Grid DBA

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...

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...

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...