BGOUG Spring 2013 : Day 1 (part 1)…

Last night we all got together to eat some food and chat. Julian Dontcheff is practically a savant where Bulgarian Poetry, World Cup match results and random Oracle facts are concerned. Although Christian Antognini was pretty impressive on the random Oracle facts too. :)

I didn’t have any presentations today, so I got to sit and watch. :) I’ve done loads of typing, mostly of syntax for 12c features, but it’s not really stuff that is worth posting, because I have no way to validate it out, so I’m just going to keep it as a reminder for when I get hold of 12c and can try it out.

The sessions I went to included:

  • Joze Senegacnik : Is my SQL Statement Using Exadata Features
  • Christian Antognini : SQL New Features in the latest generation of Oracle Database
  • Julian Dontcheff : Upgrading to the latest generation of database technology
  • Christian Antognini : How the Query Optimizer Learns from its Mistakes
  • Clive King : Solaris 11u1 performance and stability : features and frameworks
  • Tom Kyte : Tom’s Top 12 Things about the Latest Generation of Database Technology

There was a lot of material I had seen at OOW2012 and UKOUG2012, but also a lot I had not, so I’m glad I went to them. The smaller setting also made it easier to ask questions, which can be quite daunting at the big events. :)

Tom gave me a couple of tips that have gone straight into one of my talks for tomorrow. I’m gonna have to name check him for it, or I’ll feel like I’m passing it off as my own. :)

I said this after OOW2013 and I’m sure I will say it again, but the number of changes in 12c is pretty daunting. I guess the fact it’s been about a 3 year wait, rather than the normal 18 months adds to that. In many cases (but not all) it’s not the scope of the individual changes that are the issue, but the sheer volume of them. I think people are going to be blogging for a long time before they’ve got through them. It will be interesting to see what gets selected for inclusion in the OCP DBA upgrade exam. :)

I’m off to dinner now. I will try to get some photos and post them in “Day 1 (part 2)@ tomorrow. :)

Cheers

Tim…


BGOUG Spring 2013 : Day 1 (part 1)… was first posted on May 17, 2013 at 6:41 pm.
©2012 "The ORACLE-BASE Blog". Use of this feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this article in your feed reader, then the site is guilty of copyright infringement.

Win a Copy of the New Oracle Multimedia Book!

My good friend, Marcelle Kratochvil, is the Oracle ACE Director for (as she put it to me) "all data/any data." She's been working with Oracle since V4 and specializes in Oracle Multimedia. She has been a beta tester for this product since Oracle8i and runs a SIG on multimedia and unstructured data. Check out her blog at: http://eternal-donut.blogspot.com.au.

Marcelle is a great speaker and able to communicate clearly how to work with complex data in Oracle. I first met and worked with Marcelle when she flew up from Australia to speak at my first Oracle PL/SQL Programming conference in November 2005). And now she's written her first book!
Managing Multimedia and Unstructured Data in the Oracle Database has just been released by PackT and covers everything a person will need to know to get them working in multimedia. And Marcelle should know; as CTO of Piction, she works with customers all around the world including major museums and universities. She performs database administration on multi-terabyte Unix and Windows environments as well as doing serious development work with PL/SQL. She has designed and built a multimedia search engine, e-commerce system, security system, reporting engine, shipping system and her own XML parser and language specifically to handle the workflow needs of managing multimedia.

The book, according to Marcelle, provides an introduction to multimedia, how to search on it, how to manage it and how integrate it into your current environment. With lots of PL/SQL examples and schema setup scripts, Marcelle promises that this book will get you loading and using unstructured data in no time at all.

Best of all (to me), Marcelle is a strong advocate of PL/SQL and recommends it for anyone to use for building web based applications and for working with multimedia. My kind of Oracle technologist. J

To encourage us to check out her book, Marcelle is offering a chance to win a copy. All you have to do is choose from the most relevant section below, and send your answer to the question to Marcelle at marcelle@xor.com.au. Marcelle tells me that "The best, most creative and accurate answer will win a copy of the book." You must submit your answer by 31 May, 2013.

