I got to the airport 2 hours before the flight as usual, but I’ve been here 3 hours already and I’ve still not boarded the plane. I have a long wait at Dubai, so this delay shouldn’t affect my connection. It’s 7 hours from Birmingham to Dubai, then 18 hours (including a fuel stop in Melbourne) to Auckland. I have a feeling I’ll look like “Dawn of the Dead” when my friend picks me up from Auckland Airport. I’ve not even started yet and I’m already kinda nervous. The thought of 18 hours on a plane is really getting to me. I only hope I can get some sleep on this trip.

It’s about 5 minutes to boarding now so I need to go through my last minute panic session before getting on the plane.

If there is ever another blog entry it means I made it. If not, it was nice knowing you all…

Cheers

Tim…

It’s worth knowing about though.

Cheers

Tim…

Here’s the link I’ve always used for this profile. It’s been on my blog, website and forum for years and worked just fine when I’ve clicked the links in the past.

http://apex.oracle.com/pls/otn/f?p=19297:4:3351497719856466::NO:4:P4_ID:43

If you click that link you’ll see it’s now Steven Feuerstein.

I did a new search on my profile and the URL is now this.

http://apex.oracle.com/pls/otn/f?p=19297:4:3829173635384582::NO:4:P4_ID:41

The key component is the two digit number at the end. Seems I used to be 43, but now I’m 41. Freaky.

I wonder how long that has been happening.

Cheers

Tim…

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=Oracle+11gR2

As a homage to lmgtfy.com I’ve created a documentation search.

http://www.oracle-base.com/search/

If you specify your search it gives you a URL you can pass to others. When they use the URL it shows them what they could have done rather than bug you.

http://www.oracle-base.com/search/?txt=automatic+storage+manager

Update: It now uses TinyURL, like this http://tinyurl.com/yamsmc2

It’s a little basic to look at, but it made me laugh.

Cheers

Tim…

• Oracle Database 11g Release 2 Data Guard Setup using Oracle Grid Control

Cheers

Tim…

I thought the reference to the quality of Red Hat’s support was quite comical. I’ve always found their support to be terrible. To be more specific, you raise a service request and never get a response. If that is quality support I obviously have very different standards to the CIOs surveyed.

Cheers

Tim…

A few years ago I was doing a lot of Linux installations and I got sick of running around with CDs, so started doing network installations to save time. I’ve been doing loads of installs on VMs at home recently, so I started doing PXE Network Installations, which saved me even more time. As a result of the article I wrote about that, Frits Hoogland pointed me in the direction of Cobbler, which makes PXE installations real easy (once you get to grips with it). I’m not a sysadmin, so why do I care? Even when I’m installing and running a handful of VMs at home I can see productivity gains by using some of these tools. Imagine the impact in a data-center!

So back to Grid Control. Does anyone remember the days when you kept a “tail -f” on your alert log? At one site I used to have a CDE workspace on an X station just running tails. Then the number of instances got too big, so I used to scan through the alert logs each day to look for issues. The next step was to use shell scripts to check for errors and mail me. This was a pain at one site where I was using Solaris, HP-UX and Windows, which meant I needed three solutions. Then the Oracle 9i Enterprise Manager with the Management Server came into my life. All of a sudden it could manage my alert logs and I could assume everything was fine ( ) unless I got a notification email. This feature alone sold me on the 9i management server.

Back then, being a DBA and admitting using Enterprise Manager was a little like announcing to the world you were into cross dressing. Time has moved on, the product name has changed and so has its functionality, but essentially it’s still doing the same thing, which is reducing the effort needed to manage databases (and other things). The difference is that rather than managing 40 instances, teams are now managing thousands of instances.

Of course, none of this is new. I guess it’s just been brought into focus by a few things that have happened to me recently, like the PXE/Cobbler thing, the recent demise of my Grid Control VM at home and the constant talk of cloud computing and SaaS etc.

Specialists and performance consultants have the time to obsess over minute detail. The day-to-day DBAs and sysadmins have to churn through work at a pace, with reliable and reproducible results. Failing to embrace tools, whatever they are, to aid this is career suicide.

Cheers

Tim…

• Oracle 10g Release 5 Grid Control Installation On Oracle Enterprise Linux (OEL 4.8 64-bit)
• Oracle 10g Release 5 Grid Control Agent Installation On Linux

I used OEL 4.8 as it is the highest supported OS version. I went with the standard new database installation as I can’t really be bothered messing about with an 11g database as the repository. I think of Grid Control in the same way I think of Oracle Apps. They are shrink-wrapped products and I try to keep them as basic as possible. Anything that can present a problem, usually will.

I must admit to liking Grid Control as a product, but the installation and configuration is truely horrible. At every step of the way you are waiting for the next disaster. There are just too many working parts and it eats resources like nobodies business. Am I the only person who thinks the infrastructure is overly complicated for the job it is actually doing? I really hope the 11g version (if it is ever released) will be neater.

Cheers

Tim…

• Oracle Database File System (DBFS) PL/SQL APIs

There’s a lot in there, so this is just skimming the surface.

Cheers

Tim…

• Oracle Database File System (DBFS) in Oracle Database 11g Release 2

For the most part it is extremely simple. If you are working on Linux then it’s a really neat solution. On any other platform you are limited to using the dbfs_client tool, which is currently lacking a lot of functionality. Even so, it’s a good first step.

I am having a bit of trouble with the “/etc/fstab” mounting. I’ve included it in the article, with a warning that it isn’t working for me. If anyone has got it to work I would really appreciate some input on what I’ve got wrong. The documentation is a little sparse on this subject even with some digging around it’s proving difficult.

I’ll probably be witing another article on a different aspect of DBFS soon.

Cheers

Tim…