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...

One of the many necessary and frequent tasks that a database administrator performs before creating a database is installing the Oracle database binaries. These binaries form what is known as an Oracle Home (referenced by the ORACLE_HOME environment variable on Linux and UNIX environments). Unfortunately, this is also one of the most mundane and uninteresting tasks a DBA can perform. So like all good DBAs know, the best way to deal with such repetitive task is to automate it. Automating installations of Oracle database binaries enables us to reliably repeat the process to enable faster installation as well as provide identical copies of the software in multiple environments. Fortunately, Oracle allows us to clone the Oracle database binaries from one environment to another. Cloning your Oracle binaries from a source copy with all the necessary patches applied enables us to have gold images which can then be deployed to multiple environments. The procedure for cloning an Oracle home...

Much of my research to date has involved the use of virtualization technology especially Oracle VM VirtualBox. Lately however, I've found that my aging 5 year old iMac has been struggling to keep up with my testing and research even despite attempts at increasing performance by adding physical memory (16GB) and SSD disks. I could also try using other desktop virtualization software such as VMware Fusion or Parallels for OS X (I have both) since other users have had better experience with them. However, I find the alternatives lacking in some feature that I currently use in VirtualBox (such as shared disks for clustering). Also Oracle publishes several Virtual appliances for VirtualBox which makes it easy to learn a plethora of Oracle products and features. For more on Oracle with VirtualBox you can read my paper and presentations on Slideshare. With that said I've been wanting to build a dedicated lab machine for doing database research for a while now. I've been using VM...

In theme with my Collaborate 12 presentation - Learning Oracle with Oracle VM VirtualBox , I've decided to put a quick post together on using VirtualBox to learn Oracle VM Server 3.1. A VM within a VM you say? Reminds me of Inception. But yes it works! I've been wanting to learn/play with Oracle VM Server for some time now. However, due to the bare metal requirements of the hypervisor I've been unable/unwilling to procure a dedicated machine for such a hobby.  Previous attempts at installing OVM Server on VirtualBox also failed and posts by other users on several forums have also confirmed similar problems. I must say big thank to my friend @ Yuri for providing me access to his OVM Server all the way in Australia to help expose me to the technology. However, not having physical access limits the learning experience.  Wim Coekaerts tweeted about Oracle VM Manager and Server 3.1 was now available as VirtualBox templates (appliances). Now this kind of stuff makes me fe...

After a rapid slew of public betas, VirtualBox 4.0 was released on December 22 last year - just in time for the holidays.  It was introduced with a revamped GUI as well as additional functionality.  You can view the changelog here  for details.  I won't go into the details of the new version but I'd like to point out a few things that I experiened with this new version. One of the features I love about VirtualBox is the ability to move a virtual machines between different hosts using the export/import appliance wizard.  The export creates a set of virtual disks along with an Open Virtualization Format (OVF) file that describes the appliance's configuration.  You can then copy these files to an external device such as USB disks or make them available via a web/ftp server.  To import appliance you simply specify the location of the OVF file and follow the steps in the wizard. You can also use the VBoxManage commands to export/import. Oracle Technology ...

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...

I haven't updated my blog in a while, so I thought what better way to get things going again than post my latest interactions with VirtualBox.  Ever since the Oracle branded version of VirtualBox rolled out with version 3.2 on May 18, there have been many new features and improvements. Prompted by last week's "What's new in 3.2?"  Oracle VirtualBox Webinar  by Andy Hall and  Achim Hasenmueller of the VirtualBox team I decide to list   my favorite new features - Page Fusion, Support for  deleting snapshots while running a guest and disabling host I/O cache.  I listed these features as my fave because of their direct relationship with running Oracle Databases in  a VirtualBox environment and RAC in particular.  (I'll post a blog about my new Oracle 11gR2 RAC on VirtualBox in the next installment).  Page Fusion increases VM guest density via memory de-duplication.  In a nutshell it gives you the ability to run more VMs with ...

I'm getting ready to build a 2-node  Oracle 11gR2 RAC database on VirtualBox.  This will be another test of what I consider to be the best desktop virtualization software.  Right now I'm running VirtualBox 3.1 on MacOSX 10.6.2 host with 6 guests.  For running RAC however, I've discovered that 11gR2 is a memory hog.  So my puny 4GB of RAM on my intel core duo iMac isn't going to cut it.    Started the preliminary installation of OEL5 for the first node and Openfiler for iSCSI but will have to wait for the memory for the serious work to begin.  I'll be following some useful guides out there for similar setups on VMWare, Solaris and Oracle VM.  Haven't found any for VirtualBox implementations yet so this should be a pretty exciting experiment.

In my most recent attempt to experience the new and wonderful features that Oracle 11g has to offer I needed to get myself another sandbox. Unfortunately my current employer is unable to provide such tools so it's back to the virtual environment for me. My first journey in the virtualization arena took me on a roller coaster ride in my attempt to install Oracle 10g RAC on VMWare ESX 3. That was my first blog. My first thought was to try out Oracle's VM Server since I am in all honesty attached to Oracle's products by an umbilical cord. However, having moved into a job, state and country I didn't have the necessary resources to do this - namely a machine with enough specs to do what I wanted. So armed with my HP Pavillion dv2715nr laptop with 2GB RAM and dual-core AMD x64 Turion processor running Windows Vista Home Premium and Ubuntu 8.04 I attempted to install Oracle Database 11g. My choice of virtual machine was VirtualBox 1.6.2. Previously I had installed the fr...

I'm about to embark on setting up Oracle 10g RAC on a VMware ESX 3 server. I've seen a number of articles on the web on setting up RAC on VMware but not ESX server in particular. There was a previously published article on OTN about setting up RAC on VMware which was subsequently removed. However I've been trying to take out bits and pieces from other article like Tarry Singh's extensive article on DBAsupport.com and one from Oracle-Base.com