1. Open Category (open to everyone): Name three key advantages for storing multimedia in a database.

2. Museum/Gallery/Print Media (open to anyone in these industries): What is the biggest issue you face when digitizing and managing any multimedia in your organization?

3. Oracle (open to any Oracle employee):  Name five Oracle products that are tightly integrated with Securefiles and Oracle Multimedia.

 4. Oracle ACE Program (open to any Oracle ACE or ACE Director):  Which Oracle development tool or product is best designed for working with unstructured data (including multimedia)?

UKOUG

The call for papers is open for Tech 13 – the “server-side” conference of the UKOUG.

The conference was getting so big that we’ve split Apps from Server Tech and will be running the two conferences separately this year. The Server Tech conference will be in Manchester from 2nd to 4th Dec.

The closing date for submissions is Friday 31st May (only 2 weeks !) and confirmation of acceptance given by August.

There is a slightly shorter route to submission (if you don’t want to watch the video on “Why to speak”).

 

 

 


Log Buffer #320, A Carnival of the Vanities for DBAs

The red carpet has been laid down at this Log Buffer Edition, and you can witness and cheer the cat-walking blog posts from Oracle, SQL Server and MySQL. Every one of them is chic, elegant, sensual in its own right. Enjoy.
Oracle:

Create colored heat maps in SQL*Plus with Kyle Hailey.

Here’s a quick and dirty script to create a procedure (in the SYS schema – so be careful) to check the Hakan Factor for an object.

Connor has a good post about default null for collection parameter.

This is yet another blogpost on Oracle’s direct path read feature which was introduced for non-parallel query processes in Oracle version 11.

Owen Allen has seen some questions about provisioning Oracle Solaris 11. They boil down to this.

SQL Server:

Shashank Srivastava tells us as how to Change the SQL Server Instance Name after Renaming the Windows Host.

Daniel Calbimonte shares as how to synchronize two SSAS Servers.

Data Architecture underpins just about everything we do in IT.  Without a clear understanding of how data is structured, there is no reliable way to derive meaning from it.

Orlando Colamatteo is login-less in Seattle.

Lets get started testing database with tSQLt with Robert Sheldon.

MySQL:

After a lot of fuzz, Anders Karlsson is now releasing MyQuery version 3.5.1.

Nothing like reestablishing a tradition and Dave Stokes is doing just that for MySQL.

Mare Alff is spreading the word about the performance schema.

Slava Akhmechet talks about secondary indexes, batched inserts performance improvements, soft durability mode.

It is a central part of the MySQL philosophy to try and help you as much as you can. There are many occasions when it could tell you that what you are asking for is utterly stupid or give you a bad execution plan because “you asked for it”.

How to collect cluster Information using TSQL

How to collect cluster information using TSQL

Sometime back I was involved in a project which was to collect information for the servers we are supporting – creating inventory of servers. Logging into each server and collecting information is bit tedious when you have hundreds of server in your environment.  I have spent sometime and created a script that does this work for me, however, I still need to connect to the server – but using SSMS/Query Window and execute the script. And then the script will provide me the details I needed.

This inventory should have details like below for cluster and stand alone instances:

Server Name

OS Name

OS Edition

OS Patch Level

SQL Server IP

Is Clustered

Node1_Name

Node1_IP

Node2_Name

Node2_IP

SQL Server Edition

SQL Server Patch Level

Server Time Zone

SQL Server Version

SQL Server Platform

Processor Core

Physical Memory

Service Account Name

Domain

Looks good ?  Below is the version 1 of this script.


