ASM Space Calculations and Hot Spares

March 12th, 2009 § 1 Response

This is quick and dirty. I hope to get a more polished write-up of what it means and how it works, but since I’m so busy right now I don’t know if I’ll get to it soon. In the meantime someone just might find this useful or informative so I’m just going to put it [...]

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 [...]

Oracle ASM Stripe Size

December 10th, 2008 § 4 Responses

Right now I’m working on some internal documentation and referencing Oracle 11g’s Storage Administrators Guide (ASM manual). And I think there’s a bit of a contradiction here about the stripe size. ASM uses a variable “data extent” size when allocating space for files (like any sane filesystem) – the first 20000 data extents are equal [...]

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 [...]

ASMLIB Performance vs Udev

October 8th, 2008 § 8 Responses

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 [...]