I have retired

I have now retired from work as of June 2021 and will no longer be updating this site.

I had been doing a different role in the 18 months prior to retirement and therefore hardly blogged at all.

Thanks for all of the support and views over the years.

John

Response to Make database simpler

I read an interesting and thought provoking blog this morning Make Oracle database simple again 

Much of is is common sense and is really best practise – naming conventions, using scripts, standard setup etc.

However there were a few ideas I thought were worth commenting on

• Avoid virtualization: without talking about the license, virtualization is for sure underlying complexity

The obvious reason to avoid virtualisation is to keep out of the nightmare of managing licenses in such an environment. However Jerome Dubar specifically states that is not the reason.  The problem is that he does not give a strong justification as to why not virtualise. If managed well it can be very cost effective.

• Don’t use ASM: because ext4 is fine and SSDs now bring you maximum performance even on a classic filesystem. ASM will always be linked to Grid Infrastructure making dependencies between the DB Homes and that Grid stack, making patching much more complex

That is an interesting comment and I think that again it could be expanded. Certainly removing the Grid stack would remove complexity but I am not sure that SSD is appropriate for everyone or even removing SAN as mentioned earlier in the article.

• Don’t use RAC

An absolute no-brainer. Enough said.

 

Overall it is a good article but I do think it is targeted at SME sites and not larger organisations.

 

 

 

 

Oracle executives being sued by the St Louis Fireman’s retirement fund

In May 2017 the St Louis Firemans pension fund started a case against Larry Ellison and other executives over the purchase of Netscape.

They allege that Oracle paid an over-inflated price for Netsuite and the point of contention is that Larry Ellison and trusted related to his family members were the majority shareholders in Netscape.

The House of Brick – which is a newsletter well worth subscribing to  – have documented the case in great detail and if interested this is the blog to read

It makes very interesting reading and I am following the case with interest

 

A change of career after 29 years working with Oracle databases

I have worked with Oracle since the early 90’s. I did work on V6 but I do not remember that much about it. V7.3 was were I had a big learning curve. This book was the mainstay of my life at that time.

In recent years I have diversified into managing teams across a number of areas including SQLServer, Middleware (ODI, SOA, JMS, Weblogic), System Management and others. I have been quite involved in both Oracle and Microsoft licensing which leads me neatly onto my new role.

I have now moved to being the Software Asset Manager for my company and I am also taking the opportunity to move to a 3 day week. For someone who started work at 16 and has never had any time out to suddenly have 2 days a week free is quite momentous.

I am really enthused by the new opportunity and will definitely involve myself as deeply as possible in trying to understand the nuances of managing software across a large organisation.

One of the nicer aspects is that I will no longer be on-call or expected to be contactable in the event of production issues. I have probably been on call for at least 20 of the 29 years – possibly more

I have not updated this blog that much in the last 6 months or so and I think new posts will be infrequent going forward but I will still be working with the DBA team so if I hear of any interesting activities I will post them up.

 

Oracle car parking

I have been involved over the years with both Microsoft SQL Server licensing and Oracle licensing management and the following image made me chuckle.

Produced by House of Brick who have a lot of interesting content about license management

 

 

 

 

Oracle Cloud Total Cost of ownership Calculator – rather confusing

I was interested enough to try out the Oracle  TCO calculator that I was sent an email about. I can honestly say it has rather confused me in what it is comparing and how the results are calculated.

I will share a few screen shots and I will take you through my thoughts

I put a dummy company name in and my country – bizarrely it does not auto select the currency.

I then hit enter and waited and waited as I had to with every screenshot I show. I must admit that  trying this a few times performance was sometimes acceptable but when it was slow it was very slow. I then get the fantastic news that moving to the Cloud could save me £403K over 3 years. I had my credit card out and was ready to sign-up.

The basics of my comparison were shown assuming that I had was using 12Tb of storage and 24 cores. I then looked at the detailed savings

Firstly we have gone from using 12Tb storage to only 4Tb, although interestingly the 4Tb in the Cloud costs not far short of the on-premise 12Tb. We have also reduced from 24 cores to only 8 cores. Perhaps Oracle could just come on-site and sprinkle the magic dust that shrinks data and reduces processing requirements and we wouldn’t need to move to the Cloud.

Each of the lines on the diagram can be viewed in more detail and adjustments made. The network component shows that there is zero cost for running in the Cloud but I assume that data will have to be loaded into the database via some form of network load.

Overall as a calculator it is well laid out but I found the like for like comparisons to be rather not like for like.

 

The link for anyone to try it is https://valuenavigator.oracle.com/benefitcalculator

 

12C Grid – GENO process causes high CPU usage

This is an interesting bug which has affected a number of our databases  – perhaps because we are not patched to the latest levels in every case.

The MoS note is this one – Patch 20373598: GEN0 TIMEOUT ACTION ALWAYS TRY TO INITIALIZE OCR CONTENT    p20373598_121022_Linux-x86-64

OR

fixed in Bug 22291127  12.1.0.2.160419 (Apr 2016) Database Patch Set Update (DB PSU)

Here is view of top showing how a server looks when it is affected, and a list of servers running 12c grid home below the Apr 2016 PSU patch level.

