Posted by Marc Fielding on Oct 4, 2011
Update 7-October-2011: the log write caching capability has been officially announced as “Exadata Smart Flash Log”. I saw a few Oracle product management slides at OpenWorld presentations; one slide deck online is here on slide 30. A sample graph is provided, showing how the peak response times drop significantly with the additional cache.
These peaks would correspond to the times when the controller RAM cache is full. Another feature of the cache is that it returns write success status to the database when either flash or disk controller acknowledge the write, meaning tat the flash memory functions as a type of upper bound to redo write latency.
Exadata storage server software version 11.2.2.4.0 (patch link) has just been released. The readme file (My Oracle Support login required) lists 218 different changes, but one in particular sticks out:
11781936 NEED SMART FLASH LOGGING OF RDBMS REDO
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Posted by Marc Fielding on Aug 23, 2010
As of this afternoon, version 11.2.1.3.1 of Oracle’s Exadata storage server software, is out in the wild. This is the first publicly available version of the 11.2.1.3 branch, a major release including a full OS image with an update to Oracle Enterprise Linux 5.5. A number of bugs causing cell server crashes and hangs have been fixed, including 9472035, 9870117, and 9722560.
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Posted by Bill Fraser on Apr 23, 2010
Good afternoon and welcome to another edition of Blogrotate. Though I have been contributing to Blogrotate since its inception, this is the first time I have had the honour of posting it myself. Go me!
Operating Systems
Red Hat has announced the availability of a public beta for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 (RHEL 6). There are a number of changes, for which Dave Courbanou at The VAR Guy does a pretty good job of providing an overview. Read the rest of this entry . . .
Posted by Sheeri Cabral on Apr 20, 2010
Here’s a sneak peek at a video matrix — this is all the videos that include Pythian Group employees at the MySQL conference. I hope to have all the rest of the videos processed and uploaded within 24 hours, with a matrix similar to the one below (but of course with many more sessions).
Posted by Sheeri Cabral on Mar 12, 2010
This is the 182nd edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs. Make sure to read the whole edition so you do not miss where to submit your SQL limerick!
This week started out with me posting about International Women’s Day, and has me personally attending Confoo (Montreal) which is an excellent conference I hope to return to next year. I learned a lot from confoo, especially the blending nosql and sql session I attended.
This week was also the Hotsos Symposium. Doug’s Oracle Blog has a series of posts about Hotsos. If all this talk about conferences has gotten you excited, Joshua Drake notes that 14 days and the hotel is almost full for postgresql conference east which is March 25th-28th in Philadelphia. And the Oracle database insider notes that the Oracle OpenWorld call for papers is now open.
According to Susan Visser this week (ending tomorrow) is also read an e-book week. So if you have not already done so, read an e-book! She links a coupon for an e-book in the post.
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Posted by Singer Wang on Mar 1, 2010
I recently granted ALTER access in MySQL so a user could run the ALTER TABLE command . However after I granted the necessary privileges, the user was still not able to perform the tasks needed. Reproducing the issue using a test instance, I granted a test user the required privileges and MySQL reported no errors or warnings when the ALTER TABLE was run:
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Posted by Tim Inkpen on Feb 12, 2010
Welcome to another edition of Blogrotate. This has been an interesting week in the IT world, with Microsoft security issues being the major focus of attention.
Security
Once again, security flaws in Microsoft Operating Systems caused major problems for system administrators this past week. It began with Microsoft’s Security Response Center’s posting of February’s security bulletin.
Microsoft’s attempt’s to fix a 17-year-old bug resulted in a large number of computers having problems restarting. More information can be found here Restart issues after installing MS10-015 and Security patch results in BSOD, stops Windows from booting. It appear that this issue may have been caused by machines being previously infected by a rootkit
Another patch from Microsoft, the reliability update for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, turned out to be not so… reliable.
But what was of most concern to many system administrators was Microsoft’s security advisory concerning a vulnerability in the TLS and SSL protocols, since this affects not only the Microsoft Windows operating system but as TLS/SSL are an Internet standard, multiple vendors. Emil Protalinski at Ars Technica provides full coverage of the TLS/SSL flaw in Windows.
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Posted by Tim Inkpen on Feb 5, 2010
On Thursday, January 21, Pythian hosted the Ottawa Valley System Administration Guild (OVSAGE) Ottawa Valley System Administration Guild (OVSAGE).
The highlight of the meeting was an interesting presentation on security by the founder of OVSAGE, Scott Murphy. The focus was on the fact that security is a mindset, not a product. Scott’s presentation looked at a large number of security issues and explained in detail while technology alone cannot fix security issues. The presentation was a response to the Amrit Williams Blog post Top 10 Reasons Your Security Program Sucks and Why You Can’t Do Anything About It.
Scott’s presentation can be viewed here: security-quagmire-pdf. I hope you find it useful.
Posted by Tim Inkpen on Jan 15, 2010
Welcome to another edition of Blogrotate. This has been a busy week in the IT world. Here are some of the most interesting highlights.
Security
Without a doubt, the topic of the week is security. The revelation that China has been hacking into Google and over 30 other US companies sent shock waves through the IT World and beyond. There were a huge number of articles generated about this in the last week. Ironically, the best source for articles on this issue turned out to be Google’s own news aggregator: see China Google hack.
In another China-related security issue, The Money Times reports that Iranians hack China’s Baidu; Chinese hack back.
Read the rest of this entry . . .
