Gokhan Atil's Oracle Blog

Critical Analysis Meets Exadata

2012-04-16T10:31:00.000+03:00

Kevin Closson shared a presentation video titled "Critical Analysis meets Exadata" on Friday. It has 2 parts and takes about 45 minutes in total. As you may know, Kevin Closson is an Exadata guru, and in his presentation, he shows possible performance bottlenecks caused by the asymmetrical architecture of Exadata.

Here are the videos (please watch them in full-screen):

Part 1:

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How to Install Oracle Ops Center 12c (Step by Step Guide)

2012-04-11T16:58:00.000+03:00

Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center 12c is a comprehensive solution to manage all Oracle systems deployed in traditional, virtualized and cloud environments. Ops Center 12c introduces unique capabilities for establishing, managing, and supporting Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) clouds, and it's a key component to help Oracle customers adopt cloud computing faster and with less effort and risk.

I'll try to show how to install Enterprise Manager Ops Center 12c on Oracle Linux 5.5 (64bit). My previous installation guide for Oracle Linux 5.6 can help you to install 5.5 Linux (or you can just install Ops Center on Oracle Linux 5.6): How to Install Oracle Linux 5.6

INSTALLATION OF OCDOCTOR

OCDoctor is an utility to assist users in various stages of the Ops Center deployment. It is updated on a regular basis to help you identify and resolve known issues or suggest ways to improve performance.

You can download it from: https://updates.oracle.com/OCDoctor/OCDoctor-latest.zip

If you have already OCDoctor (not downloaded the latest version from internet), make sure that it updates itself:

./OCDoctor.sh --update

After updating OCDoctor, run it to check prerequisites:

unzip OCDoctor-latest.zip
cd OCDoctor
./OCDoctor.sh --ec-prereq

Manage Your Existing Data Guards with Enterprise Manager Cloud Control

2012-04-10T16:27:00.001+03:00

It's very easy to build a Data Guard using Enterprise Manager Cloud Control (I'll surely blog about it soon) and it's also possible to manage your existing Data Guards with Enterprise Manager Cloud Control. Enterprise Manager will automatically detect Data Guard configuration of the target databases but if you need to administer your Data Guard with Enterprise Manager, your database should be configured by Data Guard broker. One of the good thing is, Enterprise Manager Cloud Control also help you to set up Data Guard broker for existing Data Guards with a few clicks.

First of all, you should deploy Enterprise Manager agents to the both primary and standby servers. Then you should add these databases (including standby database) to Enterprise Manager. While adding standby database, Enterprise Manager will complain that it will not be able to monitor it because standby database is read-only (11g Active Data Guard) or in mounted mode. Ignore the warning and add the standby database without monitoring. If you do not have a DNS in your network to resolve host names, make sure that you add hostnames and IP address to /etc/hosts file of primary and standby servers. So you should be able to resolve the hostname of standby server on primary server, and resolve the hostname of standby server on primary server.

If it is not an Active Data Guard, Enterprise Manager agent will not be able to connect your standby database and you'll see your standby database is "down". That's not a problem, ignore the status of standby database for now.

My First Impressions of Enterprise Manager Ops Center 12c

2012-04-06T16:18:00.000+03:00

I've installed Oracle Enterprise Ops Center 12c to my virtual PC today. As I see, Ops Center started to use Oracle Database to keep its repository. Previous releases were using PostgreSQL. Installer of Ops Center will install (and setup) Oracle Database 11gR2 (11.2.0.3), or you can use an existing Oracle Database. This gives you flexibility to use a RAC Database for large environments.

Before starting installation, I recommend you to use OCDoctor to verify that your system meets the prerequisites. I'll create a step by step installation guide soon so I'll not mention about details of installation for now.