/*
IP address portion using : http://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Topic150196-8-1.aspx
REMOVE sp_configure parameters if you are executing this script on SQL Server 2000

Created By : Hemantgiri S. Goswami | http://www.sql-server-citation.com
Date : 24th March 2013
Version : 1.0

Tested ON:
Windows Server: 2003, 2008, 2008 R2
SQL Server:2000, 2005, 2008, 2008 R2, 2012

*/
sp_configure 'show advanced options',1
RECONFIGURE WITH OVERRIDE
GO
sp_configure 'xp_cmdshell',1
RECONFIGURE WITH OVERRIDE
GO
DECLARE @TimeZone NVARCHAR(100)
 ,@ProductVersion SYSNAME
 ,@PlatForm SYSNAME
 ,@Windows_Version SYSNAME
 ,@Processors SYSNAME
 ,@PhysicalMemory SYSNAME
 ,@ServiceAccount SYSNAME
 ,@IPAddress SYSNAME
 ,@DOMAIN SYSNAME
 ,@MachineType SYSNAME
 ,@SQLServerIP VARCHAR(255)
 ,@CMD VARCHAR(100)
 ,@Node1 VARCHAR(100)
 ,@Node2 VARCHAR(100)
 ,@Node1IP VARCHAR(100)
 ,@Node2IP VARCHAR(100)
 ,@OSEdition VARCHAR(100)
 ,@OSVersion VARCHAR(100)
 ,@OSName VARCHAR(100)
 ,@OSPatchLevel VARCHAR(100)

CREATE TABLE #TempTable
 (
 [Index] VARCHAR(2000),
 [Name] VARCHAR(2000),
 [Internal_Value] VARCHAR(2000),
 [Character_Value] VARCHAR(2000)
 ) ;

INSERT INTO #TempTable
EXEC xp_msver;

-- Replace @Value_Name to N'TimeZoneKeyName' when running on Windows 2008
EXEC master.dbo.xp_regread
 @rootkey = N'HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE',
 @key = N'SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\TimeZoneInformation',
 @value_name = N'StandardName',
 @value = @TimeZone output

EXEC master.dbo.xp_regread
 @rootkey = N'HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE',
 @key = N'SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\MSSQLServer',
 @value_name = N'ObjectName',
 @value = @ServiceAccount output

EXEC master.dbo.xp_regread
 @rootkey = N'HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE',
 @key = N'SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\ProductOptions',
 @value_name = N'ProductType',
 @value = @MachineType output

EXEC master.dbo.xp_regread
 @rootkey = N'HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE',
 @key = N'SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters',
 @value_name = N'Domain',
 @value = @DOMAIN output

EXEC master.dbo.xp_regread
 @rootkey = N'HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE',
 @key = N'CLUSTER\NODES\1',
 @value_name = N'NodeName',
 @value = @Node1 output

EXEC master.dbo.xp_regread
 @rootkey = N'HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE',
 @key = N'CLUSTER\NODES\2',
 @value_name = N'NodeName',
 @value = @Node2 output

EXEC master.dbo.xp_regread
 @rootkey = N'HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE',
 @key = N'SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion',
 @value_name = N'ProductName',
 @value = @OSName output

create table #OSEdition (VALUe varchar(255),OSEdition varchar(255), data varchar(100))
insert into #OSEdition
EXEC master.dbo.xp_regread
 @rootkey = N'HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE',
 @key = N'SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\ProductOptions',
 @value_name = N'ProductSuite'
SET @OSEdition = (SELECT TOP 1 OSedition FROM #OsEdition)

EXEC master.dbo.xp_regread
 @rootkey = N'HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE',
 @key = N'SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion',
 @value_name = N'CSDVersion',
 @value = @OSPatchLevel output

set @cmd = 'ping ' + @Node1
create table #Node1IP (grabfield varchar(255))
insert into #Node1IP exec master.dbo.xp_cmdshell @cmd
set @cmd = 'ping ' + @Node2
create table #Node2IP (grabfield varchar(255))
insert into #Node2IP exec master.dbo.xp_cmdshell @cmd

set @cmd = 'ping ' + @@servername
create table #SQLServerIP (grabfield varchar(255))
insert into #SQLServerIP exec master.dbo.xp_cmdshell @cmd

