The following is an example of rolling a virtual database (VDB) back in time with Delphix Express, the free version of Delphix. Delphix by default keeps a 2 week window of changes for virtual databases (configurable to 2 months, 2 years etc). Thus we can go back in time to any point in that time window. Why would we want to go back in time? Maybe something went wrong. For example VDBs are typically used by developers who aren’t as versed in databases as a DBA. What happens when a developer accidentally drops a table yet there was other work…
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What if I’m a developer or QA person using a copy of production database to do my work. What if my copy of production is now out of date and I want to refresh my data with the data as it is on production. Below is a video of how to refresh a virtual database to the freshest data from the source database: This example uses the free version of Delphix called “Delphix Express” and “Landshark” demo environment consisting of two VMs a source VM with a source database and a target VM with no database originally where we provision a virtual database.…
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photo by Chase Elliott Clark Here a video on using Jetstream which I like to call “DevOps Jetpack for Developers” (Remember you can get Delphix Express and Jet Stream for free.) See previous blog post on how to set up Jet Stream. With Jet Stream, users can control their data. Users can refresh their data from the source, users can bookmark data to rollback to, users can bookmark their data and share those bookmarks with other users so that those uses can access the same data. In the video Part I QA person adds edge case data to a copy of production data…
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Delphix has a developer self service interface called “Jetstream.” I like to call it the “DevOps Jetpack” for developers. Jetstream is available both in the Delphix enterprise engine and also in the free Delphix Express engine. See following blog post on users using Jet Stream. Here is a video on how to setup Jetstream for two users, a developer (Joe Dev) and a QA analyst (Jane QA). In a blog post to follow this one, we will see how Joe Dev and Jane QA can work together thanks to Jetstream which allows them to share versions of data (similar to how people can…
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I have previously announced that Delphix now has a free version available called Delphix Express as well as how to install Delphix Express. In this blog will look at an example of virtualizing your first database and not only the database but virtualizing the application as well. What does virtualizing mean? Like in the world of virtual machines where we make multiple virtual machines on one set of hardware, in the world of virtual data we make many read/write copies of data with one actual physical copy of the data. We do that by sharing unmodified data and storing each…
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This post is part of a series Delphix Express: Installation Delphix Express: Virtualizing a database and web application Delphix Express: Setting up Jetstream Delphix Express: Using Jetstream A couple of blog post ago I announced that there is now a free version of Delphix. Here is a little more information about the installation of Delphix Express. To get Delphix Express, the free version of Delphix, go to http://download.delphix.com and create an account, then log in. You should see a DelphixExpress folder. Click on it and you can download the OVAs. Delphix Express Delphix Express clones databases in minutes for almost not storage and…
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Delphix Express is available! To get a copy of Delphix Express go to http://pages.delphix.com/Free-Trial-Request.html and put “Express” for your title and I’ll send you the download info. Delphix Express is a free version of Delphix Delphix Express differs from Delphix enterprise in that it is limited to 25 GB of managed storage. Installation Example Virtualizing Example Here is a video on installing Delphix Express on VMware fusion on my Mac. Delphix Express can also be installed on Virtualbox. Here is a quick video showing how to create a virtual database as well as a virtual database application using Delphix…
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photo by Yannis (CC 2.0) Announcing Delphix Express, a completely new and free version of Delphix limited to 1 vCPU and 25 GB of managed storage. Unlike the “Free 30-day trial” version this one is yours to keep for as long as you like. If you are interested, you can download it at http://pages.delphix.com/Free-Trial-Request.html but the trick is you have to put “Express” as your title.Delphix Express is available currently for VMware and VirtualBox hypervisors. As with the 30 day demo, we suggest you test Delphix Express out with our demo environment called “Landshark.” Landshark consists of a source Linux VM with an Oracle…
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Every so often a DSS query that usually takes 10 minutes ends up taking over an hour. (or one that takes an hour never seems to finish) Why would this happen? When investigating the DSS query, perhaps with wait event tracing, one finds that the query which is doing full table scans and should be doing large multi-block reads and waiting for “db file scattered read” is instead waiting for single block reads, ie “db file sequential read”. What the heck is going on? Sequential reads during a full table scan scattered read query is a classic sign of reading…
