Making Simple Performance Charts

November 28th, 2011 § 2 Responses

Before I dive into this blog post, quick heads up for anyone attending UKOUG: on Tuesday only, I’ll be hanging out with some very smart people from the IOUG RAC Special Interest Group in the “gallery” above the exhibition hall. We’re ready to help anyone run a RAC cluster in a virtual environment on their [...]

Performance Tuning for Oracle Developers

August 30th, 2011 § 1 Response

One of my recent customers was a company with a somewhat large warehouse (around 60TB) on Oracle 10gR2.  The system was using RAC, though it was a fairly simple setup: two nodes, very large AIX LPARs, workload manually partitioned between them and somewhat evenly balanced.  The most important demand of their business is a large [...]

Developer Access To 10046 Trace Files

August 19th, 2011 § 3 Responses

Lets suppose you are a DBA at a large company. You have some great developers, and they’re learning all about how to turn on full logging of their code through the 10046 database trace. They just learned how to use this data in summary form to find out – at a very detailed level – [...]

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, [...]

DBCA Missing – Oracle 11.2 ASM/Grid

August 16th, 2010 § 1 Response

Oracle provides three ways to manage ASM: (1) through SQL, (2) through the web-based database console or grid control, and (3) through the server-based java GUI tool DBCA.  These are your choices for adding storage, replacing a disk, growing a volume, etc. But if you’re an experienced DBA who recently started playing with 11gR2 ASM, [...]