Oracle: Unbreak my Linux Heart

Someone on the Dell PowerEdge mailing list has written a script that uses SOAP calls to query dell's warranty site . I'm sure it's helpful to someone else to know this.

On Wim Coekaerts Blog I read that Zend and Oracle are working closer together. This makes PHP/Zend Server more integrated with Oracle Enterprise Linux (OEL). Zend Server is a complete, Oracle-enabled, enterprise-ready Web application Server for running and managing PHP applications that require a high level of reliability, performance and security. Connectivity to Oracle databases is delivered out of the box. We have a long history of working with Zend and the PHP community to ensure that the latest and greatest Oracle features are available in the PHP database connectivity libraries. Oracle now hosts an rpm package on their ULN servers called zend-server-repo , which updates yum to also look at the software repositories hosted by Zend. (Note: you may need to use a proxy server to get to it, if you have ULN locally mirrored, or mirror the Zend repo as well!) When a user wants to install Zend Server, just a simple command will install the zend-server product directly. FYI, the zend rp...

Oracle Linux Tests are designed to verify Linux kernel functionality and stability essential for the Oracle Database. The Oracle Linux Test (OLT) kit , which is distributed as a set of rpms, provides an automated mechanism to define, execute and analyze tests. The kit contains tools such as DBT2 and DBT3 workloads against Oracle single instance or clustered databases, as well as specialized workload simulators. OLT can be used for running tests on Oracle Enterprise Linux, RHEL and SLES distributions and a variety of topologies (storage attached network, network attached storage).

Don MacAskill from Smugmug wrote an interesting article on a problem with Linux and single-app-boxes. I.e. servers that only run one application that consumes basically all available resources. It seems Linux will swap something sooner or later, even when it is swapping the only application out to disk. So your performance will plummet. But you can not disable the swap partition or go without one (according to their experiences, not mine). However, there is a simply sweet "solution" or work-around: create a small swapdisk on a RAM disk! Read more details and a howto in Don's article. Of course, the article is about MySQL. But Oracle RDBMS is also a single-use application. At least in our data center. And I have been getting reports of some Siebel apps showing weird performance problems. This may be it!

Sadly but expectedly, Oracle does not provide or support the Red Hat Application Stack . The stack enables easy development of web applications because its components are fixed. The stack includes JBoss, Hibernate, Red Hat GFS, Red Hat Cluster Suite, and Red Hat Directory Server. However, Oracle already bundles its own "stack" with Apache and Tomcat in the form of the Oracle Application Server . Oracle has made, what appears to be, its own fork of these open source software packages, and it support them independently of the public versions of Apache and Tomcat. For clustering applications, Oracle also delivers its own file system OCFS2.