Pythian

This is the first year since 2006 that I don’t present or attend the UKOUG Technology annual conference. Sad, but I had to withdraw because I didn’t believe UKOUG had been making the right choices in the past little while. The trigger was the introduction of the limit of six presentations per company to present at the conference. I believe this doesn’t really serve the conference, attendees or my company well (which I’m so passionate about,) nor my colleagues that I’m so proud to work with.

One of the optimizations available to us when running Oracle on Linux is huge page support. This feature of the Linux kernel enables processes to allocate memory pages of size 2M (instead of 4k). In addition, memory allocated using hugepages is pinned in physical memory. It cannot be swapped out.

It is now common practice to enable huge page support for Oracle databases with large SGAs (one rule of thumb is 8G). Without this feature, the SGA can be, and often is, paged out. Paging out portions of the SGA can result in disastrous consequences from a performance standpoint. There are a variety of load patterns that perform particularly poorly without hugepages. Running with large numbers of processes, sudden increases in processes (connection storms), and highly concurrent access of diverse sets of SGA pages all can bring an Oracle system without hugepages to its knees.

Oracle OpenWorld 2013 is just few weeks away, and of course, we are organizing the Annual Oracle Bloggers Meetup — one of your top favorite events of OpenWorld.

What: Oracle Bloggers Meetup 2013

When: Wed, 25-Sep-2013, 5:30pm

If you manage Oracle on Windows, you probably have wondered why it is so difficult to work out which Oracle instances are running and which ORACLE_HOMEs they use. On Unix or Linux, this is a very simple task.  Oracle services and their ORACLE_HOMEs are listed in the oratab file, located in /etc/ on most platforms and in /var/opt/oracle/ on Solaris.  To find what is running, we would usually use the ‘ps’ command and pipe it through grep to find and run PMON processes.

On Windows, it just isn’t this easy. Each Oracle instance runs in a single monolithic oracle.exe process. Nothing about the process indicates the name of the instance. When we want to find all of the configured Oracle services, we can use the ‘sc’ command, and pipe the results through find (I have added emphasis to the ASM and database instances):

Amazon Web Services has offered Relational Database Service as part of their cloud offering since 2011.  These days, RDS provides easy to deploy, on-demand database-as-a-service for MySQL, Oracle, and SQL Server.  When you compare it to essentially any other method of hosting and licensing Oracle, RDS seems to have a variety of really appealing qualities.

With RDS/Oracle, you don’t really need a DBA to take care of your database. With the notable exception of tuning, most of the DBA tasks, such as database creation and configuration, backups, upgrades, and disaster recovery are simply features of the service.

By now, the Denver Convention Center is probably cleaned up from IOUG Collaborate. The signs directing thousands of attendees to top-notch technical presentations have been removed, the twenty rental laptops which composed the classroom for Pythian’s RAC Attack class have been returned, and the vendor exhibition floor has been completely cleared out. Flight delays notwithstanding (thanks to some midwest weather), attendees are generally home by now – even those coming from places as far away as Germany and Australia.

Now that the buzz is dying down, I’ve finally found a few minutes to post my personal highlights.

Friends Old and New

First off, my favorite part of Collaborate is the opportunity to meet so many old friends and make new acquaintances who are all using Oracle technology. It’s both fun and informative to hear about the ways others are using Oracle software.

For only $299, you can access Virtual IOUG Collaborate 13 individually or set up a conference room at your company for the whole team. There will be two tracks broadcasted, so if you have demand for both tracks, it makes sense to purchase two access passes and setup two tracks broadcasted in parallel in your office so that members of your team can individually choose what to attend. I think that’s a steal even if you want to purchase this package individually.

Spring is a very active conference season for me. I might be going to half a dozen conferences in 3-4 months. That’s a lot of travel, but I look forward to all of them. The conference I’m probably looking forward to the most this year is IOUG COLLABORATE. It might be because:

I’ve recently realized that I hadn’t posted the second version of my presentation — Under The Hood of Oracle Clusterware 2.0: Grid Infrastructure, codenamed UTHOC2. I think it would be very useful as I still see lots of questions being asked, and UTHOC1 covers Oracle RAC 10g and 11gR1 only. 11g Release 2 brought many changes in the clusterware, and the slides needed some good refresh.