There are lots of improvements but here the new features I noticed (after a quick preview):

Better support for Cloud Lifecycle Management
Support for advanced features of Oracle Solaris 11
Support for SPARC Supercluster
LDAP Integration
Customizable User Interface
Automatic Service Request (ASR)

Here are the screenshots:

This is the login page of Ops Center.Read more »

Oracle Unveils Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center 12c and It's Ready to Download

2012-04-06T09:23:00.000+03:00

Oracle announced Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center 12c. Ops Center 12c delivers complete, centralized management for Oracle's EXA Familiy, Oracle's SPARC and x86 servers, Solaris, Oracle Linux, ZFS Storage Appliance and Oracle Virtualization (including Oracle VM and Oracle Solaris Zones). You can read the press release:

http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/1575402

You can download Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center 12c from OTN:

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/oem/ops-center/oem-ops-center-188778.html

Ops Center Documentation: ,

http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E24628_01/nav/management.htm

As you know, Oracle introduced the Ops Center Everywhere Program. If you have Oracle Premier Support, you can use Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center at no additional cost.

EMCLI "session expired" Error and FQDN

2012-03-23T11:10:00.000+02:00

In my previous post, I demonstrated how to use emcli to download new agent software and import them to Enterprise Manager Cloud Control. One of my readers told me that emcli gives "session expired" error when he tries to import catalog file. First I thought he does not run the commands in time so emcli session expires but I get the same error in one of my test servers.

./emcli login -username=SYSMAN
./emcli list_active_sessions
Error: Session expired. Run emcli login to establish a session.

I checked the logs and found the bug 10625373 in My Oracle Support. According to the bug, you get this error if you do not use a fully qualified domain name (FQDN) of the OMS server for emcli setup (or while installing Enterprise Manager Cloud Control). You need to re-setup emcli and use a FQDN or you can use "auto-login" to fix this problem.

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How to Download New Agent Software for Oracle Cloud Control 12c in Offline Mode

2012-03-20T15:55:00.000+02:00

In my opinion, Enterprise Manager Cloud Control server should be able to connect My Oracle Support. You may use a proxy if you don't want it to have a direct connection. Sometimes, security policies do not allow your Cloud Control server connect internet in any way. In this case, you can use it in offline mode, and still can use self-update and patch management features.

First of all, you need to activate "offline" mode. Enterprise Manager Cloud Control will not switch to offline mode when it can connect to My Oracle Support. You need to switch it manually. Click "offline patching" under the "provisioning & patching" menu. Select "offline" for connection mode, and click "apply" button.

Oracle EMEA Exadata & Manageability Partner Communities Event, Istanbul

2012-03-16T11:40:00.003+02:00

I attended Oracle EMEA Exadata & Manageability Partner Communities Event on March 14-15. It was held in Istanbul. There were parallel sessions for Exadata and Manageability. I followed the manageability track because it mostly focused on Enterprise Manager Cloud Control. Although I'm not a partner, I've been invited there by Steven Lemme (Oracle Partner Enablement Director) to make a small speech about Turkish Oracle User Group. So my review about the event will reflect the opinions of an Oracle User, not a partner.

Steven Lemme and me.

The event started with welcome speech of Javier Puerta, Core Technology Partner Programs Director of Oracle EMEA. Then Ron Tolido (VP, Capgemini) made a great keynote presentation about Innovation and Cloud infrastructure.

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How to Download New Agent Software for Oracle Cloud Control 12c

2012-03-12T16:53:00.003+02:00

Today, one of my blog reader asked how we can add new agent software to Oracle Cloud Control. He says he installed Cloud Control on a Linux server and now he wants to deploy cloud control agents to Solaris Servers. Adding new agents can be done by self update feature of Cloud Control. Click "setup", and then extensibility and click to Self Update:

Oracle Solaris and unixODBC

2012-03-07T13:22:00.002+02:00

In a project, I asked to create a database link between Oracle to MySQL. I thought that I can use Oracle's Heterogeneous Services. Oracle Database is running on Sparc Server (Solaris 10), so I downloaded the free ODBC packages from unixODBC project. They already provide a binary package for Solaris but it says it will remove any non pkgmgr content in "/usr/local/bin" directory. So I decided to download the source codes and build it manually. Although it sounds like a scientific operation, you just need to run 3 commands to build and install the package in normal conditions but oh unfortunately it took a lot of time to fix "library" dependencies problem and adding MySQL support to unixODBC.

