11g RAC on VMware hands-on lab from Collaborate ‘08. Uses OEL5 and ASM and it’s basically screenshot heaven: every keystroke and mouse-click documented for setting up this virtual RAC environment on a PC.

To run this lab you need at least a 2Ghz processor, minimum 2GB memory and probably 15G free disk space. You will need to download VMware Server, OEL5, and Oracle Database/Clusterware yourself. The instructions here are verbatim from collaborate; they are tailored to the lab that existed there. If you try this at home then of course you’ll need to customize a few steps (like networking settings and paths of installation ISO’s).

Note: I referred to Tim Hall’s exellent articles about installing 11g RAC on VMware and installing Oracle Linux quite a bit while putting this together (in addition to manuals and metalink and such). He certainly deserves the bulk of the credit for posting such great step-by-step guides.

Wrote this presentation for Collaborate ‘08. It was subtitled “how services work and what you should use them for… or… Five Things You Might Not Know”.

Short presentation that gives a broad overview of Oracle Corporation. Probably nothing new for most people who are visiting this site but I thought I’d post it anyway since there’s some interesting general information in there.

This is from a short presentation about performance tuning in 10g. The slides are a bit sparse but a few are useful so I thought I’d post the whole thing.

This is a presentation about new performance features in 11g. It only covers the first half of the material; I’ll be putting together a second presentation soon.

This is an in-depth research paper summarizing several months of research about Oracle Services.

Abstract: Performance management and high availability have become base requirements for today’s enterprise relational database management systems. In Oracle databases users create “services” to meet these challenges and those services touch almost every aspect of database configuration. This paper presents a broad yet thorough exploration and explanation of every aspect of services for both single instance and cluster (RAC) databases.

Seems like quite a few people have had difficulty installing RAC on AIX. This is a cookbook-style step-by-step guide for installing 10g RAC on AIX — updated for release 2. It’s configured with Oracle Clusterware and ASM (no HACMP or GPFS) and covers a non-default listener port and a non-default SSH installation. It also illustrates a fully OFA-compliant installation using response files. This guide was published on the RAC SIG website - if the link at left doesn’t work then you can try a local copy.

I thought that it would be an interesting exercise to programmatically map out the SGA tables exposed through x$kqfta and x$kqfco. This short SQL*Plus script will generate a C program which can directly read any x$ table in the SGA. It is not complete (in particular I haven’t added code to handle all datatypes yet); there are still a few more enhancements I’d like to make. Look at the last page of the document for example output from the program.

This program is not really that useful in the grand scheme of things because you can’t really statically map out the SGA. For example many tables will change their structure depending on initialization parameters (like “processes” and “sessions”). It’s more of an exercise and a chance to learn a little more about what the SGA looks like.

Bug fix for OCFS version 1 which was included in 1.0.12 - for more info see this general overview or this detailed email from the OCFS mailing list. If the link at the left doesn’t work then you can try a local copy.