Grid DBA

The annual Oracle OpenWorld global technology conference being held in San Francisco, CA is almost upon us. It kicks off September 22 with user group symposiums and runs until September 26. I was lucky enough to be chosen as speaker again this year. I say lucky because I believe there are much better speakers with more interesting topics that should've been accepted over mine. Whatever the reason, I'm happy and I'm looking forward to meeting up with old friends and networking with some of the best technologists and speakers in the world. I will be participating in quite a few activities - mostly on Sunday. Here a few sessions that I'm scheduled to either present or be a panelist in. Session ID: UGF9774 Session Title: Oracle RAC SIG Meeting: Expert Panel Venue / Room: Moscone West - 3004 Date and Time: 9/22/13, 15:30 - 16:30 Session ID: UGF9794 Session Title: Managing Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12 c with Oracle Clusterware Venue / Room: Moscone W...

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.

This post is mostly a reminder to myself on how to install an EM12c shared agent. I found the documentation somewhat lacking, so I hope this will help someone else attempting to perform a shared agent installation. With a shared agent installation, a master agent is installed on a shared filesystem such as NFS and a shared agent is "installed" on remote hosts. The remote hosts should have read-only access to the share. The documentation lists the following pre-requisites for the mount options on the remote host. mount -t nfs -o ro : For example, run the following command: mount -t nfs -o ro abc.oracle.com:/scratch/masterAgent /scratch/sharedAgent Since I use a NAS for serving NFS shares in my environment I replaced the master_agent_host_name with the name of the filer and the exported volume. The shared agent will have its agent instance located on a local file system which contains configuration and host-specific information. When deploying an agent on N...

Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c introduced several ways to deploy agents to hosts. The Oracle Management Agents are responsible for gathering metrics from targets such as database instances, listeners and the host themselves and sending them to the Oracle Management repository and Server for further processing. It also interacts with targets by executing commands sent via the OMS Console and the EM Command Line Interface (EMCLI). EM12c release 1 introduced four ways of deploying Management Agents Add Target Host Wizard - Agents are mass deployed using the Management Console. AgentPull - Silent install script to automatically download and deploy agents on remote targets using a response file. agentDeploy - Silent install script to deploy agents using a response file after manually downloading a compressed package of the agent using EMCLI and transferring it to remote targets. RPM - Use a .rpm package to deploy to targets that support it (Linux x86-64).  Start...

The third release of Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control is now available. It includes numerous enhancements such as updated user interface, improved EMCLI with scripting options, Administration Group enhancements, OMS Disaster improvements among others. For the complete list see the New Features page. For users still running on pre-12c or 12.1.0.1, it is a highly recommended upgrade. If you are running EM 12.1.0.2 you may see some benefits of upgrading but I personally wouldn't rush off unless there were some compelling features/fixes that would be of benefit. That said, if you do decide on going full speed with the new release, here is a step-by-step document on how I upgraded a POC environment with a single OMS and repository on the same server from 12.1.0.2 with PSU3 to 12.1.0.3. The official Oracle documentation lists the detailed steps for the upgrade here . The pre-requisite steps needed for the upgrade are listed below: 0. Allocate additional space (14GB on Linux...

Last week I attended my very first Kscope event in New Orleans. Kscope is an annual ODTUG event originally geared towards Oracle database development but has expanded to include other areas such ADF, Essbase, EPM, BI etc. I was accepted as a speaker to present in the "The Developer's Toolbox" category where I presented on "SQL Developer for DBAs". Honestly, I had high expectations going to Kscope. I remember seeing tweets from users on last year's conference and felt a bit left out based on the buzz from some of the attendees. Fortunately, the conference lived up to the expectations. It was well organized and the events flowed without a hitch. It wasn't  as crowded as other user conferences I've attended such as OpenWorld or Collaborate - which is a good thing. The smaller size makes it more intimate and easier for attendees to network with each other. I met up with colleagues from past events as well as met new ones within my social media network...