Here are the commands to build unixODBC:

./configure --prefix=/usr/local/unixODBC
make
make install

Oracle Extreme Performance Tour in Istanbul

2012-02-22T23:54:00.000+02:00

I attended to Oracle Extreme Performance Tour event in Istanbul, yesterday. It was a marketing event so I can't say it was attractive for a tech-guy like me. On the other hand, I meet friends from Oracle, found some social networking opportunities and examined Oracle Database Appliance. So it was over my expectations.

Oracle Turkey chooses great places to host their events but this one is really amazing. The event was held at the Ciragan Palace. It's a former Ottoman palace, now a five-star hotel. I just wanted to share some photos of this beautiful place:

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Real World Performance Tour: Istanbul, Turkey

2012-02-10T10:49:00.003+02:00

I attended Real World Performance Tour, yesterday. TROUG (Turkish Oracle User Group) organized the event under the sponsorship of the Oracle Turkey. Although it was snowing, there were about 100 attendees. Well known Oracle experts Tom Kyte, Andrew Holdsworth and Graham Wood presented a 6 hour seminar in a conversational format.

Some of the topics:

Database connections
SQL statement parsing
Set based operations rather than row by row processing
Queuing
Proper use of indexes
Understanding JOINs

Fundamental Oracle Flaw Revealed (Part II)

2012-01-26T13:49:00.000+02:00

In my previous blog, I tried to explain why the fundamental Oracle flaw is dangerous. On the other hand, in my tests I couldn't find a way to pass a higher SCN to a target DB to crash it. Since then, I'm trying to verify that this flaw can be can exploited. Here's a short video of one of my tests:

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Fundamental Oracle Flaw Revealed (Let's create a storm in a teacup)

2012-01-18T20:39:00.007+02:00

InfoWorld magazine published an detailed article regarding Oracle Database security bug yesterday. InfoWorld says Oracle requested them to hold the story until they release a patch for the flaw. The bug is related with System Change Number (SCN). If SCN is increased beyond the current maximum value (SCN Headroom or Maximum Reasonable SCN), database gives ORA-600 errors and crashes.

As we know, the System Change Number (SCN) is a number that increments sequentially with every database commit (inserts, updates, and deletes), and usually it's not possible to reach the maximum value. The biggest problem is the SCN is also incremented through linked database interactions.

As I see, most Oracle experts do not realize the importance of this security threat. Some people even say that the Oracle SCN issue is a storm in a teacup. I think they miss that it's possible to increase the SCN intentionally and use database links to exploit the bug. So let's create a storm in a teacup :) I should remind you that I will not take any responsibility if you mess up your databases. Just read the blog, do not test it on your systems.

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How to Uninstall the Agent Oracle Home that registered with inventory

2012-01-10T16:43:00.000+02:00

A long title for a short trick. I have uninstalled my cloud control agent and tried to re-install it. I gave the same directory I previously used to install and EM Cloud Control Agent Deploy Wizard gave an error at remote prerequisite check:

So it says I should deploy to a different directory or uninstall the Agent Oracle Home already registered. Because of our deployment standards, I need to deploy this agent to the same directory so I searched how I can uninstall the Agent Oracle Home.
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Is It Possible to Build an Exadata Simulator?

2012-01-02T13:02:00.003+02:00

The idea of creating an Exadata simulator arose at Oracle Day 2011 Istanbul. One of my friends was trying to fix a virtual machine in a hurry (right before his presentation), he said his "fake Exadata" crashed. He was just joking but I wondered if it's possible to build an Exadata Simulator using virtual Box (or any other virtualization solution). I googled and found that installing Exadata software on anything other than an Exadata machine is a violation of the software license agreement.

