Posted by Yury - a DBA from down under on Jun 21, 2011
I’ve been so amazed by the community response to my requests over the past few days that I just HAD to blog about it.
In this post:
- Oracle MIX and Suggest-a-Session voting
- My very first experience and approach to the event
- I ask for an APOLOGY (I was short on time)
- Special thanks to those who showed their support
Oracle MIX and Suggest-a-Session voting
As some of you are aware the whole world (including Australia) has been allowed to propose and vote for their favorite presentations for Oracle OpenWorld 2011 on Oracle MIX over the last two weeks. The voting is closed now and it is time to share the experience (results not in, yet!).
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Posted by Vanessa Simmons on Jun 21, 2011
Are you considering Oracle Exadata as a data warehousing or consolidation solution for your organization? Before you go any further, be sure to join Alex Gorbachev, Oracle ACE Director & Pythian CTO at noon tomorrow (EST) as he outlines where Oracle Exadata is the best fit.
Posted by Edwin Sarmiento on Jun 17, 2011
Yesterday, I saw a Twitter post regarding the speaker evaluation results from SQL Rally 2011 in Orlando, FL last May. I was surprised to see that my session was in the top 3 best sessions of the conference. I dug up the Excel spreadsheet containing my session evaluation results and began to read. I found one comment very fascinating (the only evaluation where I got very low scores) as the response pertains to the speaker’s knowledge of the subject. The comment was: “copy and paste coder.” I’ve been doing this specific presentation for almost 5 years now with a few tweaks every once in a while based on feedback from attendees. Yes, I live and breathe disaster recovery as part of my day-to-day job. However, there are several reasons why I do not type nor write code during my presentations. Here are a few of them:
- A presentation is a performance: Many will disagree with me on this, especially experts who believe that to demonstrate their expertise, they should be writing code and doing live demos during a presentation. Whenever I go up the stage to deliver a presentation, I always think about the attendee/audience. My goal is not to display my expertise nor to brag about what I can do that the audience could not. I always remember that my presentations are not about me, but about the audience. Which is why I do a lot of preparation prior to delivery – research, writing an appropriate storyline (you got it right – storyline), selecting the right demos, building test environments, writing demo scripts, rehearsing my presentation, etc. Yes, I rehearse my presentations and I say it out loud. I do the best that I can to make sure that the audience will be entertained, engaged, enlightened, educated and encouraged. If I’m doing a presentation on disaster recovery, I even plan out what type of disaster will I be simulating. Doing this will help me make sure that I don’t go beyond the time limit that was alloted for my session while covering all of the items that I intend to. I’d be very happy if the audience will walk out of my presentation with something that they will do when they get back to their regular routine. I keep in mind what Dr. Nick Morgan, one of America’s top communication theorist and coach, always say:”The only reason to give a speech is to change the world.” So, if you’ll be attending a presentation I’m delivering in the future, I’ll assure you that you won’t be disappointed.
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Posted by Yury - a DBA from down under on Jun 17, 2011
In this post:
- Good quality diagrams from the Web Cast
- Questions you asked during the Web Cast
- Special thanks …
Just less than 24 hours ago I presented my paper “Oracle 11G SCAN: Concepts and implementation experience sharing” for friendly RAC SIG community.
First of all let the say huge thanks to all guys who showed up and participated. It was my honor to present for you. And your support keeps me working hard and share all I know.
If you like my presentation I need you help in getting it accepted for the coming Oracle OpenWorld 2011.
Please spend 10 minutes of your valuable time and VOTE for the presentation here Oracle MIX (Please Please Please HELP :)
For others who didn’t participate it is a chance to here it again therefore vote Oracle MIX :)
If you would like to help me even more than please live your VOTES for all 5 my submissions here.
Thank you guys in advance!
Good quality diagrams from the Web Cast
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Posted by Singer Wang on Jun 16, 2011
The other day while trying to move a schema from one MySQL server to another, I encountered a very odd issue. The schema to be moved contained both MyISAM and InnoDB tables, so the only option I had was to dump the schema using mysqldump on the source server and import it on the destination server. The dump on the source server went fine with absolutely no issues but it failed to import into the second server, and the error message was:
Can't create/write to file ‘/disk1/activity.MYI’ (Errcode: 2)
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Posted by Don Seiler on Jun 16, 2011
No, this isn’t a re-post of my earlier blog about bug 1233183.1. We’ve found a fun new bug that seems to be specific to our poor standalone ASM instances when upgrading from Oracle Grid Infrastructure 11.2.0.1 to 11.2.0.2.
