If you’re planning on running Oracle VM with Amazon EC2, there are some important limitations you should know about. As part of my work getting the Oracle Linux Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel 2 working (yeah that’s a mouthful) I tried using the Oracle-supplied Oracle Linux 6 AMI images that are listed as community AMIs by Amazon: [...]
March 27, 2012
As announced a few days ago, Oracle’s core database product is now supported on Oracle Linux 6. Coming a full 13 months after Oracle Linux 6′s launch, and 16 months after Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, it’s a much anticipated announcement. Update 28-Mar-12: the official certification information has come out on My Oracle Support. So [...]
November 15, 2011
A common scenario in the life of a DBA on a linux server looks something like this: From: Sue-the-sysadamin To:the-dba Date: 2011-10-28 17:54:34 Dear DBA, We will be patching the linux systems this Friday night, October 28th at 21:00. The list of patches is attached. Let us know if there are any conflicts with Oracle. [...]
June 13, 2011
Hello there, it’s me again, with another blog about a DBA situation that a typical Linux Administrator may find themselves in. In this blog, i’m going to review a recent MySQL upgrade I have done on one of the systems I am involved in administering. This is a real world example of an upgrade project, [...]
May 20, 2011
Among the features announced with the release of version 4.6 of the KDE Software Compilation is KateSQL, a SQL Query plugin for the Kate text editor providing the basic functionality of a SQL client. It leverages the Qt SQL module, allowing you to make a connection to most types of databases. Out of the box [...]
September 30, 2010
Being in the remote administration business is a strange beast and offers lots of challenges, but when you are working for multiple clients sometimes connecting to the servers can be challenging enough. Here’s a little idea that I had this morning that may save someone some grief, so I thought I would jot it down [...]
June 8, 2010
Roamer, wanderer Nomad, vagabond Call me what you will $ENV{LC_ALL} = "anywhere"; my $time = localtime; say {$anywhere} my $mind; local *anywhere = sub { ... }; Anywhere I roam Where I 'git ghclone environment' is $HOME # 'grep may_roam($_) => @everywhere', # with apologies to Metallica Laziness and a severe addiction to yak shaving [...]
April 23, 2010
Good afternoon and welcome to another edition of Blogrotate. Though I have been contributing to Blogrotate since its inception, this is the first time I have had the honour of posting it myself. Go me!
Operating Systems
Red Hat has announced the availability of a public beta for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 (RHEL 6). There are a number of changes, for which Dave Courbanou at The VAR Guy does a pretty good job of providing an overview. Of note are that Red Hat has completed its migration from Xen to KVM as the supported virtualization technology (which began with RHEL 5.4), and that ext4 is now the default filesystem.
There have been a couple of tidbits of news in the Ubuntu world. The first being a bug with memory leakage in X.org affecting beta 2 of Ubuntu 10.04. The discussion on Slashdot became a debate on the merits of time vs scope-based release schedules. Per the bug report, a fix has since been committed, which is good because — and this leads into the second bit of news — Ubuntu has announced the availability of the release candidate for 10.04. Things are moving fast as we approach its release next Thursday.
And for something that’s not release announcement related, M. Tim Jones has an interesting article over at IBM’s developerWorks about Kernel Shared Memory in the Linux 2.6.32 kernel. Without going into a lot of detail (I’ll let him do that), it’s basically the implementation of a daemon to handle de-duplication of memory pages. This has obvious implications in a virtualization environment as there is the potential to run more virtual machines on a host without increasing the memory footprint.
Security
The big news on this front was that McAfee pushed out a virus definition update that falsely identified svchost.exe as a threat, resulting in Windows automatically rebooting. Peter Bright from Ars Technica has some good coverage of this, and linked to McAfee’s official solution. Meanwhile, Dave Courbanou over at The VAR Guy has a follow up on the situation with some additional detail, and Barry McPherson from McAfee has posted an official response stating that a ’small percentage’ of enterprise accounts were affected. And finally, Ben Grubb of ZDNet Australia reports that Coles had 10 percent of its point-of-sales terminals affected and shut down stores in WA and South Australia as a result.
Software
Oracle has decided to charge for an ODF plugin for MS Office which allows users to import/export documents in Open Document Format. Matt Asay, COO at Canonical, provides some commentary on this stating that “$9,000 is the new ‘free’ for Oracle“.
Jono Bacon, Canonical’s Community Manager, wrote that Canonical has made the single sign-on component of Launchpad available as open source under the AGPL3 license. There is some coverage from The H on this as well. Launchpad itself was released under the AGPL3 license about a year ago.
Hardware
On a final (interesting) note, ‘Cyber Cynic’ Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols writes that HP and Likewise to release Linux-based storage line about HP and Likewise partnering on a line of StorageWorks products that will make use of the Likewise CIFS stack to support Active Directory authentication.
Well, that’s all I have time for this week. Will Brad be back at the helm next week, or will I continue my reign? You’ll just have to wait and see…
April 21, 2010
I have successfully compiled and installed DBD::Oracle on Windows 2008 Server 64bit operating system today.
