Grid DBA

The Delphix Data Virtualization Engine allows DBAs to spend less time cloning and refreshing databases and focus on other import tasks - like golf or your favorite activity. In full disclosure, I tried golf once and was ' turrible ' at it. In all seriousness, having the ability to spin up a virtual database (VDB) in a matter of minutes shaves hours or days off of manual, mundane and error prone work. This makes customers (developers, analysts) happy too. Not only can you quickly and easily create full read/write copies of their production data, they also get the time machine-like ability to go backwards and forwards with their data, which opens up a world of possibilities. As a database administrator, I've spent way too many hours creating clones of databases for development, test and reporting purposes. Cloning or duplicating multi-terabyte databases can take a very long time. Oracle databases, in particular, can become complex depending on how the clone is being pe...

Databases Storage – The New Frontier As database and storage administrators and engineers, it is important to understand the effect that storage has on database performance. It is important to understand that databases are an extension of your storage and requires a holistic view when designing and managing solutions that use the database. This article gives an overview of the Oracle database storage landscape – past, present and future. It’s not meant as an in-depth technical treatment of the topic but opens the door for more discussion and engagement about database storage. Evolution Both storage and databases continue to evolve (albeit at different paces). About a decade ago the enterprise storage of choice was the Storage Area Network or SAN array. At about the same time the current release of Oracle was 10gR1, which introduced Automatic Storage Management (ASM), which provided mirroring and striping capabilities for data files. Database sizes were typically in the ...

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...

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...