Oracle: Unbreak my Linux Heart

MySQL created a TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) calculator showing how cheap MySQL is compared to Microsoft MSSQL and Sybase. Interestingly, the parent company Oracle remains out of this picture. I find that sad. Why not be open and let the customer decide? Either way, the savings of MySQL Enterprise Edition to MSSQL are shocking: MySQL TCO Savings Calculator . Add your grain of salt...

EMC (VMware) has a great technical webcast and PDF online about Performance and Provisioning for Virtualized Oracle . I highly recommend you listen to it or read the sheets. Very informative if you want to use virtualized Oracle databases in a production environment. Most set-ups of virtualizing Oracle databases on VMware fail because storage I/O becomes a bottleneck. It turns out, 50% of all surveyed set-up had storage configured wrong. The problems has to do with storage queues in the VM and subsequently on the ESX host. Additionally, vSphere 4.1 introduces features ( SIOC ) to optimize the I/O better to the SAN and para virtualized SAN drivers can further reduce latency and increase throughput. Then the webcast also mentions Oracle's "native" NFS client ( dNFS , PDF) inside the database kernel. This reduces the CPU overhead and latency normally observed on NFS client in the OS. By using Oracle's native NFS client, you can use shared storage in a grid computing envi...

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).

I've been searching for an easy way to rename 38 mediawiki tables in MySQL using phpmyadmin, but I failed. You can rename databases but not tables. Copy yes, rename no. Weird. Anyway Pool of oblivion provided me with a lifesaver PHP script to rename multiple tables in MySQL database . The script lists a way replace a pattern with a new pattern. So you need to change the line that builds the new table name if you just want to prefix or postfix a table name with a set string (as I did). I'll include that code here, for your convenience: // replacement $new_table_name = str_replace ( $pattern, $new_pattern, $table_name); //prefix //$new_table_name = $new_pattern . $table_name; // postfix aka suffix //$new_table_name = $table_name . $new_pattern;

Drizzle : "The Drizzle project is building a database optimized for Cloud and Net applications. It is being designed for massive concurrency on modern multi-core architecture. The code is originally derived from MySQL."

Just discovered a fabulous resource for installing and configuring Oracle databases on various OS platforms: ORACLE-BASE . Oracle 9i, 10g, 11g but also RAC on Linux, Microsoft, VMware, Xen, etc. Recommended!

There is a quick FAQ on Oracle VM , explaining the basics about Oracle new virtualization technology. For instance, basic OracleVM is free as anyone can download the binaries . Support is available on a per-socket basis, not per-core. There are also ready-made templates with Oracle Linux (OEL) 4 update 5 for both 32 bit and 64 bit VMs. You will manage VMs with Oracle VM Manager. Oracle supports their own database 10g and 11g inside OracleVM, as well as OEM, Siebel, Peoplesoft and E-business Suite. Support for Oracle RAC clusters will be available somewhere in 2008. Testing is in progress, but timing issues in RAC are very strict, so it must be thoroughly tested. The requirements for OracleVM as similar to Xen's requirements: a new/recent CPU with VTX virtualization extensions is required for running VMs with Windows. If you only run Linux, you can use older hardware as well (and a kernel supporting paravirtualization).

While we ourselves did not have any performance issues of our Dell Poweredge 2950 using 2 Qlogic qle2460 HBAs to connect to an EMC DMX-3 SAN over Cisco FC switches, some of our colleagues at another subsidiary did have problems: only 50MB/s using the bonnie disk benchmark where we got 240MB/s... Clearly something was different. Investigations showed they were using LVM on the LUNs and created partitions within LVM. We did not use LVM but gave bare LUNs to OracleASM to manage and control. This led to believe that misalignment of the partition to physical disk cylinder may have caused additional overhead. Because LVM created an MBR on the disk's first set of cylinders, the first partition was created starting at cylinder 63. As this is not a power of 2, the disk subsystem experiences overhead as it translates the numbers back and forth. Research showed that both Oracle and EMC's best-practices both recommend to align your partitions on power of two cylinders! There is a best-pra...

" Oracle Validated Configurations are pre-tested, validated architectures with software, hardware, storage, and networking components with included documented best practices for deployment. Oracle and its strategic partners offer and recommend these configurations to enable end-users to deploy fully tested solutions to achieve standardization with high performance, scalability, and reliability while lowering infrastructure costs."

