Grid DBA

The latest release of Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c (12.1.0.2) is accompanied by a Database template pre-configured for the repository. I was quite pleased to see this addition, since installing Enterprise Manager required some upfront footwork in configuring the database to be used as the repository. Personally, I was a bit annoyed every time the installer complained about parameters that it needed changed on the repository database during installation  (though some we not mandatory during installation). As a pre-requisite to using the template you should have a software-only installation of a Oracle 11.2.0.3 RDBMS software. The installation instructions warn that the template is suitable for a Simple Install. However you may also use it as a basis of an Advanced Installation. You can read the rest of the instructions here . Note: The instructions in the documentation has a screenshot of a Oracle Database 12c DBCA instead of the 11.2.0.3 DBCA. I suspect this...

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 .

Here are some steps I used to troubleshoot the failure of a public network used for SCAN in a 2-node RAC cluster. Note: I used an aliased crsstat   for the command: crsctl stat res –t Check the status of the Clusterware resources. You can see that there are several resources that are offline below. The ones highlighted in red are the ones we are interested in. The resource for the local listener is now offline while the VIP has been failed over. You will also notice that all of the SCAN Listeners have been failed over to the surviving node. grid@tibora30[+ASM1]-/u01/11.2.0/grid/log/tibora30 >crsstat -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- NAME           TARGET  STATE        SERVER                   STATE_DETAILS ----------------------------------------------...

There has been a lot of talk in the ubiquitous cloud space recently and more specifically the PaaS service delivery model. Naturally this piqued my curiosity. How does the database fit in the cloud? Just about every major enterprise vendor is jumping on the cloud bandwagon. And rightfully so. Private clouds are now being pushed by Oracle with Exalogic Elastic Cloud and Exadata, IBM with SmartCloud and VMware with Cloud Foundry just to mention a few. Amazon AWS and Rackspace are the major players in the public cloud stratosphere. Add to this community Clouds like OpenStack The easiest to do an evaluation is by using Amazon AWS public cloud services. Amazon AWS provides Relational Database Service (RDS) for MySQL and Oracle Database 11g. Strictly speaking EC2 is a Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) delivery model. However, the use of AMIs enable PaaS characteristics where complete environments can be easily packaged and deployed in EC2. There are several publicly available Oracle Da...

Ever received this error message in your alert log? I have on a couple of occasions. Perhaps an application server started spawning more database connections than it normally does in turn creating more processes on the database. The Oracle description of this error is: Error: ORA 20 Text: maximum number of processes exceeded   Cause: An operation requested a resource that was unavailable. The maximum number of processes is specified by the initialization parameter PROCESSES. When this maximum is reached, no more requests are processed. Action: Try the operation again in a few minutes. If this message occurs often, shut down Oracle, increase the PROCESSES parameter in the initialization parameter file, and restart Oracle. But what if you cannot connect to your database to shut it down and increase the parameter? oradba01t[labdb01]-/home/oracle/>sqlplus  /as sysdba SQL*Plus: Release 11.1.0.7.0 - Production on Mon Jun 6 11:25:05 2011 Copyright (c) 1982, 2008, Ora...

Having worked on Oracle RAC since 9i, there hasn't been a time when I haven't faced something new or realized something was not what I thought it was. I think this is one of the reasons why I enjoy working on these systems - always a challenge. I stopped my RAC database to put it into noarchivelog mode using the srvctl command [oracle@oradba10t oracle]$ srvctl stop database -d labrac Next I proceeded to connect to the first instance to startup in mount mode [oracle@oradba10t oracle]$ sqlplus /nolog SQL*Plus: Release 10.2.0.4.0 - Production on Thu May 5 09:47:15 2011 Copyright (c) 1982, 2007, Oracle.  All Rights Reserved. SQL> conn / as sysdba Connected to an idle instance. SQL> startup mount ORA-29760: instance_number parameter not specified Wait, what's this? I've never encountered this error message before. Googled a bit and realized that most of the responses were a bit far fetched since the database had been in perfect working order before I stopped...

Remote Diagnostic Agent (RDA) is a Oracle utility used to collect information on RAC configurations. It collects a wealth of information that would otherwise be tedious to collect manually. This includes operating system, network, hardware, database, cluster  configuration and logs . This is useful for troubleshooting RAC issues such as node evictions. Once collected this information can then be uploaded to My Oracle Support (MOS) as part of a SR. It also complements Oracle Configuration Manager (OCM) which is used to proactively do health checks and help with the speedy resolution of SRs. RDA can be downloaded from MOS. Unzip the RDA archive oracle@gridora31[gridprd2]-/u02 >cd /mnt/orasource/AIX/utils oracle@gridora31[gridprd2]-/mnt/orasource/AIX/utils >ls RDA422.zip ocm-Production-AIX-ppc.zip swingbench230422.zip cpumonitor02.91.zip orion_aix_ppc64.gz swingbench240688.zip datagenerator040198.zip osw3b.tar traceanalyzer010100.zip oracle@gridora31[gridprd2]-/mnt/orasou...

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...

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...