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PYTHIAN NEWS

Pythian and Scalar Decisions today announced a formal partnership providing Oracle customers an unparalleled one-stop shop solution provider in Canada. Combined, we can help Oracle customers develop, fulfill, implement, and manage their whole Oracle solution stack.

• Read the full press release.
• Related news.
• More about Scalar Decisions

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.

Pythian is pleased to announce the new Flash Cache Query Tool for Oracle Exadata, developed by our Senior Consultant, and Oracle ACE, Christo Kutrovsky.

This tool will be most valuable for Exadata DBAs and Exadata Architects that are trying to understand if the Oracle Exadata Flash Cache is used as envisioned.

Read Christo’s release blog post for the Flash Cache Query Tool for Oracle Exadata and bookmark the tool home page.

Or, download the Flash Cache Query Tool for Oracle Exadata now.

Check out more Pythian resources for Oracle Exadata or the rest of our Exadata-related blog posts here.

One of the exclusive Exadata features is the Smart Flash Cache (Oracle White Paper PDF). On a full rack, there is 5 TB of flash cache, which can store a significant amount of data. Quite often it’s several times more than the working set for a given reporting system.
Read the rest of this entry . . .

If you’re attending Oracle OpenWorld 2010 in San Francisco, Sept. 19-23, 2010, be sure to stop by one of Pythian’s many sessions.

We’ll be all over the show, with experts Alex, and Marc speaking as listed below. Or, you might find Paul, Alex and others attending the bloggers meetup, participating in Oracle ACE/ACE Director activities, or at some of the User Group or OPN sessions on Sunday. Drop us a line on twitter @pythian while you’re at the show to connect with Pythian.
Read the rest of this entry . . .

Good afternoon and welcome to issue 27. The number 27 according to numerology is “the symbol of the divine light” so I’ll try to do that ideal justice. We’re off to a good start, what with me actually getting this out on schedule and such, so let’s get to it while the day is still quiet.

Operating Systems

It’s been two weeks since Ubuntu 10.04 was released. I’m still loving it. If you are on the fence or just curious, Ryan Paul at Ars has an intensive 9 page review of the release. Read the rest of this entry . . .

Hi there and welcome to Blogrotate in which I, your humble host and blogger, bring to you interesting stories and events from the past week in the SysAdmin world. It’s been yet another busy week, which is why this is coming out on a Sunday again, so I am going to have to short list this edition but there’s still plenty of tasty nuggets to be found. Read on.

Operating Systems

It’s been discovered that Microsoft released three patches last month without including them in the release notes. Two of the patches were to fix security holes in MS Exchange servers. While this is nothing new it completely removes the ability for a sysadmin to evaluate the impact of the patches on critical corporate systems, which is necessary before rolling out the updates. Not to mention it makes it really difficult to diagnose a change in behaviour if you have no idea there was a change made. See more gory details in Security firm reveals Microsoft’s ‘silent’ patches.

Sun/Oracle removed public firmware downloads is a strange piece by someone called techbert describing how he logged into the sunsolve to download some firmware for his systems only to find that they were no longer publicly available. Read the rest of this entry . . .

Good evening and welcome to this weeks edition of Blogrotate. It’s a bit later than usual this week due to client concerns but I could not let this week go by without something. This week, after all, is the release of Ubuntu 10.04LTS (Lucid Lynx) so I get to leverage my supreme blogging power to promote the product since I use it pretty much everywhere now.

Operating Systems

So as I was saying, the release of Lucid Lynx has the world abuzz. We had a mini install fest here in the SA cluster at Pythian and 2/3 of it went well. It seems that video is the main source of install pain for us in this new version. Read the rest of this entry . . .

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 . . .

Good morning everyone and welcome to another edition of all the news fit to reprint. Last week iPad news was the number one topic on the hearts and minds of most places I visit, let’s see if the iPad can last another week or if a new champion will be crowned. Call or text your votes to … oh wait that’s someone else. :)

Operating Systems

Starting off on a sad note that I missed last week. Ed Roberts, the inventor of the Altair personal computer died on April 2nd at the age of 68. Read the rest of this entry . . .