Grid DBA

Following the release of Oracle Solaris 11 Express last week, I took a cue from the The Fat Bloke's blog and decided to try out the new Automated Installer feature.  Being a n00b to Solaris installation I wanted to find a relatively painless path to installing Solaris.  Having imported the previous Solaris 10 update 8 VirtualBox image however,  I thought this would be a good challenge. The Automated installer allows network-based installation of multiple systems in a fully automated manner. It relies on an Image Packing System (IPS) package management system to find the version and type of architecture (SPARC vs x86) required for installation.  You can customize the manifest files used to determine which packages you want installed.  The AI is also bootable, which allows for an automated local install without any interaction.  Just select the default install at the boot menu and it will initialize the installation and select the default IPS loc...

I am testing running Ubuntu Server 10.10 in the Cloud.  Canonical made it easy as 1,2,3 to test an Ubuntu Server AWS instance running on EC2.  Just login with your launchpad.net account and select the type of server you want to install - base install,  WordPress (the one I chose) , MoinMoin and Drupal 7 beta.  The EC2 instance in the cloud lasts for 55 mins but it will give you enough time to play around with Ubuntu Server before it disappears. You can either use your SSH public key to login to your instance or password authentication.  I chose the former.  After resetting my password on login I was up an running in less than 5 minutes! The server itself was configured with 10GB of RAM with a 10GB / mount point and 140 GB /mnt mount point .  See top output below. This truly indicates the power of cloud computing.  Virtually zero hardware cost, utility billing (billed to Canonical - thanks for the dime guys) rapid deployment and elasticity. The or...

Day 3 of OpenWorld was probably the best day of the conference for me so far.  The sessions were great but the networking was really the highlight of my day. I spent most of day 3 on the DEMOgrounds, fielding questions to vendors from Quest, EMC, NetApp, Oracle and a few others.  I also had an interesting discussion with the EMC representative regarding their Symmetrix storage and its use in ASM.  He shed some light on the reasons why storage admins create LUNs the way they do for ASM, and what they really need to do for each implementation.  Likewise with NetApp, I got a demo of their SnapManager for Oracle tool for doing backups and recovery in a virtualized environment.  I currently use RMAN for all production backup and recovery related tasks but with more organizations moving towards virtualization of their infrastructure - including databases, it was worth exploring how this will be handled by the different products. SMO seemed to do a good job - backup ...

I started off my day somewhat later than planned, although I was up from 4:00 am.  Having been bitten by the dullness of previous day's keynotes I decided to skip this morning's session with John Fowler, Edward Screven and Mark Hurd.  My first session was at 11am so I decided to use the time and do some 'fun' stuff.  The DEMOgrounds was where I headed to try and bag some free swag before any cerebral activities.  There were quite a number of vendors displaying their wares - most of which were giving away some items in return for marketing opportunities.  By far the most popular giveaway item was iPads.  EMC claims that they are giving away an iPad every hour, with several other vendors attempting to follow suit.  I even had time to shoot some hoops in the Game Zone. After all the fun I sat in the the database general session with Andrew Mendelsohn - Why Standardize on Oracle Database 11g.  Andy kicked things off talking about new features in 11g...

So User Group Forum day has come and gone. The IOUG sessions were pretty good.  Naturally I was focusing on RAC, Grid Infrastructure/ASM etc.  My favourite session of the day was the Grid 2.0 session by Pythian's Alex Gorbachev - high entertainment value (oh yeah I learned stuff too). Running a close second to that was the Oracle Experts panel - pretty informative discussions but there wasn't enough time to answer all the questions. I also got to meet up with some pretty cool guys from twitterland - Chet (oraclenerd), Sunil Ranka and even ran into Alex  in between sessions. Chet and myself met up at the Welcome Keynote where we were expecting to have front-row seats - with our press/blogger pass and all.  Too late.  Safra Catz gave the opening welcome and introduced the HP keynote speakers.  This proved to be the most agonizing hour for most attendees including myself.  After what seemed like an eternity Larry did his own long pre-introductory ritu...

Gonna jump on the OpenWorld bloggers bandwagon this morning with another 'Day 1' post. I arrived in SF last night at about 9pm via OAK. Found my way to the hotel fairly easily apart from going in the wrong direction after coming off the BART. Quickly checked google maps and made a u-turn. There was some difficulty sleeping last night due to all the roadside traffic.  Since I was up at about 2:30am I checked out the OpenWorld iPhone app to do mobile check-in via SMS.  There was a reply from my CHECKIN text message that asked where I wanted to pick up my badge - Hilton or Moscone West.  I chose the latter and a second later I got another reply telling me that I can pick up my badge at that location when it reopens at 10am. Today is user group forum day - MySQL, IOUG, ODTUG etc.  I'll be at the IOUG sessions so I plan on heading out about 10am to pick up my badge and like most other folks on my twitter list check out the first session at 12:30 pm. 3:30pm update -...

After being 'leaked' last week, the Oracle 11.2.0.2.0 patchset for Linux  x86/x86_64 was officially made public on 09/13. If you were like me, frantically searching e-delivery, MOS and OTN to find the files to download - login to My Oracle Support, click on Patches.  Under the Patching Quick Patch Links section on the top left click on Latest Patchsets under Oracle Server/Tools.  Select the architecture required (x86 or x86_64), download and install (after reading the Readme of course).   There are 7 files in all for a total of (4.8GB) but you may not need all of them (though I'm pretty sure I'll be downloading everything). For everyone else not running on the 'Penguin Platform' you'll just have to wait until the other releases become available. Some of the changes are pretty significant while some new features were added.  One of the most notable changes is that the patchset is a full-install - no longer required to install the base version first.  A...

For all those going to OpenWorld this year - Schedule Builder has been the tool of choice to help navigate the thousands of sessions being presented/demoed.   I initially started putting together my agenda on July 22 with the IOUG events .  However, after several re-iterations and fine-tuning my schedule I realized that my sessions disappeared from the calendar of the Build Agenda section. I checked the My Agenda section and all my sessions were still there.  Thinking it was a minor glitch of some sort, I wasn't too troubled hoping that things would reappear once the 'glitch' was worked out.  I forgot about it after several weeks and when I finally got around to logging back in I realized that my sessions were not restored.  Seeing that I spent several hours in building the schedule, I really wasn't thrilled about rebuilding from scratch.  I fired off an email to the OpenWorld registration team in the hope that they could help fix the issue.  They re...

I haven't done a technical post in a while, so I thought I'd share some stuff I'd been working on recently. It may sometimes be necessary to migrate storage devices being used by a database and Oracle Clusterware.   This may be due to a SAN upgrade or simply moving between storage frames.   AIX provides a native command called migratepv which can handle the movement of logical volume groups and filesystems.   However, for Clusterware (OCR & Voting Disks), and ASM which reside on raw devices, a different method is required.   The ocrconfig and crsctl commands are the preferred methods of working with OCR and voting disk files.   Instructions on migrating AIX volume groups using migratepv   is beyond the scope of this article but you can check out this article by Chris Gibson for additional details http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/aix/library/au-aixstorage/ . This document will describe the steps used to migrate the following types of devices at...