Training Days 2014 for RMOUG starts in just TWO days. Tim and I have picked up Jonathan Lewis and Pete Sharman this weekend, the flurry of speakers will be arriving in the next couple days. With the fantastic help of Team YCC, we have an incredible conference planned for everyone! If you haven’t downloaded the Guidebook mobile app from the App store or Play store, do so, as you can’t miss out on this great application to make the most of the conference. You can build your schedule, read up on Speaker/exhibitor bios, keep up with all the going on’s…
-
-
I often have folks ask me for assistance when target discovery isn’t successful. The following is from a client’s environment that shows just how important it is to ensure your server environment is kept pristine. The goal was to discover a new database on an existing RAC cluster. The cluster had already been discovered and configured, but the DBA was experiencing a failure upon adding the database targets. Once the cluster is configured through a manual discovery using the GUID wizard, adding a RAC database is often a simple process. Just click on Targets and Databases from the EM12c console…
-
This post is to clearly discuss an opinion I have on where I think we’re failing our current and next generation on technical education. So I’ll start out with a disclaimer. 1. It’s my opinion and no one else’s. Not my employer, not my genders and not anyone but mine. 2. Its a whole lot easier to write here in a blog post than in a twitter conversation, no matter how much I enjoy chatting with everyone, including Jeff Smith and Bradd Piontek… 🙂 The basis for the discussion was an article that can be found here. Although the article…
-
photo by David Blackwell. Not sure if you can imagine or have ever experienced a meeting where you bring in your statspack or AWR report, all 30 pages of it, point out some glaring issues that anybody could see and proposed some precise solutions, only to have the management team’s eyes glaze over. Then after you finish your pitch they all start arguing as to what the problem might be despite your clear presentation of the problem and solution. Have you ever had that same meeting with a printout of top activity from Oracle Enterprise Manager, with it’s load graph…
-
**Note- This is an article I wrote about 4 years ago that, as far as I know, can only be found in hard copy and although I’ve changed my stance on statistics, etc. with 11g/12c, the main point of CTAS benefits still stands the test of time. As a kid did you ever watch the cartoon Hanna-Barbara’s, “the Jetson’s” and see Elroy drop out of George Jetson’s flying saucer, going to school via his personal, hyper-pod and thought, “forget the bus, I want to go to school in the hyper-pod!”? For any developer or DBA working with large objects…
-
I’ve been working a good number of hours this December between project/clients for Enkitec and co-author work on the EM CLI book with Seth Miller and Ray Smith, plus my additional responsibilities as the Training Days Conference Director for RMOUG’s big conference coming up in 6 weeks. Due to all of this, going to take one more blog post off from technical and share what happens when you eat food outside of your normal diet just before going to bed… —————————————————————————————————————————————————————- Saturday evening we were returning home from a wonderful post-Christmas dinner at Tim’s Mother’s home. We had quite a…
-
Anyone who knows me, will also know that I’m an Android person. I have nothing against Mac products and really do think they are cool, but I use what works for me and I am very content with my Samsung Android Galaxy S4 for my Smartphone and Galaxy Note 10.1 for my tablet. With the innovation of wearable smart devices, one would think that I would have gone Galaxy Gear, but I didn’t. Here are the initial reasons my letter to Santa had the Sony SmartWatch 2 instead: Play Store wise, the Sony had just as many and actually had…
-
Information Publisher, (IP) Reporting has been a feature of Enterprise Manager for quite some time now, but I’ve just recently started to work with a few clients who’ve wanted to put it to use, but not implement BI Publisher, (yet… :)) If you haven’t investigated the “canned” reports that are already available to a user of the Enterprise Manager, (EM12c) then you are missing out, as there are a number that are highly valuable. Accessing the feature is as simple as logging into the EM12c console and clicking on Enterprise, Reports, then Information Publisher Reports. You will see the list…
-
Nothing is more annoying that getting alerted on things that are not critical to you or that you already know is occurring and there is not a darn thing you can do about it. I’ve also been frustrated to wake up in the morning and to see my inbox flooded with a ton of alerts from numerous EM12c systems and really- none of them are truly critical, but can appear to be simply overwhelming! How to we steer the inbox from madness to manageable? The answer to this question is not just managing metric settings and thresholds- there are a…
-