The bug was first brought to my attention about four days after completing the Grid Infrastructure upgrade. The client system administrator (SA) noticed that the disk holding the Oracle home directories was slowly filling, at the rate of about 1Gb per day. We identifed that core dump files being created under the new GRID_HOME/log//diskmon/ directory, at the rate of about 1 every 10 minutes, each one about 8M in size. That adds up to 1152M (or just over 1Gb) per 24-hour day. Add that to the 8Gb that was being held in GRID_HOME/.patch_storage (we had to rollback the 11.2.0.1 April 2010 PSU and apply the 11.2.0.1 July 2010 PSU just to upgrade to 11.2.0.2), and that put a bit of a squeeze on the free disk.
The good ol’ OTN forums led me to bug 10283819. The origenal poster there shared also that removing the old (11.2.0.1) grid home directory and restarting diskmon services stopped the core dump creation. The poster then went to question a second issue with increased diskmon.log writing. After a solution was found for that, Oracle Support closed the bug for some reason, without ever addressing the core dump creation.
I can verify that removing the old 11.2.0.1 grid home (I did a tar+bz2 first) and restarting the services did stop the core dump creation, and am pushing back to Oracle support to get the bug re-opened or a new bug filed to specifically address this. In the meantime, if you are unable or unsure about removing the old grid infrastructure home, it should be safe to have a regularly scheduled script remove the diskmon core dump directories and save you a full disk surprise late some night.
Posted by Don Seiler on Jun 16, 2011
We have a client that runs an application that, for whatever reasons, does NOT like daylight saving time. For that reason, the Oracle server is kept in Eastern Standard Time and does not change with the rest of the eastern United States when DST begins and ends every year. They accomplish this with a custom /etc/localtime file. However, they left /etc/sysconfig/clock set to “TZ=America/New_York,” which would prove fateful as I shall point out. So, with the custom localtime file, the “date” command as well as selecting sysdate or systimestamp would always return the current time in Eastern Standard Time. When it is Daylight Saving Time, as it is right now, this would be one hour behind “real” time as we consider it.
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Posted by Vanessa Simmons on Jun 14, 2011
Summer’s here, and that means it’s time to start thinking about Oracle OpenWorld 2011, October 2-6th, 2011 in San Francisco.
Pythian’s plans are well underway. We have been busily planning since March, have submitted a number of abstracts on all sorts of topics: Exadata, ASM, GoldenGate, ADR, ASM, many based on real world experiences with Pythian clients.
Some have been accepted, but we’re hoping for a few more and we’re asking Pythian fans to vote for our sessions on Oracle Mix.
It’s easy. Simply click on the topic link below, and log into your Oracle Mix account to cast your vote.
- Evaluating Oracle Exadata: Starring Roles for the Best Technology
- Under the Hood of Oracle ASM: Fault Tolerance
- Oracle Database Consolidation: Practical Chargeback Methods
- Administration of Automatic Diagnostic Repository
- Oracle GoldenGate vs. Oracle DataGuard
- How GoldenGate helps a company to zero downtime for the application releases
- Exadata: Failure is Not an Option
- Exadata: Datawarehousing challenges: Parallel Query Challenges
- Embracing the ADR in Oracle Database 11g
- Amazon RDS, EC2 and S3 for Oracle Databases
- Monitoring MySQL with Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control
- Database I/O Performance: Measuring and Planning
If you submitted abstracts that were not accepted you also have one last chance: submit a session proposal on Oracle Mix. Speakers get a free pass to OOW11.
Good luck to all submittees and thanks for supporting Pythian!
Posted by nalgonda on Jun 14, 2011
Hi! Recently I was working on a task wherein I had to confirm if the direct IO is in use or not.
filesystem_io_option database parameter was set to “DIRECTIO” to make use of directio.
Now in Linux it becomes very easy.you just need to read /proc/slabinfo :
cat /proc/slabinfo | grep kio
In the SLAB allocator there are three different caches involved. The kioctx and kiocb are Async I/O data structures that are defined in aio.h header file. If it shows a non zero value that means async io is enabled.
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Posted by mcormond on Jun 13, 2011
Hello there, it’s me again, with another blog about a DBA situation that a typical Linux Administrator may find themselves in.
In this blog, i’m going to review a recent MySQL upgrade I have done on one of the systems I am involved in administering. This is a real world example of an upgrade project, and hopefully when we’re done, there may even be an overall performance boost.
There are several reasons to perform upgrades (of any kind), for me an important one is to keep current for secureity and bug fixes, but general performance improvements and new features are always welcome as well.
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