Pythian Group

Collaborate 2011, Orlando, Florida – April 10-14, 2011
Pythian is happy to welcome Michael Abbey back to our team. He joins our list of distinguished speakers below. Keep an eye out for Pythian founder Paul Vallee who will also be making his annual appearance at the show.
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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

After over a hundred hours of hard work, Pythian has achieved multiple specializations under our Platinum membership level of the Oracle PartnerNetwork’s OPN Specialized program. We’re proud to be recognized by Oracle as a value-added services partner.

We’d like to shout out a big thank you to Pythian’s dedicated team of database experts who continue to demonstrate and prove why Pythian is trusted by so many clients for Oracle database and applications infrastructure support and consulting services. And, we’d like to give an even bigger thank you to our valuable customers, for your ongoing partnership and confidence in our company.

Check out our shiny new badges of honor, below:

But there is no rest for the wicked. Stay tuned for more news as we announce the next round of specializations.

Oracle Recognizes Pythian as a Value-Added Partner for Core Database Expertise and Outstanding Consulting Services

PYTHIAN NEWS: As Announced today at Oracle OpenWorld 2010, San Francisco, CA.

Contact Vanessa Simmons for media inquiries.

The Pythian Group, Inc., a leading provider of remote database infrastructure services, and a Platinum member of the Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN), today announced it has achieved four specializations under the OPN Specialized Program. By attaining “specialized status” Pythian has demonstrated and met rigorous business and technical competency criteria for core Oracle solutions including Oracle Database 11g, Database Performance Tuning, Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC), and Oracle Linux. Through specialization Pythian demonstrates solid experience, expertise and success with planning, deploying and managing Oracle products in complex and large-scale environments, providing added value to Oracle end-customers.

Pythian has been an Oracle partner since 1999, providing services across the entire Oracle technology stack since the company’s inception. Pythian consulted on the implementation of Oracle Exadata at LinkShare Corporation, the first in New York. The company’s DBA and senior consulting resources serve over 140 clients worldwide, including FOXSports Interactive, and have been engaged in many Oracle-related projects. In addition; Pythian is the outsourced database services team for Grasshopper, known as the virtual phone system for entrepreneurs.

“We have worked with Pythian for a number of years at FOXSports Interactive and view this specialization as a further commitment to the Oracle expertise they provide,” said Sheli Reynolds, Vice President, Engineering.
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Hello Everyone,

This is one of my fist posts under Pythian’s blog. I will try to keep those short and simple at the beginning.

Recently I was troubleshooting a new GNS (Grid Name Services) functionality.

For more information please see here: Oracle Clusterware Network Configuration Concepts.

I have noticed that there is a-trace-level parameter in the GNS process string.
# ps -ef | grep gns
root 26790 1 2 14:41 ? 00:00:00 /u01/app/11.2.0/grid/bin/gnsd.bin -trace-level 0 -ip-address 10.10.193.201 -startup-endpoint ipc://GNS_hostrac01_23867_408c49e351f1f6a8
root 26825 17210 0 14:41 pts/1 00:00:00 grep gns


Unfortunately there is no description as of now in the documentation or MOS on how to change it to generate invaluable diagnostic information.
NOTE: I am sure the documentation will be updated in Database 12c version (c for Cloud ;)

For a time being the following should work for you:

# /u01/app/11.2.0/grid/bin/crsctl modify resource ora.gns -attr "TRACE_LEVEL=6"
# /u01/app/11.2.0/grid/bin/srvctl stop gns
# /u01/app/11.2.0/grid/bin/srvctl start gns


I hope that this advice will help you to diagnose your GNS issue.

I will blog about the way I resolved future GNS-related issues later on.

It looks like I have said too much for my very first post already.

See you around,

Yury

Just another DBA from down under

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.

To register, visit https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/171889707. For more Pythian webinars, visit http://www.pythian.com/library/webinars/.

This is my first mobile post so please excuse any typos. I must admit though that T-Mobile 3G is _fast_.

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.

Read the rest of this entry . . .

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.