Before I started consulting, I was an Oracle engineer in a very large software development organization. The company had a number of major products and the one I worked with was used by hospitals and radiology offices world-wide. (These guys are one of the biggest companies worldwide in the field.) Our product included the hardware and software; you could order it with Sun or HP hardware (Solaris or Linux). It had an Oracle backend and a web-based middle tier built with lots of C++ and Java code.

Any software engineer who has worked on large projects - industry or community - can tell you the importance of solid change control processes. So… since everything for the build had to be checked into clearcase… yes, we checked Oracle 10g into the repo. A 2G tarball. And whenever there was a 1K patch to the oracle install? A brand new 2G tarball. The clearcase guys loved me.

And that was how I started thinking about an automated build process. I don’t need to check B24792-01_1of5.zip into the repository because it’s straight off edelivery. I can skip p7150622_10203_Linux-x86-64.zip since it’s direct from metalink. The only thing missing was a solid, simple, flexible program for automating the oracle install, patchset, CPUs and oneoffs - taking Oracle’s official bits as input.

Anyone else out there who could use a program like this? How about for rapid provisioning of servers? (Like all that grid buzz.) Grid Control does some basic stuff (if you can make it work) and there are advanced kits for the big data centers - but there have to be more people than just me who would love to have this program.

Proposing orainstall

That’s why I’m proposing to write a bit of software called orainstall. It would be script-based and cross-platform and intended for community use. I have some ideas for a design but I’m really interested to hear how you might use something like this and what features might be useful to you. Do you think it’s a good design? I’d also be interested in hearing if you’d be interested to use it or to help test it.

The program would be launched by running › Read more

Is asmlib obsolete on a modern Linux system? I’m still undecided but starting to lean toward “yes”.

Everybody knows that asmlib was very useful when it was first introduced with Oracle 10.1 to simplify a host of issues on Linux: direct async device access without raw devices, file permissions & ownership without custom code, and persistent device naming without devlabel.

But I’m now involved in setting some standards to be used across a large organization for Oracle 10.2 on RHEL5 and I’m wondering if there’s still a case for using asmlib. So I did a little trolling for info - which was suprisingly sparse. Had a hard time finding much, but after a lot of digging I think I’ve compiled a useful bit of information about benefits and drawbacks.

Benefits

It seems to me that the ASMLIB API was originally introduced to do more than just simplify file permissions - sounds like it was an alternative I/O API to the standard unix one, allowing ASM to access the underlying storage more efficiently and completely. I don’t think it’s just an “extra layer” - it’s an alternative code path to the std unix I/O libs. Like an ODM for block devices - and the idea was that there could be additional vendor implementations. And Oracle released an initial generic implementation on Linux under the GPL.
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I have a new personal blog running over at http://schneiderlife.com - please update your bookmarks. Personal posts are going over there now.

All of our wedding pictures are also online at http://schneiderlife.com/photos. Slideshow is at http://schneiderlife.com/wedding-favorites-slideshow.html. Enjoy!