Grid DBA

Oracle Container Cloud Service Oracle Container Cloud Service lets you easily deploy applications based on docker images. If you don't have an existing application you can create one on docker. However, the easiest method to get a full application up and running is by deploying a stack. Oracle Container Cloud Service provides several example stacks that you can deploy, including web servers based on NGINX or Apache, MongoDB database, and Wordpress. You can find more examples on Oracle GitHub Site . Let's see just how easy it is to spin up a Wordpress site using the Oracle Container Cloud Service. Prerequisites: Access to Oracle Cloud Account Subscription to Oracle IaaS Service First, go to the Oracle Container Cloud Service console and launch a new service. In this example, I created a service with three containers. One manager and two worker nodes. Choose an appropriate "shape" for your compute instances. Note: Oracle uses the term "shape" to r...

Uploaded slide from my KScope 14 presentation: "Databases for the Masses: Self-Service Oracle Multitenant with APEX" Here are a couple of short demos on using the PDBSS application.

Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) has now become a buzzword in the IT industry. Organizations are starting to r ealize the benefits of database as a service thanks to the ubiquity of "The Cloud". Companies relying on Oracle databases for managing their data can also get on the DBaaS fast track thanks to Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c. Using EM12c you can enable self-service and rapid provisioning of Oracle databases and enjoy all the benefits (well most) of Cloud computing.  EM12c supports both IaaS and PaaS models. These are also tightly integrated with Oracle VM Server along with their engineered systems including Oracle Exadata Database Machine. Setting up and configuring DBaaS requires several steps. While these are well-documented , it seems like a daunting task for those who are unfamiliar with process. A list of steps required to setup DBaaS include the following: ■Create Roles and Users ■Setup Privilege Delegation ■Add Hosts ■Configure Software Lib...

The information technology industry has been a tremendous growth in Cloud delivery models for IT services in the past couple of years. More recently, the PaaS service model including Database-as-as-Service (DBaaS) has been gaining traction rapidly. Amazon's RDS public DBaaaS service supports Oracle, MySQL and SQL Server and enable rapid development lifecycles by giving end-users the ability to provision databases on demand in a very short period. Security and control are two drawbacks seen in public cloud environments. How can this be overcome while delivering the same level of rapid provisioning, elasticity and multi-tenancy for databases? Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c provides a complete lifecycle management framework for databases - from provisioning to patching. The Database Cloud plug-in enables DBaaS for users on premise without the drawbacks of public clouds. If developers want copies of schemas then the Schema-as-a-Service sub-model can enable them to sel...

In previous versions of Oracle Enterprise Manager you would call the EMD_MAINTENANCE package to execute certain maintenance tasks such as partition maintenance and statistics gathering. EMD_MAINTENANCE.ANALYZE_EMD_SCHEMA EMD_MAINTENANCE.PARTITION_MAINTENANCE In OEM12c these procedures are replaced by: EMD_MAINTENANCE.GATHER_SYSMAN_STATS EMD_MAINTENANCE.DAILY_MAINTENANCE The daily_maintenance procedure actually calls gc_interval_partitions and gathers stats on Saturday. Not quite sure why that was hardcoded but I guess they figured that monitoring was least likely to be impacted on that day. If the OEM DBMS jobs are down you can also submit them by logging in the to the repository database as SYSMAN and execute the package: Begin      emd_maintenance.submit_em_dbms_jobs(); End; / Note that these procedures are automatically run through scheduled jobs once the job_queueue_ processes parameter is set to a value greater than 0.

HP has opened up beta testing of their public cloud service - HP Cloud Services for a couple of months now, and I was lucky enough to be selected as an early private beta tester. HP Cloud Services is built on the open source cloud platform OpenStack and provides the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) model of cloud computing. This post will just highlight my experiences with HP Cloud Services so far from the point of view of an Oracle DBA. Setup There are a couple of ways to access the HP Cloud resources. First there is the web-based management console that allows you to do basic administration. Here you can view, create and modify your compute instances and object storage. It also allows you to view your account keys, security IDs and other pertinent information needed to access and control your resources. Then there is the Unix command line interface ( CLI ) which is my preferred method of accessing and using HP Cloud. In addition, you can use RESTful APIs to access HP Cloud Co...

Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Cloud Control incorporates the use of plugins to extend its functionality for management of the complete cloud stack. Plugins are provided for databases, middleware, virtualization among others. For a few weeks I had been struggling to deploy Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c agents on IBM AIX 6.1 targets. This became a very lengthy cycle of patching, searching and tweeting in an attempt to get things going. I finally had the agent deployed on the hosts but no targets were being discovered. After coming across   MOS Note [ID 1388143.1]   I discovered that I needed to update and deploy the database plugin in order to discover the database targets. To deploy plugins go to Setup->Extensibility->Self Update From this screen you can see a list of plugins and their status. If there is an updated plugin available it will have a non-zero revision number in the Revision column and the status will be available. The Oracle Database plugin upda...