Grid DBA

This is a place holder for a blog post on using Enterprise Manager 12c Cloud Control for managing Oracle 11gR2 RAC and Grid Infrastructure. Hopefully, I'll get some time to actually do a write-up. For now, enjoy the screenshots .

Cluster Health Monitor or CHM (formerly IPD/OS) is a utility used to gather OS metrics such as physical memory, swap, CPU usage etc. It's useful for troubleshooting node reboots or evictions, instance evictions as well as poor performance. CHM gathers data in real time with little resource overhead and stores the metrics which can then be retrieved for root-cause analysis. This is very important as other utilities often cannot provide such detailed metrics if there's a resource issue on a node. CHM was bundled with  Grid Infrastructure for Linux and Solaris (x86-64) platforms in 11.2.0.2. However, the feature has now been made available in Grid Infrastructure 11.2.0.3.0 for AIX. After upgrading from 11.2.0.2 to 11.2.0.3 a new resource ora.crf can be seen in the CRS stack. grid@oradba10t[+ASM1]-/home/grid >crsctl stat res -t -init -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- NAME TARGET STATE SERVER ...

The Oracle RAC Assurance team has been working on a handy little goody for quite sometime. RACcheck as the name aptly implies turns out to be quite useful at checking your RAC configuration for any issues as well as provides recommendations for correcting them. It checks database, ASM, Grid Infrastructure and Clusterware components as well as infrastructure level components such as OS, storage and network. Setup is straightforward and you can run it as the database installation owner (oracle). Root or sudo privileges are required for some checks. MOS Note 1268927.1 describes it in detail. So far it works on RedHat Linux, AIX, and Solaris SPARC and SuSE Linux. Please note that bash is required for running this utility so if you're using an OS such as AIX which doesn't have bash installed by default you may want to discuss this with your systems administrator. Here's the HTML output of running RAC Check against a 2-node 11.2.0.2.3 cluster running on AIX 6.1. Results are al...

Oracle Database 11g XE has been in beta for several months now. On September 2, the production release was made available for Windows 32-bit and Linux 64-bit platforms. This lightweight version of the juggernaut database of world is geared towards students, developer and ISVs. You can find the full feature list here . Having played around with the beta version I decided it was time to take a stab at deploying it in the cloud - more specifically Amazon AWS EC2.  I started off by selecting the  Oracle Linux 5.6 x86_64 - OVM (ami-42778a2b) to launch a micro-instance of Oracle Linux. The micro-instance has 613MB of physical memory, 2GB swap and 15GB EBS storage.  [root@ip-10-242-49-142 ~]# cat /proc/meminfo | grep SwapTotal SwapTotal: 2104504 kB [root@ip-10-242-49-142 ~]# cat /proc/meminfo | grep MemTotal MemTotal: 629760 kB Once you download the installation archive from OTN and save it to your computer, you'll have to transfer it to your EC2 instance. ...

While installing Oracle RAC it is important to setup SSH user equivalence for installation of of the binaries.  Oracle 11gR2 RAC now includes automatic ssh setup. While reading one of my favorite blogs by Martin Bach  he describes using a utility called sshUserSetup.sh for setting up user equivalence for RAC . This takes out some of the repetitive steps needed to setup ssh user equivalence when installing a RAC cluster.  As Martin pointed out you can also use OUI to setup user equivalence but it helps if you can run the cluster verification utility (CVU) to check on many pre-requisites before starting the installation.  During installation using OUI on the AIX platform however, OUI is unable to perform automatic SSH setup. This means that SSH user equivalence will need to be setup manually prior to installation. To ease the setup all you need to do is to run the sshUserSetup.sh script and follow the prompts directions. It takes as parameters the user (oracle or gr...

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...