I used the latest version of DBD::Oracle 1.24, version 11.2.0.1.0 for 64bit Windows of Oracle’s
Instant Client Package – Basic along with the Instant Client Package – SQL*Plus and finally the Instant Client Package – SDK.
To get it to make and compile correctly I had to download Microsoft’s Visual Studio Ultimate
which should contain all the files you need. It is rather portly at 2+gb so you might want to grab lunch while you are downloading it.
After all the above downloading DBD::Oracle installed right out of the box.
All one has to do is select ‘Start Menu->All Programs->Microsoft Visual Studio 2010->Visual Studio Tools->Visual Studio x64 Win64 Command Prompt (2010)’
which will open a good old ‘dos’ window.
At this point CD to the directory where you downloaded DBD::Oracle
c:\DBD-Oracle
then set your ‘ORACLE_HOME to the Instant Client directory
c:\DBD-Oracle set ORACLE_HOME=c:\IC_11
you should also set your NLS like this
c:\DBD-Oracle set NLS_LANG=.WE8ISO8859P15
Once the above setting are done do a
c:\DBD-Oracle perl Makefile.PL
and then a
c:\DBD-Oracle nmake install
Which will produce a whole of warnings (these you can ignore, as they do not seem to effect DBD::Oracle at all) and near the end it should output something like this;
Generating code
Finished generating code
if exist blib\arch\auto\DBD\Oracle\Oracle.dll.manifest mt -nologo -manifest blib\arch\auto\DBD\Oracle\Oracle.dll.manifest -outputresource:blib\arch\auto
\DBD\Oracle\Oracle.dll;2
if exist blib\arch\auto\DBD\Oracle\Oracle.dll.manifest del blib\arch\auto\DBD\Oracle\Oracle.dll.manifest
C:\Perl64\bin\perl.exe -MExtUtils::Command -e "chmod" -- 755 blib\arch\auto\DBD\Oracle\Oracle.dll
C:\Perl64\bin\perl.exe -MExtUtils::Command -e "cp" -- Oracle.bs blib\arch\auto\DBD\Oracle\Oracle.bs
C:\Perl64\bin\perl.exe -MExtUtils::Command -e "chmod" -- 644 blib\arch\auto\DBD\Oracle\Oracle.bs
C:\Perl64\bin\perl.exe "-Iblib\arch" "-Iblib\lib" ora_explain.PL ora_explain
Extracted ora_explain from ora_explain.PL with variable substitutions.
C:\Perl64\bin\perl.exe -MExtUtils::Command -e "cp" -- ora_explain blib\script\ora_explain
pl2bat.bat blib\script\ora_explain
At this point you are all done.
Well almost.
It is important that you test your code before you install but you will have to set a few things up first to get it to fully test correctly.
You will need a TNSNAMES.ORA file that points to a valid DB in the Instant Client Directory
Next you will need to set the ORACLE_USER_ID to a valid user
c:\DBD-Oracle set ORACLE_USER_ID=system/system@XE
You will have to set up TNS_ADMIN to point to the Instant Client Directory
c:\DBD-Oracle set TNS_ADMIN=c:\IC_11
Most importantly you will have to add the Instant Client directory to your path like this
c:\DBD-Oracle path = c:\IC_11;%path%
If you do not do this step you will run into the dreaded
Can’t load ‘C:/Perl/lib/auto/DBD/Oracle/Oracle.dll’ for module DBD::Oracle: load_file:%1 is not a valid Win32 application at C:/Perl/lib/DynaLoader.pm line 202.
Error later on after the compile when you try to use DBD::Oracle.
What is actually going on is that Perl cannot find oci.dll (or one of the other .dlls it needs to run) the
C:/Perl/lib/auto/DBD/Oracle/Oracle.dll’ and the DynaLoader error
is just a false trail as perl is very limited in what it Windows errors it can report on. For more complet info on this sort of error check out this page;
by Alexander Foken. It is rather dated but the facts of why perl did not find a dll are still valid.
now you can do this
c:\DBD-Oracle nmake test
and all the tests should run and it will report.
Finally simply do a
c:\DBD-Oracle nmake install
and you are all set.
That is about it.
At this point you might want to add the Instant Client directory permanently to your path so you will not run into the Dynaloader error again.
As well you do not need to keep Visual Studio around to use DBD::Oracle so you can uninstall that as well.
March 17, 2009
In about 15 minutes, Giuseppe Maxia will begin a webinar in which the main focus is a presentation on “How to have a good presentation”. Talk about meta!
Giuseppe posted how to join the free webinar.
The slides can be found at http://datacharmer.org/downloads/2009_03_Presentation.pdf.
June 25, 2008
Usenix 2008 - Automated System Management, by Æleen Frisch of Exponential Consulting (and numerous books)
What is automation?
generic [perl|shell] scripts with cron,at
Problem: overlap of effort
So folks developed automation systems. General automation tools are around:
These are general — files, directories, etc. Don’t need to use chmod and chown and underlying commands.