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What happens with I/O requests over NFS and more specifically with Oracle? How does NFS affect performance and what things can be done to improve performance? What happens at the TCP layer when I request with dd an 8K chunk of data off an NFS mounted file system? Here is one example: I do a dd if=/dev/zero of=foo bs=8k count=1 where my output file is on an NFS mount, I see the TCP send and receives from NFS server to client as: (the code is in dtrace and runs on the server side, see tcp.d for the code) There is a lot…
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What is right deep verses left deep? Good question. In join trees (not VST) the object on the left is acted upon first then the object on the right. Below are left deep and right deep examples of the same query, showing query text join tree join tree modified to more clearly show actions VST showing the same actions All of this boils down to the point that a right deep HJ can return rows earlier than a left deep HJ. A left deep HJ has to wait for each join to finished completely so that the result set can be hashed before the next…
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About year ago or more, Oracle came out with a way to create thin clone copies of a database in EM 12c called “Snap Clone”. Not sure this makes working with data any sunnier and certainly doesn’t add any sunlight to the cloud movement. Snap Clone technology has seen little adoption AFAIK. I’m not aware of a single customer reference yet, besides internal usage at Oracle. Why ? Because Snap Clone doesn’t solve the real problem. Snap Clone is complex, depends on cobbling other technologies together, and lacks in crucial features. The real solution is simplicity and end-to-end integration with data source syncing all…
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Performance testing requires full, fresh data Many organizations don’t even attempt to test performance until very late in their development cycle because it is only in the UAT (or equivalent) environment that they have a full copy of their production data set. Errors and inefficiencies found at this stage are expensive to fix and are often promoted to production due to pressures from the business to meet release schedules. Delphix customers give each developer, or team of developers, a full, fresh copy of the database where they can validate the performance of their code in the UNIT TESTING phase of…
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Followup: The tweets from the datachat are available at http://www.confio.com/logicalread/oracle-db-performance-80-percent-hardware-dc01/ in chronological order. Confio software is hosting a live discussion on twitter tomorrow Tuesday April 15 at 12pm PST on the subject of Oracle performance. I’ll be online answering performance questions and have invited many other friends to participate. Some friends who’ve said they’ll be there are Arup Nanda Dominic Delmolino Marcin Przepiorowski Toon Koppelaars Karl Arao Participation and tracking of the discussion can accomplished by either posting with and following along with the #datachat hashtag. Get on TweetDeck or your favorite Twitter tool, search #datachat, add a column and…
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Maximum manageable storage per VM by ESX version 4.1: 32TB (vmdk) / 120TB (RDM) 5.0: 60TB (vmdk) / 3.75PB (RDM) 5.1: 60TB (vmdk) / 3.75PB (RDM) 5.5: 3.63PB (vmdk) / 3.75PB (RDM) Note that the 60TB limit for 5.0 and 5.1 requires Update 1. Without this the limit is 24TB. Exceeding the limits on ESX < 5.5 can result in VMFS heap exhaustion and data corruption! More details: Component ESX 3.5 * ESX 4.0 ESX 4.1 ESX 5.0 ESX 5.1 ESX 5.5 vCPUs 4 8 8 32 64 64 RAM 64GB 255GB 255GB 1TB 1TB 1TB Disk Size (VMDK)…
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Introduction Unfortunately, what Oracle calls “Network Waits” most often have little to do with Network but and almost exclusively to do with the time it takes to pack messages for the network before they are sent. Client = you, the tool, sqlplus, application Not the client, the other side = the shadow process is communicating to the client Of the three waits, only “more data” is possibly related to network issues and that’s not even clear, the other two are simply the time it takes to pack a message before sending it. SQL*Net message to client – time to pack…
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Oracle 10 and 11 Buffer Busy Waits usually happen on Oracle 10 and 11 mainly because of insert contention into tables or Indexes. There are a few other rare cases of contention on old style RBS segments, file headers blocks and freelists. Before Oracle 10 and 11 there was one other major reason which was readers waiting for readers, ie one user does a phyiscal IO of a block into memory and a second user want to read that block. The second user waits until the IO is finished by the first user. Starting in 10g this wait has been given…
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if someone fraudulently uses your information for medical services or drugs, you could be held liable for the costs The demand for healthcare application development is exploding and has been exploding over the past couple of years because of Obama Care – Affordable Care Act Regulatory – HITECH and HIPAA Privacy Acts ICD 10 Pro-active Health Care (versus reactive health care) Mobile devices but to develop applications for health care requires the data to be masked. Why does masking data matter and matter especially for health care? If patient information gets out it can be quite damaging. One heuristic for…