So what do you do when network hiccups and other “small” issues start to send you incident notifications that a target is down, when in fact, it was really about a target just being delayed in communicating with the Oracle Management Server, (OMS)? These are just one more way that “white noise” can drive a DBA to pull their hair out. This post will discuss ways you can eliminate this type of EM12c “white noise”. Let’s say we are receiving this incident notification, almost every night. We’ve done some research and discovered that heavy network traffic at this time…
-
As many folks know, “white noise” or having incident alerts that don’t offer value is something that I just refuse to tolerate. The metric alert “Listener response to a TNS ping is xxxx msecs” is valuable, as it represents how many milliseconds it takes the listener to respond to a network request, (i.e. ping). In the EM12c metric settings, this is set to default threshold of 400 to signal a warning and 1000 for critical. For most Listener targets, this is a solid set of thresholds, but that isn’t always the case. There are advanced logic capabilities involved with EM12c…
-
Oracle 12c introduces the new Pluggable Database (PDB) functionality into the Oracle database. What’s the advantage of PDBs? PDBs eliminate the heavy memory overhead of starting up a full Oracle instance requiring a new SGA and full set of background processes. Instead, we startup one container database (CDB) and then PDBs all share resources of the CDB. With a CDB & PDBs, there is one instance, one set of background processes, one SGA and these are shared among the PDBs. Starting a PDB only requires about 100MB of memory as opposed to half a GB normally required to start…
-
One of the greatest advancements in EM12c from previous Enterprise Manager versions is the auto-deployment. I have a number of clients with Windows environments and upon another recent search on Google, I found that there was a consistent and solid recommendation of installing Cygwin, (or another shell emulator installation) to utilize the auto-deploy. There is a large amount of work that is required to perform the pre-requisites to then take advantage of the auto-deploy, so I’m thrilled when I see someone recommend using the silent installation with Windows installation. I’m aware that I, along with others, have created posts that…
-
So as the book gets under way on the Enterprise Manager Command Line Interface, (EMCLI) I’m starting to move away from the introduction statements that I commonly was required to repeat to folks, (“it’s the return to the golden age of the DBA 1.0- command line, baby!” :)) and now are onto what has changed in release 3. The first things we want to talk about is the cool new features with Jython scripting and the the formatted output using JSON, (JavaScript Object Notation). These may not seem like much to most, but for those of us that have been…
-
So yes, I’ve been involved in a number of conferences and in a number of different roles. I started out presenting, then volunteering at conferences, reviewing abstracts, then as a track lead and now as a conference director for RMOUG. This year I also am the database track lead for ODTUG’s KSCOPE for a second year in a row. A lot of folks have asked me recently what they need to know to submit a great abstract, how to get accepted and why they may not have been selected. It’s often a lot more complicated than what it may first seem…
-
Inspecting work area usage for memory is an important aspect of my job when I’m performing a tuning exercise. This is especially true when we are talking about specific processes vs. overall database level. Often, along with SQL enhancements, choices in source objects to a process can improve performance drastically. Most developers are focused on the results of query, especially with tight deadlines vs. performance and the DBA can often assist them in succeeding with both. The process for our example today is a CTAS, (create table as select) that has a number of joins , a union, along with…
-
So I tried to finish out some of my OOW posts, but I ended up talking about this with a friend and thought I would share how I became Facebook friends with Larry Ellison instead…. After returning from Oracle Open World 2011, I sat one day at my desk, staring in disbelief, (as many Oracle folks busy in the social media world during OOW were that day) at a friend request from Larry Ellison’s Facebook account. I accepted it and me and my fellow DBAs then reviewed the account to verify that this was Larry’s official account and yes, he’d…
-
Great day today with a second WIT session and all the interviews and General Session for Enterprise Manager 12c. If you are looking for the ebook, you can download it from Oracle here. A couple people caught on that I was tweeting while discussing the benefits of EM12c, even capturing me in a photo, (will never live it down… :)) They played the trailer for the new Cloud Odyssey movie Oracle has been working on to promote EM12c and cloud. It’s been a lot of fun as they’ve talked about how they came up with the idea based off the…