linux

I need to download a copy of CentOS 2.1 (x86), but I can’t find it anywhere. I’ve been down the list of mirrors and they all list 2.1, but then have an empty tree below it.

If anyone knows how I can get hold of it please drop me a line.

Cheers

Tim…

This is an investigation into an half rack database machine (the half rack database machine at VX Company). It’s an exadata/database V2, which means SUN hardware and database and cell (storage) software version 11.2. I build a table (called ‘CG_VAR’), which consists of: - bytes: 50787188736 (47.30 GB) - extents: 6194 - blocks: 6199608 The [...]

Until a couple of days ago I hadn’t even realized that Fedora 13 was out. I guess that shows how interested I am in Fedora these days.

Anyway, I had a play around with it.

• Fedora 13 (F13) Installation
• Oracle Database 11g Release 2 (11.2) Installation On Fedora 13 (F13)

Cheers

Tim…

For those of you who haven’t followed all the Oracle Exadata and database machine information, and want a brief introduction to the database machine: here it is! The confusion There is some confusion about ‘exadata’ and ‘the database machine’. If we look at the official product names, ‘Exadata’ is the storage server, and the ‘Database [...]

The second installation step of the database machine aka Exadata by Oracle ACS (Advanced Customer Support) is configuring the database and storage (‘cell’) nodes/servers. The blades are delivered with default IP addresses, during this step they are configured to the IP addresses which fit in our environment. Also the cellservers are configured (‘LUN’s are carved’) [...]

With the recent news that the latest version of VirtualBox now supports shared disks, I thought I better give it a go and see if I could do a RAC installation on it. The good news is it worked as expected. You can see a quick run through here:

• Oracle Database 11g Release 2 RAC On Linux Using VirtualBox

This is pretty good news as that was the last feature that tied me to VMware Server. I’ve now moved pretty much everything I do at home on to VirtualBox and it’s working fine.

It’s worth taking a little time looking at the VBoxManage command line. Some of the operations, like creating the shared disks, have to be done from the command line at the moment. It’s also handy for running VMs in headless mode if you don’t want the GUI screen visible all the time.

Cheers

Tim…

This post originally appeared over at Pythian. There are also some very smart comments over there that you shouldn’t miss, go take a look!

This should have been the easiest task on my todo list: Install Oracle 10.2.0.3 EE standalone on a new Linux RHEL 5 server, later to be used as a standby for a production RAC system. This means 2 lines of “runinstall -silent …”, less than 5 minutes of DBA work and maybe 20 minutes of waiting. I did not expect to spend over 5 hours doing this.

Problems started when I discovered that I don’t have the 10.2.0.3 patchset and another patch that exists on production and should be installed on the standby. I had to wait for my Metalink credentials to be approved for this customer CSI before I could download the patches for them.

“Why don’t you just clone the software from production?” asked a helpful colleague.

Sounds like a great suggestion. I cloned Oracle software before and it is a simple process: tar $ORACLE_HOME, copy the tar file to the new server, untar, run the cloning script which will register the new home with the inventory, and you are done!

In theory, at least.

Here is what actually happened:

One of the advantages of ASM is doing non (operating system) buffered IO (also known as ‘DIO’ or Direct IO), and doing asynchronous IO (also known as ‘AIO’ or ‘asynch IO’). This is an excerpt from “ASM 10gr2 Best Practices“: The database file level access (read/write) of ASM files is similar to pre-10g, except that [...]

After the successful 5th edition of the DBA Symposium, which featured Jonathan Lewis, Planboard just begun planning the 6th edition of this well-known Dutch DBA Symposium and the Call for Papers is now open. If you are a Dutch DBA who wants to share his or her experiences with other Dutch DBA’s you definitely want [...]

I made a post about creating and using Oracle’s DBFS. One thing I’ve done is just dropping the user which was the owner of a database filesystem (drop user cascade), with the intention to get rid of the database filesystem. During the creation of a filesystem with the same name as I’ve used with the [...]