RAC Attack – Oracle Cluster Database at Home

May 17th, 2011 § 3 Responses

First of all, the RAC Attack deep dive at Collaborate went great – thanks to everyone who participated! The room was full (20 participants) and I got evaluations from about half of them. Here’s a summary of the eval results: 100% class met expectations, would recommend to others 66% easy to follow, could use skills [...]

Mysterious Oracle Net Errors

September 8th, 2010 § 5 Responses

Yesterday, I had a fight to the death with a nasty Oracle Net problem. The battle consumed a little more of the day than I intended… but it was worthwhile for the sweet taste of victory. Everything started with this short, innocent-seeming instant message: there is something wrong with a 10g server config. connecting to [...]

RAC Investigation on Low-Memory Linux

September 2nd, 2010 § 9 Responses

Back in the Oracle 9i days, I was one of those people who got on eBay to buy firewire PCI cards and disks that could do non-exclusive login.  Remember that?  The first time a little test cluster could be cheap enough for the home enthusiast?  I still have the parts in my closet. Of course, [...]

Future of OCFS2

February 5th, 2009 § 6 Responses

At the company where I’m working right now, I’m part of an architecture effort to come up with our standard design for RAC on Linux across the firm. There will be dozens or possibly hundreds of deployments globally using the design we settle on. We’re internally debating whether or not we should include OCFS2 in [...]

Robust Software Version Numbering

December 5th, 2008 Comments Off

This article isn’t directly database-related, but I think it’s a great software engineering topic so it seemed worth writing about. Right now I’m involved in a project that involves releasing software packages of a few different flavors. Some of them are other people’s software that we’re re-packaging (like oracle database binaries) and some are code [...]

Parsing LISTENER.ORA with awk and sed

November 28th, 2008 § 5 Responses

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone in the US! And happy belated thanksgiving to everyone in Canada since you celebrated back at the beginning of October. :) I’ve been doing a lot of scripting work lately. Although I can’t write about everything I’m doing, I would like to post a pattern that I thought could be useful [...]

Oracle Fully Automated Install and Patch

October 22nd, 2008 § 12 Responses

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 [...]