I’ll be giving a webinar about Exadata implementation, where I’ll be talking about Exadata features and how best to use them. I’ll also be sharing some lessons learned from my own implementation experience.
The webinar will be on Wednesday August 11 at high noon eastern time. Note that this is a change from the previous date.
This should have been the easiest task on my todo list: Install Oracle 10.2.0.3 EE standalone on a new Linux RHEL 5 server, later to be used as a standby for a production RAC system. This means 2 lines of “runinstall -silent …”, less than 5 minutes of DBA work and maybe 20 minutes of waiting. I did not expect to spend over 5 hours doing this.
Problems started when I discovered that I don’t have the 10.2.0.3 patchset and another patch that exists on production and should be installed on the standby. I had to wait for my Metalink credentials to be approved for this customer CSI before I could download the patches for them.
“Why don’t you just clone the software from production?” asked a helpful colleague.
The process for applying a patch on top of the CRS, or now called, the Grid Infrastructure, has changed from what we used to do on 11gR1 and prior releases.
The patch I had recently applied was in order to resolve the Oracle bug “11.2.0.1 ONS CORE DUMP or High Resource Usage [ID 988795.1]“.
Database name: TEST
Instance Names: TEST1, TEST2
Grid Infrastructure Home: /u02/app/11.2.0/grid/bin (non-share home)
Grid Infrastructure Home Owner: oracle
Due to the fact that the patch doesn’t require full downtime and could be applied on a rolling basis, the plan below is to be executed on each node at time. Read the rest of this entry . . .
Upgrading to 11g Release Grid Infrastructure? You probably want to read on…
Oracle 11g Release 2 Grid Infrastructure has been dramatically redesigned compare to 10g and 11gR1 Clusterware. Coming with impressive set of new features, Grid Infrastructure also uses much more memory. While RAM is rather inexpensive these days, it does pose an inconvenience in some scenarios. Particularly, for sand-box type installations that I use all the time for my own tests and demonstrations. For production upgrades, you need to be aware of and plan for increased memory usage.
I’ve been able to easily run a 2 node 10g RAC cluster on my MacBook with 4 GB of RAM allocating less than 1 GB of RAM to each virtual machine. That was even enough for a mini database instance with a very small memory footprint. Oracle 11g Release 1 was pretty much the same except maybe the database instance itself required a bit more memory but one node could still fit within 1 GB of RAM.
In 11gR2, bare-bone Grid Infrastructure processes alone consume 10+ times more memory (11.2.0.1 on 32 bit Linux to be precise): Read the rest of this entry . . .
Here are the slides from my presentation at RMOUG 2010.
I am not sure how much sense all this will make without my comments. We may do it in a webinar if there is sufficient interest. Regardless I will probably be doing it again at some point in the future.
Mike Hogan, CEO of ScaleDB spoke at the Boston MySQL User Group in September 2009:
ScaleDB is a storage engine for MySQL that delivers shared-disk clustering. It has been described as the Oracle RAC of MySQL. Using ScaleDB, you can scale your cluster by simply adding nodes, without partitioning your data. Each node has full read/write capability, eliminating the need for slaves, while delivering cluster-level load balancing. ScaleDB is looking for additional beta testers, there is a sign up at http://www.scaledb.com.
Oracle RAC SIG is holding elections for its officers and it’s now time for all RAC SIG members to vote. The voting is closed on 30-Sep so make sure you don’t miss the deadline — go to Oracle RAC SIG web-site and click on “Elections” tab (here is the direct link if it works).
If you are not already a member of Oracle RAC SIG and interested in Oracle RAC technology then you should definitely join — it’s free. As a member of RAC SIG you can enjoy regular webinars about Oracle RAC technology as well as access previous archives. Some time ago, I have done a webinar on RAC connection management and there are many good presenters involved. RAC SIG also active at the conferences and organizes round tables, speaker panels and other events. I’ve been involved into one of the past events — RAC Attack! in Chicago — and also presented RAC session at the last year’s Oracle Open World. I’m doing another RAC presentation at the Open World this year during User Groups Forum on Sunday on behalf of RAC SIG.
RAC SIG keeps growing and engaged into more and more activities. I’ve been involved in RAC SIG activities for a while and now decided it’s a good time to step in more actively so I am running for the Vice President of the RAC SIG this year – I believe I can bring great value and make RAC SIG even more successful. You can find more details at the “Election” page of the Oracle RAC SIG web-site so please have a look and if you think I would be a good candidate (I’m sure you do) — cast your votes appropriately! ;-)
Welcome back to our videocasts — this is the last video in the series about Oracle RAC Virtual IP’s. I strongly suggest to watch the two previous videos:
I’m writing this post sitting in Vancouver airport but I won’t get into details of my travel complications here, I think it deserves a separate post as it makes a good point for DR plans. :)
What we are looking at during this videocast is how to troubleshoot the connectivity issues that can be caused by VIP’s in Oracle RAC environment and how to diagnose cryptic Oracle error messages using SQL*Net tracing facility on the client side.
We first look at the typical error message “ORA-12545: Connect failed because target host or object does not exist” and how it leads to the IP alias resolution problem that, at first, seems to be easily fixed by changing IP aliases in the connection descriptor to the numerical IP addresses. Then we find out that it’s not enough with Oracle RAC and server-side connection load balancing can still cause you some grief. Read the rest of this entry . . .
The first videocast was quite popular — it has more than 300 views in couple weeks and considering no Hollywood stars were starring in that video and there were no nude scenes, I think it’s fair to say that this format was very much welcomed by the audience.
Today, I’m posting the follow up session on VIP’s (Virtual IP’s) with Oracle RAC. What I demonstrate today is a typical configuration mistake for a RAC databases created with Database Configuration Assistant (DBCA) and what’s the result of such omission.
It’s actually logged as a bug 4338578 on Metalink (thanks to Marcin Przepiorowski for reference). However, I believe it’s not a database issue but (1) misunderstanding how remote listener registration works, (2) documentation bug and (3) DBCA bug.
The init.ora parameter remote_listener defines the list of remote listeners that an instance should register with. The parameter local_listener sets the address for the local listener registration and if not specified, by default it’s hostname and the default port 1521. However, it turns out that the local_listener parameter is used not only for local registration but for something else as well… Read the rest of this entry . . .
“Seeing it once is better than hearing about it a thousand times” — I think this is the closest translation from one Russian proverb. I may add that hearing and seeing might be often better then reading so let me try to start a series of small videocasts about Oracle database technology.
One of the topics that beginners RAC DBA’s (along with network engineers supporting Oracle database infrastructure) are confused about is the Virtual IP usage in Oracle RAC starting from Oracle Clusterware 10g.
With this videocast, I will try to clarify those concerns once and for all. I have embedded the video here in a smaller window so you might want to go directly to YouTube for the full-size version of “Pythian Video: Oracle RAC – Why VIPs“.
This is an experiment for now so let’s see how it goes. Let me know if you find this format useful and don’t forger to rate it on YouTube. Note that if you don’t leave any comments here, I’d never know whether you liked it or not so don’t be shy and comment away…
Upgrading to 11g Release Grid Infrastructure? You probably want to read on…