Posted by John Piwowar on Nov 23, 2011
Hello everyone! After a bit more than 2 months, it’s finally time for my first Pythian blog post. In addition to getting accustomed to the “Pythian way” of doing things and learning as much as I can about my clients, I’ve really been enjoying getting to know the smart group of people that comprise our ERP team. It’s fitting, therefore, that my first post is “crowdsourced,” in that it grew out of several conversations with my teammates. We’ve been talking a lot about Fusion Apps, the upcoming release of E-Business Suite Release 12.2, and what it all means not just for our clients, but for us as Apps DBAs. One of the topics that’s been on our minds recently is:
The clock is ticking down on Apps 11i. What does all the new stuff coming down the line mean for those customers in the next 12-18 months?
Oddly enough, the answer to that question is:
Not very much. At least, not yet.
Read the rest of this entry . . .
Posted by Don Seiler on Dec 7, 2010
The past four days have found me very frustrated and at wits’ end while testing upgrades of standalone Oracle Grid Infrastructure (ASM) 11.2.0.1 to 11.2.0.2 on RHEL/OEL 5 VMs. The upgrade would seem to go fine, but after rebooting, I would see ASM and LISTENER running under the old (11.2.0.1) grid home directories again.
Looking at /etc/oratab, I saw this:
$ grep -i asm /etc/oratab
+ASM:/u01/app/grid/product/11.2.0/grid_1:N # line added by Agent
grid_1 is the old grid home, I expect to see grid_2. The comment about being added by Agent led me to a path where I eventually took a look at /etc/init.d/ohasd, which is basically the master script that starts everything up. I noticed that this file hadn’t been updated as part of the patching, and contained this:
$ grep -i crs_home /etc/init.d/ohasd
ORA_CRS_HOME=/u01/app/grid/product/11.2.0/grid_1
export ORA_CRS_HOME
Read the rest of this entry . . .
Posted by Sheeri Cabral on Jul 26, 2010
IOUG has a free series of three webinars on upgrading MySQL. Each webinar is an hour long, and it starts with a webinar by me tomorrow at 12 noon Central time (GMT-5) on “Why and How to Upgrade to MySQL 5.1″. The webinar assumes you are upgrading from MySQL 5.0 to MySQL 5.1, and talks a little bit about the new features, server variables, and what you need to know when upgrading to MySQL 5.1.
The software used is GoToWebinar (formerly GoToMeeting), so you will need to install that software. To register, use the links on the IOUG MySQL Upgrade Webinar Series page.
The complete list of webinars in the MySQL Upgrade Series is:
* MySQL 5.1: Why and How to Upgrade
Sheeri Cabral, The Pythian Group
Tuesday, July 27, 12:00 p.m. – 1:00 p.m. CT (GMT-5)
* MySQL Upgrades With No Downtime
Sean Hull, Heavyweight Internet Group
Wednesday, July 28, 12:00 p.m. – 1:00 p.m. CT (GMT-5)
* MySQL Upgrade Best Practices
Matt Yonkovit, Percona
Thursday, July 29, 12:00 p.m. – 1:00 p.m. CT (GMT-5)
(note, I am not sure if it is free for everyone or just free for IOUG members; my apologies if it is the latter)
Posted by Alex Gorbachev on Mar 6, 2010
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 . . .
Posted by Sheeri Cabral on Dec 9, 2009
According to the official lifecycle calendar at http://www.mysql.com/about/legal/lifecycle/#calendar, active support for MySQL 5.0 (including regular binary updates) will end on December 31st, 2009, which is about 3 weeks away.
Many folks are still using MySQL 5.0.45, as until October that was the package that came with RedHat. That was released in July 2007, over 2 years ago!
Upgrading to MySQL 5.1 is not difficult, though it requires more steps than just upgrading the packages.
There is a list with all the changes made that might affect the upgrade process at http://www.pythian.com/news/1414/new-in-mysql-51-sheeris-presentation/. This includes which variable names have been deprecated and changed, as well as how to upgrade stored procedures, functions, triggers and views so they work properly in MySQL 5.1.
I hope this helps folks out, and please feel free to ask any questions. Pythian is available to assist you in the upgrade process, just contact us if you want to engage our help.
Posted by Don Seiler on Nov 19, 2009
Today, I had a spare Fedora 11 machine sitting next to me, so I thought I’d try the upgrade to the newly-released Fedora 12, aka “Constantine.” Fedora support cycles are rather short compared to Ubuntu, so Fedora 11 will likely be de-supported in 6 to 7 months. Normally I’d wait a little longer into the Fedora 12 cycle for others to find the fun upgrade bugs and have them fixed for me, but I didn’t mind having to re-install from scratch on this machine if I needed to.
Following the Fedora documentation, I decided to use the “preupgrade” tool. Everything was going smoothly until the machine restarted to begin installation of the new packages. I got a message that there wasn’t enough space in my /boot partition. Specifically, the message claimed that there was insufficient disk space in /mnt/sysimage/boot. I found this rather odd and troubling, since I had let the Fedora installer determine the /boot partition size when I originally installed Fedora 11.
Turns out that this is a known problem with the preupgrade tool. A kind soul in #fedora on IRC directed me to the list of common Fedora 12 bugs, in particular the preupgrade free space check. I installed the updated preupgrade package as directed, but again got the error. That’s when I followed the next link for additional tips to free up space in /boot. The first was to remove obsolete kernels, which I had already done. The next was to run tune2fs on /boot filesystem to free up reserved blocks, which aren’t needed for /boot. I strongly suggest you visit the links provided for helpful screenshots and commands to follow.
After making these changes, the upgrade worked and am I’m the proud owner of a Fedora 12 Constantine laptop, with a slightly brighter shade of blue desktop than that crusty old Fedora 11. ;)
Posted by Augusto Bott on Jun 23, 2009
Welcome, readers! It’s time for another update to our series of posts on installing Oracle on Ubuntu Linux. In this edition, we’ll be installing Oracle 11g R1 on Ubuntu 9.04, both 32-bit.
This time, I’ve used VirtualBox to run a virtual machine (VM) to perform our work. (Virtualization has a number of advantages; in this case, I made several trial installs, trying different combinations and configurations. Having a pristine, basic set-up accelerated the whole process, since I didn’t had to reinstall from scratch on every new attempt.)
You might want to review the previous editions of this series, as there are technical references on this text fully detailed on previous posts. See these HOWTOs for Ubuntu:
Since we’re installing on a VM, we’ll be using Ubuntu 9.04 32-bit Server edition, , so let’s download it and check the MD5sum:
user@jackalope:/media/trezentos/downloads$ md5sum ubuntu-9.04-server-i386.iso
20480057590ff8b80ad9094f40698030 ubuntu-9.04-server-i386.iso
user@jackalope:/media/trezentos/downloads$
Download Oracle Database 11g Release 1 (11.1.0.6.0), and verify the provided cksum:
Read the rest of this entry . . .
Posted by Alex Gorbachev on Feb 4, 2009
According to Metalink Note 161818.1 Oracle Server (RDBMS) Releases Support Status Summary, Premier Support of Oracle 10g Release 1 ends in January 2009, which means that those of us supporting Oracle 10.1 databases have less support from Oracle from now on.
Read the rest of this entry . . .