Best Practices to Use Database Upgrade Assistant

2011-12-27T14:42:00.002+02:00

I'm going to upgrade one of our main databases with DBUA (Database Upgrade Assistant), and I take some notes to provide a smooth upgrade. Upgrading your database with DBUA seems a very easy and automated task but there are three important points you should consider when updating:

Downtime: You would probably like to keep downtime to a minimum
Errors while upgrading: It's not possible to re-run DBUA if an error is encountered mid-upgrade!
Performance Degradations: Most of the upgrade problems appear as performance degradations after the upgrade operation completed

So you need to carefully evaluate, plan, configure, test and implement the upgrade.

PLAN: First of all, I recommend you to visit the upgrade guides and plan all steps of the upgrade process:

Upgrade Advisor: Database from 9.2 to 11.2 [ID 264.1]
Upgrade Advisor: Database from 10.2 to 11.2 [ID 251.1]

RTFM: Although everyone says the same, we all intend to pass this step. Read the manuals before it's too late :)

http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E11882_01/server.112/e23633/toc.htm

Very important and useful documents:

Oracle 11gR1 Upgrade Companion [ID 601807.1]
Oracle 11gR2 Upgrade Companion [ID 785351.1]

Use Internet Explorer to read upgrade companion documents (because they are interactive and requires IE) and don't forget to check "behavior changes"!

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Simple (demo) APEX Application in 2 mins

2011-11-23T13:52:00.002+02:00

In Oracle Day 2011 Istanbul, I gave a presentation about Oracle APEX. APEX is not well-known in Turkey, so I wanted to demonstrate how fast an APEX Application can be created, and prepared a video. Unfortunately there are no sound and annotations (because it's planned to be shown with a narrator) but I think it's still easy to follow.

First, I created a sample table with 4 columns. APEX created the sequence and trigger to populate numbers for the primary key. Then I created a sample application with an input form, and run it to enter sample data. At last, I checked if data is inserted into the table (by using APEX user interface). All of these steps were completed in 2 minutes and 12 seconds:

The presentation is in Turkish, so I don't see any point in sharing it here but it'll be shared in TROUG web site.

Oracle Releases Oracle Solaris 11

2011-11-09T20:45:00.001+02:00

Oracle today announced availability of Oracle Solaris 11. Here are some key points about Oracle Solaris 11:

Oracle Solaris Zones provides virtualization with lower overhead than VMware. New integrated network virtualization allows you to create data center topologies within a single OS instance with bandwidth control and monitoring.
Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center provides enterprise wide, centralized control over hardware, OS and virtualization resources for Solaris 11, and it's "included" in systems support (not requires an extra license).
Oracle Solaris 11 is "secure by default", it locks down services from first install and provides role-based root access.
Oracle Solaris ZFS provides flash-enabled tiered storage pools, encryption and the scalability to store unlimited amounts of data. With Oracle Solaris ZFS deduplication, storage requirements in virtualized environments can be reduced by 10x.
Oracle Solaris and Oracle software applications (such as Oracle Database 11g, Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g) are designed and tested together to provide faster fail-over, reliability and better application performance.

Oracle Day 2011 Istanbul (Part II)

2011-11-02T14:15:00.000+02:00

Yesterday, I presented at Oracle Day 2011 Istanbul. It was taken place in Swiss Hotel. I found opportunity to talk with my friends in TROUG and some readers of my blog. There was a huge interest to the event which contains 9 parallel sessions. As usual, our (TROUG) sessions were the favorites for the technical staff. Thanks to Oracle Turkey, we gave our presentations at one of the biggest conference rooms in Swiss Hotel, and we managed to fill the room.

Oracle Day 2011 Istanbul

2011-10-11T14:37:00.006+03:00

Oracle Day 2011 Istanbul will be take place at Swiss Hotel, Istanbul on November 1. It's the most essential, can't-miss business and technology event of the year. You will get a chance to see the latest development in Oracle's public and private cloud computing solutions and how the power of simplicity can change your IT to a force that drives business innovation.

