Everything our consultants learn while running databases for customers: Oracle, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, MySQL, MariaDB, MongoDB and Delphix. Expect hands-on posts about installation, day-to-day administration, backup and recovery, performance tuning, replication and upgrades.
The Challenge: Modern Data Complexity As businesses scale, so do their data environments. With hybrid cloud adoption, legacy system migrations, and stricter compliance requirements, IT teams must ensure test environments are: The Solution: Delphix & OMrun Also for your heterogenouse data storage technology, Delphix and OMrun provide a seamless way to virtualize, anonymize and validate your test data securely and…
I recently wrote a blog to show how to configure Veeam RMAN plug-in to take database backups. As all DBA knows, configuring a backup, will not go without testing a restore. In this blog I will show how I tested my previous Veeam configuration and backups performed with this Veeam RMAN plug-in on the same ODA. In order to test…
There are several situations when you have to migrate your Oracle databases to a new server. This could be due to hardware lifecycle reasons for on-prem systems or you need to upgrade your Operating System (OS) from Enterprise Linux 8 to Enterprise Linux 9. In this blog I wanted to talk about my recommended methods for such migrations considering ease…
This is maybe one the biggest steps forward for PostgreSQL: PostgreSQL 18 will come with support for asynchronous I/O. Traditionally PostgreSQL relies on the operating system to hide the latency of writing to disk, which is done synchronously and can lead to double buffering (PostgreSQL shared buffers and the OS file cache). This is most important for WAL writes, as…
Another great feature was committed for PostgreSQL 18 if you are interested how memory is used by a backend process. While you can take a look at the memory contexts for your current session since PostgreSQL 14, there was no way to retrieve that information for another backend. Since PostgreSQL 14 there is the pg_backend_memory_contexts catalog view. This view displays…
Before we take a look at what this new feature is about, let’s have a look at how PostgreSQL 17 (and before) handles “NOT NULL” constraints when they get created. As usual we start with a simple table: Trying to insert data into that table which violates the constraint of course will fail: Even if you can set the column…
Few days ago, through our alerting at the Service Desk, we receive an alert about a database in an AlwaysOn cluster with the message: CRITICAL: Database xxxx [replica: xxxxxx] [role: SECONDARY] state is SUSPECT, synchronization health is NOT_HEALTHY, synchronization state is NOT SYNCHRONIZING [suspended: true] [failover ready: false] [joined: true] After creating the ticket, I go to the environment and…
I recently had to install and configure the Veeam RMAN plug-in on an ODA, and would like to provide the steps in this article, as it might be helpful for many other people. Create Veeam linux OS user We will create an OS linux user on the ODA that will be used to authenticate on the Veeam Backup server. This…
When you want to upgrade from one major version of PostgreSQL to another you probably want to go with pg_upgrade (or logical replication). There are several modes of operations for this already: What is best for you, depends on the requirements. We usually go with “–link” as this is pretty fast, but you can only do that if the old…
Loosing all the object statistics after a major version upgrade of PostgreSQL with pg_upgrade is one of the real paint points in PostgreSQL. Collecting/generating the statistics can take much longer than the actual upgrade which is quite painful. A first the to resolve this was already committed for PostgreSQL 18 and I’ve written about this here. Yesterday, another bit was…
I recently asked myself this question after having been confronted with a quite challenging situation, which will be been dissected in this post. Indeed, most of the DBA are aware about several mechanism offered by the Oracle database engine to call external programs.However, we rarely have the opportunity to get deep understanding of all of them due to the broad…
Introduction Patching your Oracle Database Appliance from 19.20 or earlier release to 19.21 or newer release implies the use of Data Preserving Reprovisioning (DPR). Most of the time, and with an adequate preparation, the DPR works fine. But if something goes wrong at the restore-node -g step, you will need some troubleshooting and maybe opening a SR. There is no…