If the server has loads of cores assigned the overall effect will be small as seen here, CPU shows as 2.8% used

Tasks: 618 total,   3 running, 614 sleeping,   0 stopped,   1 zombie
Cpu(s):  2.8%us,  0.2%sy,  0.0%ni, 96.8%id,  0.2%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st
Mem:  198475784k total, 80283568k used, 118192216k free,  4491100k buffers
Swap: 41680876k total,        0k used, 41680876k free, 56391976k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
44361 oracle    20   0 4225m 2.8g  18m R 99.6  1.5 753924:28 asm_gen0_+ASM
24347 root      20   0  448m 5536 1348 S  4.9  0.0   7480:21 /usr/sbin/collectd -C /etc/collectd.conf -f
68317 oracle    20   0 50.3g 182m 166m S  3.3  0.1   3052:05 ora_pr00_OEMPRD2A
66023 oracle    -2   0 50.3g  19m  17m S  2.3  0.0   1113:44 ora_vktm_OEMPRD2A
34357 oracle    -2   0 1405m  17m  15m S  2.0  0.0  17424:26 asm_vktm_+ASM
67399 oracle    20   0 50.4g  99m  38m S  2.0  0.1   1885:56 oracleOEMPRD2A (LOCAL=NO)

This SQL is a useful way to identify which servers require patching assuming you are using OEM

select
host_name,
home_name,
home_location
patch_id,
install_timestamp,
description</span>
from sysman."MGMT$SOFTWARE_ONEOFF_PATCHES"
where
host_name not in (
select host_name 
from sysman."MGMT$SOFTWARE_ONEOFF_PATCHES"
where patch_id in ('22291127','20373598'))
and home_location like '%12%grid'
and description like '%Database Patch Set Update%'
order by 1,4
;

Creating a database link using a tnsnames entry

I have had this in my draft posts for a couple of weeks and I refrained from publishing because it was too simple.

However the main purpose of this post is to help others save time by providing useful information. The secondary purpose of to remind myself how I overcame whatever problem is being covered.

A user did not have permissions to edit the tnsnames.ora file on a server so I created the database link for him to use the connect description, thereby circumventing the need for an update to the tnsnames.ora file.

I prefer database links to be named to show the database they connect to, however in this case they wanted a standard name which is used in code and can be used across all the environments.

 create database link ebsdev connect to remote_username  identified by password using

‘EBSDEV =
(DESCRIPTION =
(ADDRESS = (PROTOCOL = TCP)(HOST = servername)(PORT = 1531))
(CONNECT_DATA =
(SERVER = DEDICATED)
(SERVICE_NAME = EBSDEV)
)
)’;

select ‘x’ from dual@ebsdev;

ORA-01450: maximum key length (3800) exceeded

This is an oddity as essentially I have an index on a table but I cannot rebuild it because it suggests the block size should be bigger than 8K – however both the database and tablespace block size are 16K already.

The maximum allowed index key length depends on your block size. So the minimum allowed size reported in ORA-01450 varies, depending on which block size your index is using:

ORA-01450 maximum key length (758) exceeded -> (2K Block)

ORA-01450 maximum key length (1578) exceeded -> (4K block)

ORA-01450 maximum key length (3218) exceeded -> (8K Block)

ORA-01450 maximum key length (6498) exceeded -> (16K Block)
See MOSC Note 136158.1 and MOSC Note 236329.1 for more details on the ORA-01450 error and key length.

Even more odd was that I could drop the index and recreate it with no issues and yet rebuild failed every time, even after the recreate. Studying the table and data there did not seem to be a value that was much bigger than the others and certainly nothing that would cause one or more rows to be much larger than the others.

How to add a metric extension and use a ‘control’ table to test results

I have previously blogged about creating a User Defined Metric (UDM) before  (7 years ago!)  but the method I am using today demonstrates how you can test out the alert using specific data.

The aim was to see if integration data is flowing through a table.  If there is a backlog we want to know about it.

Simon Ryan, a colleague did all the preparatory work and created all the 18 !! screen shots which I had to copy and paste into this entry

select * from sm7.EVENTOUTM1; -- Transient table so data not usually present.

The data is processed quickly but occasionally you can see a handful of rows for a few seconds.

select DESCRIPTOR ,
EVTYPE ,
TO_CHAR(EVTIME, 'DD-MON-YYYY HH24:MI:SS') ,
EVSYSSEQ ,
EVUSRSEQ from sm7.EVENTOUTM1;

DESCRIPTOR EVTYPE EVTIME EVSYSSEQ EVUSRSEQ
 (BLOB) email 08-NOV-2017 11:40:01 0000000005254328

A typical query for the ME would be very simple:

select count(*) from sm7.EVENTOUTM1;

However, we are going to plugin a ‘control’ table in order for us to test the alert by artificially adjusting the results.