Slashdot | Oracle Contributes Linux Code, Expands Hardware Support : "Oracle expanded the list of hardware compatible with its Linux distribution and added support for Novell's YAST administration tool. They have now certified six hardware configurations able to run Oracle Enterprise Linux. Certified products include those made by Compellent Technologies, Dell, Egenera, EMC, Hewlett-Packard, Pillar Data Systems and Unisys. Oracle also said it is releasing an open-source version of the YAST Linux installation and configuration tool for Oracle Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Enterprise Linux under the General Public License."

Oracle Unveiled Oracle Database 11g last week.

We found an interesting issue on the same server (VM) when connection to terminal window in VNC and through ssh... When trying to list the limit for the number of open files, the terminal window in VNC showed the limit to be 1024. Very low indeed. Increasing the limit using ulimit failed. The same server but now through ssh (putty), showed the same parameter to be 131029. This confused us a bit until we realized that the VNC session was initialized by the VNC daemon and disconnecting from it, merely closed the session but didn't restart the main process. When we restarted VNC, a terminal showed a much better value for nolimit of 65536. However, that was still different from the value we got when using an ssh session. The difference was explained in this document: Increasing the number of open file descriptors . You must align a few more config files...

Today, Oracle announced a new TPC-C benchmark result on an HP ProLiant ML350 with the best ever price/performance. This result sets a world record in the price/performance category, which measures the cost per transaction of the configuration benchmarked. It demonstrates that Oracle Database not only provides customers with a highly performant and scalable data management solution, but can also deliver unparalleled cost savings with record-breaking performance on HP ProLiant systems, ideally suited to small and medium sized businesses (SMB). Achieving 100,926 transactions per minute with a price/performance of $.78/tpmC, Oracle Database 10g Release 2 Standard Edition One delivered 45 percent more performance at 14 percent less cost than its nearest competitor. To set this new TPC-C price performance record, Oracle Database 10g Release 2 Standard Edition One was run on an HP ProLiant ML350 server with one Intel Quad-Core Xeon 2.6 GHz processor and HP StorageWorks arrays. The operating s...

Had a discussion with an Oracle architect about increasing the shared memory limit of Linux for Oracle. Thought I'd blog this link to instructions on Tuning and Optimizing RHEL for Oracle 9i and 10g Databases . As OEL is very similar to RHEL 4, it should apply. As far as I know, you can increase the shared memory limit of Linux on a bare metal machine with 16GB RAM to a value higher than 4, 8 or even 12 GB. You only need the hugemem kernel if you have more than 16GB of RAM. And it will basically assign a separate chunk of 4GB to kernel space and the rest to user spaces...

It seems Puschitz has been a valuable resource for everyone in Installing Oracle 10g R1,R2 on RHEL 4, 3 and 2.1 . I am including him here.

I have been searching here and there for some sample kickstart files to get started on creating an Automated Installation of Oracle Database 10g and Red Hat Enterprise Linux , but all I can find are things I already know. I know Oracle Enterprise Linux (OEL) creates a sample kickstart of the configuration you've just completed in the root account of the server you['ve just installed. I know I can add pre and post-install scripts in that kickstart file. I know Red Hat has documentation on kickstart and there are some clever things I can do there. I know there is an oracle-validated RPM out now which will test my server for required packages and fetch them if needed. I know the Oracle installation guides lists which packages I need and which tweaks I must make after installation of Linux... What I am looking for is a kickstart that: - installs the minimum required packages for succesful installation and operation of Oracle (10g) - tweaks the kernel and system accordingly after in...

Oracle now has an RPM which will update or install all required libraries for the RDBMS for you. libstdc++, glibc-headers, gcc, sysstat, and so on. All in one easy RPM .

Oracle's licensing terms have recently changed. The Standard Edition is now way, waaay , cheaper to deploy than the Enterprise Edition. Of course, you'll have to do without certain enterprise-level features"." But the question is: do you really need and/or use them? Many people think they need the enterprise features, but their actual application doesn't use them. Perhaps the development guys weren't familiar with it or didn't know about them and so on. So it makes sense to check and make sure. In the meam time, check out a comparison of Oracle Standard and Enterprise Edition 's features...