Oracle Database as our consultants live it every day: installation and patching, upgrades, RMAN backup and recovery, Data Guard, RAC, performance tuning, multitenant, licensing, and engineered systems such as ODA and Exadata.
This is a step by step demonstration on how to migrate any ASM disk groups from a cluster to another. May be use, with or without virtualization and may be used with storage layer snapshot for fast environment provisioning. Step 01 – Shutdown source database(s) on VMWARE servers Shutdown all databases hosted in the targeted Disk groups for which you…
By Franck Pachot . This is the big new feature of Oracle 18c about database software installation. Something that was needed for decades for the ease of software deployment. Piet de Visser raised this to Oracle a long time ago, and we were talking about that recently when discussing this new excitement to deploy software in Docker containers. Docker containers…
When doing a performance review I often do talk with the DBA about the CPU utilization of the server. How reliable is the server CPU utilization with tools like top or the host CPU utilization in the AWR-report? E.g. on an Linux Intel x86-64 server with 8 Cores and 16 logical CPUs (Intel Hyperthreading), what does a utilization of 50%…
By Franck Pachot . Do you have complex connection strings with DESCRIPTION_LIST, DESCRIPTION, ADDRESS_LIST, ADDRESS and a nice combination of FAILOVER and LOAD_BALANCE? You probably checked the documentation, telling you that FAILOVER=YES is the default at all levels, but LOAD_BALANCE=YES is the default only for DESCRIPTION_LIST. But when disaster recovery and availability is concerned, the documentation is not sufficient. I…
By Franck Pachot . In my opinion, the volume of logging (aka redo log, aka xlog, aka WAL) is the most important factor for OLTP performance, availability and scalability, for several reasons: This is the only structure where disk latency is a mandatory component of response time This is a big part of the total volume of backups This is…
By Franck Pachot . Here is a little script I use from time to time to look at V$MYSTAT values and displaying on one line a set of statistics with their delta value between two calls. The first script, _mystat_init.sql, initializes the variables. The second one displays the values, such as: SQL> @ _mystat_diff.sql db block changes redo size…
By Franck Pachot . Every database analysis should start with system load analysis. If the host is in CPU starvation, then looking at other statistics can be pointless. With ‘top’ on Linux, or equivalent such as process explorer on Windows, you see the process (and threads). If the name of the process is meaningful, you already have a clue about…
By Franck Pachot . In 12.1 we had the possibility to unplug a PDB by closing it and generating a .xml file that describes the PDB metadata required to plug the datafiles into another CDB. In 12.2 we got an additional possibility to have this .xml file zipped together with the datafiles, for an easy transport. But that was not…
By Franck Pachot . If you want to apply the latest patches (and you should), you can go to the My Oracle Support Recommended Patch Advisor. But sometimes it is not up-todate. For example, for 12.1.0.2 only the PSU is displayed and not the Proactive Bundle Patch, which is highly recommended. And across releases, the names have changed and can…
By Franck Pachot . Creating – and using – your own services has always been the recommendation. You can connect to a database without a service name, though the instance SID, but this is not what you should do. Each database registers its db_unique_name as a service, and you can use it to connect, but it is always better to…
Suppose you got an OVA image created on VMware and the VM contains more than 4 Disks and you have to migrate this machine from VMware to OVM. As first step you import the OVA into the OVM in the usual way: You see the that the appliance was imported successfully, we have 5 disks: Now you create your VM from…
By Franck Pachot . I encountered recently a case where result cache was incorrectly used, leading to high contention when the application encountered a peak of load. It was not a surprise when I’ve seen that the function was called with an ‘ID’ as argument, which may have thousands of values in this system. I mentioned to the software vendor…
