wizard.

Read the rest of this entry . . .

I recently installed Oracle DB 10.2.0.1 RAC (two nodes) on Oracle Enterprise Linux x86_64 and faced three issues. Since I had to dig out at several places, I thought it might benefit others to have my notes all here.

Facts

1. OS : OEL 4 — 2.6.9-67.0.0.0.1.ELsmp #1 SMP Sun
2. 2 Node RAC Install
3. Clusterware / RDBMS – 10.2.0.1

Issue 1: Error while loading shared libraries: libstdc++.so.5 during root.sh run on first node.

root@linux1 oracle]# /u02/app/oracle/product/crs/root.sh
WARNING: directory '/u02/app/oracle/product' is not owned by root
WARNING: directory '/u02/app/oracle' is not owned by root
Checking to see if Oracle CRS stack is already configured

Setting the permissions on OCR backup directory
Setting up NS directories
Oracle Cluster Registry configuration upgraded successfully
WARNING: directory '/u02/app/oracle/product' is not owned by root
WARNING: directory '/u02/app/oracle' is not owned by root
/u02/app/oracle/product/crs/bin/crsctl.bin: error while loading shared libraries: libstdc++.so.5: cannot open shared object file: No such file or
directory
Failure initializing entries in /etc/oracle/scls_scr/linux1.
[root@liux1 oracle]# chown -R root:dba /u02/app/oracle/
chown: cannot dereference `/u02/app/oracle/product/crs/lib32/libagtsh.so': No such file or
directory

On Node 2:

[root@linux2  VOTINGDISK]# /u02/app/oracle/product/crs/root.sh
WARNING: directory '/u02/app/oracle/product' is not owned by root
WARNING: directory '/u02/app/oracle' is not owned by root
Checking to see if Oracle CRS stack is already configured

Setting the permissions on OCR backup directory
Setting up NS directories
Failed to upgrade Oracle Cluster Registry configuration

ldd /u02/app/oracle/product/crs/bin/crsctl.bin
libclntsh.so.10.1 => not found
libhasgen10.so => not found
libocr10.so => not found
libocrb10.so => not found
libocrutl10.so => not found
libskgxn2.so => not found
libdl.so.2 => /lib64/libdl.so.2 (0x0000003c58900000)
libm.so.6 => /lib64/tls/libm.so.6 (0x0000003028900000)
libpthread.so.0 => /lib64/tls/libpthread.so.0 (0x0000003c59100000)
libnsl.so.1 => /lib64/libnsl.so.1 (0x0000003c60400000)
libstdc++.so.5 => /usr/lib64/libstdc++.so.5 (0x0000002a95577000)
libgcc_s.so.1 => /lib64/libgcc_s.so.1 (0x0000003c5b700000)
libcxaguard.so.5 => not found
libc.so.6 => /lib64/tls/libc.so.6 (0x0000003c58600000)
/lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 (0x0000003c58400000)

Ref: Metalink Note 400565.1 / Bug.5671963. Install compat-libstdc++-33-3.2.3-47.3.ia64.rpm and repeat the Oracle Clusterware installation.

Issue 2: PRKN-1008: Unable to load the shared library srvmhas10 during root.sh run on first node: Read the rest of this entry . . .

After weeks of not having the time I wanted for this, it’s finally done! Today, I installed RAC on Oracle Enterprise Linux 5 (OEL5), and I can tell you that there’s nothing exceptional about the process.

The only trouble I encountered had nothing directly to do with the installation. In order for the device rights to be assigned when RHEL5 or OEL5 start up, you have to create a file in /etc/udev/rules.d, but I have already spoken about that in my last post on the subject of raw devices.

Besides that, it’s all quite simple once 10g’s prerequisites are met. After an hour and a half, it was all wrapped up, at least for two nodes. I didn’t see anything revolutionary differences, but nonetheless there are some points worth mentioning.

Read the rest of this entry . . .