SET @SQLServerIP=(
 SELECT substring(grabfield, charindex('[',grabfield)+1, charindex(']',grabfield)-charindex('[',grabfield)-1)
 from #SQLServerIP where left(grabfield,7) = 'Pinging'
 )
SET @Node1IP =(
 SELECT substring(grabfield, charindex('[',grabfield)+1, charindex(']',grabfield)-charindex('[',grabfield)-1)
 from #Node1IP where left(grabfield,7) = 'Pinging'
 )

SET @Node2IP =(
 SELECT substring(grabfield, charindex('[',grabfield)+1, charindex(']',grabfield)-charindex('[',grabfield)-1)
 from #Node2IP where left(grabfield,7) = 'Pinging'
 )

SET @ProductVersion = (SELECT Character_Value from #TempTable where [INDEX]=2)
SET @Platform = (SELECT Character_Value from #TempTable where [INDEX]=4)
SET @Windows_Version= (SELECT Character_Value from #TempTable where [INDEX]=15)
SET @Processors = (SELECT Character_Value from #TempTable where [INDEX]=16)
SET @PhysicalMemory = (SELECT Character_Value from #TempTable where [INDEX]=19)
SELECT
 ServerName = @@SERVERNAME
 ,OSName = @OSName
 ,OSEdition = @OSEdition
 ,OSPatchLevel = @OSPatchLevel
 ,SQLServerIP = @SQLServerIP
 ,IsClustered = SERVERPROPERTY('IsClustered')
 ,Node1_Name = @Node1
 ,Node1_IP = @Node1IP
 ,Node2_Name = @Node2
 ,Node2_IP = @Node2IP
 ,SQLServerEdition = SERVERPROPERTY('Edition')
 ,SQLServerLevel = SERVERPROPERTY('ProductLevel')
 ,ServerTimeZone = @TimeZone
 ,SQLServerVersion = @ProductVersion
 ,SQLServerPlatform = @PlatForm
 ,ProcessorCore = @Processors
 ,PhysicalMemory = @PhysicalMemory
 ,ServiceAccountName = @ServiceAccount
 ,WKS_Server = @MachineType
 ,Domain = @DOMAIN

GO
DROP TABLE #Node1IP
DROP TABLE #NODE2IP
DROP TABLE #SQLServerIP
DROP TABLE #TempTable
DROP TABLE #OSEdition
GO
sp_configure 'xp_cmdshell',0
RECONFIGURE WITH OVERRIDE
GO
sp_configure 'show advanced options',0
RECONFIGURE WITH OVERRIDE
GO


Please do post back your feed back for this script, I will try my best to update and post back new version for this script.

- Hemantgiri S. Goswami (Cross posting from http://www.sql-server-citation.com/)

photo credit: Skimaniac via photopin cc

Removing a Domain in WebLogic

First of all, shutdown your domain (in this example, my domain is called ‘oldDomain’ and has one Managed Server): export MW_HOME=/u01/app/oracle/middleware export WLS_HOME=$MW_HOME/wls_10.3.6 export DOMAIN_NAME=oldDomain export DOMAIN_HOME=$MW_HOME/user_projects/domains/$DOMAIN_NAME $DOMAIN_HOME/bin/stopWebLogic.sh $DOMAIN_HOME/bin/stopManagedWebLogic.sh ManagedServer_1 Remove the domain entry from the Node Manager file: vi $WLS_HOME/common/nodemanager/nodemanager.domains …remove this line: oldDomain=/u01/app/oracle/middleware/user_projects/domains/oldDomain Remove the domain registry entry relevant to your domain: vi $MW_HOME/domain-registry.xml

Read More...

Performance Monitoring

Updated – just a quick reminder for next week; I’ll be doing a short webinar next Wednesday comparing the performance monitoring tools Oracle and SQL server provide.

