Pythian Group

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…