However, they don’t really survive reboots well. For that, we tend to use tools more towards jumpstart, kickstart.
Monitoring with Nagios, related tools are rrd-tools such as cacti, cricket, munin, “or any of 8,000 others.” Automating ideas like iostat.
Nessus is a security testing tool.
homegrown, general, performance related, also automated backups — bakula, amanda, legato.
What do you want automated?
“Coffee machines”.
A lot of unsolved problems are human interaction.
Other problems solved — using remote power management.
Inventory management is another issue. HP OpenView is one, but Frisch says folks are not happy with it. You can pay for high-end monitoring systems.
A question came up about an inventory of users on systems. LDAP or NIS or Active Directory is the traditional solution where there are no local accounts. There’s authentication and then authorization, and the automated tools usually have authentication information but not authorization information. (You can handle it, but making groups on these tools is usually painful.) Authorization is usually handled either locally or as “if you’re authenticated you’re authorized”.
We talked about how to power down 500 machines when the air conditioning goes out, or when the power is going down. Combinations of temperature probes, “wake-on-lan”, remote power on and off were discussed.
What do people use to automate installs and configuration on Windows? For installation, the Windows native tools are great. It was noted that efs works better on Windows.
Anyone using Splunk with Windows? One answer — it works OK, there are some daemon tools to convert Windows Event Log to syslog.
Splunk came up as a topic of discussion, how it’s a great log management software and solves a problem we’ve had for decades — how to deal with logs. Frisch says, “Splunk is the most promising thing out there.”
Record keeping of time was brought up, as well as time management. Basically what we do at Pythian, so I explained how we do things. Other folks brought up ticketing systems as well. Jira and RT (Request Tracker) and OTRS (Open Ticket Request System) were brought up as well.
Also for change management, some folks use ClearCase (not open source), and others use rancid, others use Trac or bugzilla + change management system like subversion. Jira was recommended as a product that does both (with an add-on).
Use DHCP to help automate IP assigning. rsync is your friend too.
(it occurs to me that a dishwasher is an interesting problem; why do we have a dishwasher instead of just having a sink/dishwasher hybrid? Similarly, a hamper that does laundry for you when it’s full.)
January 8, 2008
I try to do a decent job of advocating for caring about good backups and business continuity strategies in my 7 Deadly Habits article.
But this one beats them all:
Just too funny and great not to share. Found via this reddit article, where there is a lively discussion underway.
December 21, 2007
In the era of consolidation, storage has not been left out. Different systems are made to share the same storage boxes, fiber-channel switches and networks. Inside a typical storage box, we have front-end and back-end controllers, cache, physical spindles shared amongst different applications, databases, backup destinations, and so on.
The impact of backup on normal database activity . . . batch processing in one database impacting transactional processing — these are two real life examples of the consequences of storage consolidation known to almost every DBA. Of course, it’s easy to suggest separating databases to different physical disks, but what about SAN box controllers and shared cache? And don’t forget about the cost factor and ubiquitous consolidation that forces storage administrators to pack as much data as possible into a single SAN or NAS storage device.
Some of our customers use hosting services — they outsource hardware hosting just like they outsource DBA work to Pythian. In such scenarios, hosting service providers usually have storage hardware shared amongst different customers to provide higher utilization and on-demand storage capacity at a lower cost.
December 19, 2007
I gave this talk at the UKOUG, and I have received a few requests to post the slides online. Instead of just posting the PowerPoint I took some time to give the presentation again (internally here at Pythian) and this time we recorded the session and we’re posting it here in a variety of formats. This is a bit of a departure from the typical Pythian Goodies, in that it is scripted, and there is a lot of content here in the whitepaper, but there hasn’t been a Goodie in a while so why not!
I’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to ask any follow-up questions to this post in the comments.
Abstract
Do I have enough memory? Why is my free memory so low? Am I swapping to disk? Can I increase my SGA (db cache) size? Can I add another instance to this server? Are my system resources used optimally? These are all questions that often haunt DBAs. This presentation is The Answer. It covers in detail the different types of memory, how to monitor memory, and how to optimally use it with Oracle. Multiple examples in the presentation demonstrate how certain actions on the database side cause different memory areas to be allocated and used on the OS side. Key underlying differences in operating systems approaches to managing memory will be highlighted, with special attention given to Linux, Solaris, and Windows. Using Linux as an example throughout, this presentation explains how to effectively use tools such as “top”, “vmstat” and “/proc/meminfo” to look into into a system’s allocation and use of memory.
Below you should see a flash video with me giving the session.
Download this presentation!
Powerpoint
IPod video (right-click and Save As . . .)
MP3 audio only
And below you will find the complete contents of the whitepaper. This is intended to be a good overall reference resource for how memory works in Oracle, using Linux as an example.