I think I may have broken my record with 6 countries in 6 weeks – so I haven’t been very thorough at updating my blog recently. Just time, before I head off to Heathrow once again, to do a quick advert for the next redgate webinar that I’m doing with Grant Fritchey. This time comparing built-in performance monitoring tools. Details and Registrations at this URL.

I’ll see if I can catch up with a couple of answers while I’m in the airport lounge – but no promises, since the simple act of walking into an airport makes me  feel like falling asleep.


Webinars

Reminder:

The webinars on “Smarter Statistics in 11g” are on tomorrow (Friday) at 2:00 pm and 6:00 pm. There’s a waiting list for the 6:00 pm event, so if you’ve signed up but can’t make it please delete your registration. (The event will be repeated on 10th June).  If you want to vote a better time for me to do short webinars there’s a poll at the end of the article.

 

 

I’m about to make a serious move into online webinars, and as a warm-up exercise I’ll be doing a couple of one-hour free events on Friday 17th May.

I’ll be talking through a Powerpoint presentation called “Smarter Statistics in 11g” twice, once at 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm BST, and again at 6:00 pm BST  (12:00 pm - 1:00 pm CDT) . Broadly speaking the first one is for the benefit people from the UK and eastwards, and the second is for the benefit of people from the US and westwards. This is just a trial run, of course, and if it works well I will be doing more of the same, perhaps three times per day to spread across more time zones.

John Goodhue (my O1 sponsor for the USA) is arranging all the mechanical details, and I’ll post links for registration when they become available – we’ll be using GoToWebinar as the supply mechanism, and we’ll be limiting access to 100 people (so if you do register and can’t attend, please remove yourself from the list; if you don’t manage to register for either event, you’ll get another chance later as I plan to repeat each event a few times.)

I’ll also be doing a full day paid event on 23rd May which will be my “Indexing Strategies” tutorial. This first full day event will be timed to suit the American audience – although anyone can register, of course – but we plan to have further events suited to other time zones. The URL for registration is now available – with an option to purchase a 30-day window to the recording of my “Oracle Mechanisms” presentation in Minneapolis.


BGOUG Spring 2013 : Day -1

It’s stupid o’clock in the morning and I’m waiting for my taxi to arrive. Considering how close Bulgaria is, it takes me a very long time to get there.

I am a mix of excited and nervous. This is my first conference this year, so all the usual insecurities are in full effect, from fear of flying to the constant nagging thoughts that perhaps I don’t know anything about Oracle and maybe I shouldn’t be on stage acting like I do. :)

I’m sure it will go OK and it will be nice to meet up with the gang again.

Cheers

Tim…


BGOUG Spring 2013 : Day -1 was first posted on May 16, 2013 at 4:55 am.
©2012 "The ORACLE-BASE Blog". Use of this feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this article in your feed reader, then the site is guilty of copyright infringement.

Our Glass Overlords Have Arrived

We ran into Floyd (@fteter) last night. His cyborg transformation is complete.

IMG_20130514_191405

Note the serious demeanor, with Glass power comes great responsibility, or something.

Backstory, Anthony (@anthonyslai) finally got his Explorer Series Glass unit on Sunday. Funny story, its display had a few dead pixels, three actually. He counted. Google replaced the unit, so all’s well.

Anyway, Anthony has generously been allowing people to test-drive his Glasses, and boy, do they get attention. People wherever we go are curious. Noel (@noelportugal) and I each took a turn, and despite the bare feature set, they’re pretty amazing.

IMG_20130513_094004

Anthony says he’s been wearing them non-stop since Sunday, and that he can’t live without them. Pretty strong endorsement. I know he’s been using them heavily because texts from him have the latest in gadgety signatures appended “Sent through Glass.”

Look for a post from him on his adventures soon. He and Noel are attending Google I/O this week, and I’m sure there will be lots of Glass news.

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