Who never had to measure the disk performances on a system?

Speaking about Linux performance monitoring includes a significant part of disk performances. If you are facing applications or databases running slower than expected or than on other environments, you may take a look on the I/O performances.
This posting aims to provide an introduction to a pretty interesting tool: IOzone.

I'm pretty sure that most of you already struggled with some low performance systems. In order to analyse such cases several tools and utilities, like top, nmon, fuser or lsof are available under Linux. However trying to dig in processes analysis and looking for files and processes relations may be quite painful.

To get started with performance checks and analysis, a interesting utility is available: htop

We have now arrived at the end of the largest Oracle OpenWorld ever. Around 45'000 people traveled to San Francisco to exchange on IT and especially Oracle technologies. It has been a great conference with a lot of interesting sessions and several announcements as every year: Enterprise Manager 12c, Exalytics and Oracle Public Cloud.

For my last post on OOW '11, I want to talk about the last session I attended. Who said that late sessions are usually less interesting? I personally was lucky enough to attend a great presentation held by Oak Table member Alex Gorbachev. Alex used ASM to demonstrate how hardware and software fault tolerance mechanisms, especially mirroring, are affected by different parameters such as MTBF.

This has been a long day. It started with gathering some news about Enterprise Manager 12c and finished with a huge concert on Treasure Island. However, the highlight of the day was clearly Larry Ellison's Keynote. Since this afternoon (pacific time), Oracle is officially offering a public cloud integrating an Oracle social network!

In my second blog posting about OpenWorld, I wrote about the Engineered Solutions portfolio that just got enhanced with Exalytics. Today I'm going to focus a bit more on Oracle Database Appliance and how this new box works. I had the chance to go to a session called "New! Database Appliance: secrets revealed", which provided more information on its architecture and functionality. After that I went to a highly interesting use case by Dell on the brand new Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c for Cloud computing. But first let's have a look at the Database Appliance secrets...

Oracle OpenWorld's day 2 is now over … with some rain… We had some interesting sessions such as Fusion Middleware, RMAN or NoSQL.

In this OOW 'Road Journal' post, I am going to focus on two of them, introducing a coming Data Center Management solution and giving an outlook on the Oracle Enterprise Linux roadmap.

So the first day of the Oracle OpenWorld 2011 is over. This introduction day was dedicated to Oracle Users, Oracle Partner Forums, and the Welcome Keynote. It already showed some interesting stuff and finished with a new announcement.

Finally after a 18 hours, door-to-door, journey I arrived at San Francisco for Oracle OpenWorld 2011. My trip started in Basel, with a stop in Paris and then an 11 hours flight to San Francisco. Even with the on-board movies these kind of flights are still quite boring, but the funny things is that I really thought I was flying with "Air Oracle"…

It's already quite a while that I posted my last article on the Oracle basics, so I decided to take some times in the train to continue this small serie. This time, I'm going to speak about one of the root of Oracle administration, starting and shutting down a database server.

I was upgrading Netbackup yesterday to version 7.0.1 and faced a quite "funny" issue with the OpsCenter. The installation failed on pre-requirements checks saying that no space was available. Nothing strange at this point...except that we still had about 79GB free space!

What is finally the primary objective of a database? Storing Data

The question is, how Oracle makes it. For many beginners, a confusing topic is to get the picture between physical storage and logical one. So how does it work?

NetBackup provides a pretty nice Web Interface, OpsCenter, to monitor and check the basic configuration. However after working a while with it, you may find that some information can be quit boring to find out.

Good news! Symantec didn't forget that in Unix World some peoples still like working in command lines...

While beginning to work with Oracle, one of the most common confusions is between Oracle Database and Oracle Instance. The term Oracle Database is mainly used to designate the whole Oracle RDBMS architecture. However, taking a closer look at Oracle RDBMS Server, we can see that it is composed of two entities, the Database and the Instance. What is really the difference between them? Let's find out.