You can find the event details and register at Oracle Events Website.

Thanks to Oracle Turkey, 6 members of TROUG will be presenting in Oracle Day 2011. I'm one of them. I'll give a presentation about Oracle Application Express. I'll try to give a brief introduction about Oracle APEX in 30 minutes.

Here's the agenda (in Turkish).

Presentations of TROUG Members:

Oracle Cloud G'nin Gidişi C'nin Gelişi by Zekeriya Besiroglu (Oracle ACE)
Data Mining in 30 Minutes by Husnu Sensoy (Oracle ACE Director, DBA of the year 2009) - Have I mentioned that each presentation will take only 30 mins? :)
Rapid Application Development Tool: Oracle APEX by Gokhan Atil (Oracle ACE)
What has Exadata changed? by Ferhat Sengonul (Oracle ACE)
Data Integration in Heterogeneous Environments by Gurcan Orhan - Gurcan is honored as Oracle Excellence Awards, Technologist of the Year 2011 Enterprise Architect.
Forgotten Features by H. Tonguc Yılmaz (Oracle ACE)

6 presentations, 4 Oracle ACEs, 1 ACE Director, 1 Technologist of the Year: Too good to be true :) All presentations of TROUG members will be in Turkish. I believe that it will be a wonderful event for all Turkish Oracle users.

How to Deploy Oracle Management Agent 12c

2011-10-08T20:22:00.002+03:00

In my previous post, I tried to show how to install Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c, now I'll show how to add target hosts to our Enterprise Manager system. I assume that you're in a similar position (installed Cloud Control but haven't added any target yet).

As you know, we have to install Oracle Management Agent to the targets to be able to manage them via our Enterprise Manager. In OEM Cloud Control 12c, we can "Add Host Targets Wizard" which is accessible from the web interface. We can manually enter required information of host or we can use auto-discovery method.

If we'll use auto discovery, we need an active agent to discover targets in network. This agent can scan local services or network. "Nmap" is used for scanning network. Nmap requires root privileges to be able to use raw sockets for "Syn Scanning" (a method to detect open ports through firewalls). So we need to configure "privilege delegation" in the host of our agent (which we'll use for scanning).

How to Install Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c

2011-10-07T12:52:00.006+03:00

Installing Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c is easy and it's already explained in a video at OTN website and MOS [ID 1359176.1]. Still, I wanted to create a step by step guide, and highlight the important points.

Here are the steps:

1) Installation of Oracle Linux (How to Install Oracle Linux 5.6)
2) Installation of Oracle Database (Repository Database): You can install one of the certified databases: 11.2.0.3, 11.2.0.2, 11.2.0.1, 11.1.0.7 and 10.2.0.5.

Do not forget to apply the latest PSU to the database. It is recommended that you do not use "memory_target" parameter with Enterprise Manager. Run the following commands and bounce the database:

ALTER SYSTEM SET pga_aggregate_target=1G SCOPE=SPFILE;
ALTER SYSTEM SET shared_pool_size=600M SCOPE=SPFILE;
ALTER SYSTEM SET job_queue_processes=20 SCOPE=SPFILE;
ALTER SYSTEM SET log_buffer=10485760 SCOPE=SPFILE;
ALTER SYSTEM SET open_cursors=300 SCOPE=SPFILE;
ALTER SYSTEM SET processes=300 SCOPE=SPFILE;
ALTER SYSTEM SET session_cached_cursors=200 SCOPE=SPFILE;
ALTER SYSTEM SET sga_target=2G SCOPE=SPFILE;

EXEC dbms_auto_task_admin.disable('auto optimizer stats collection',null,null);

These are minimum values, you can set higher values according to your system resources. It's also recommend to have at least 3 redo log groups sized 300M. Luckily, the installer will warn you about all these settings.

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Oracle Unveils Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c

2011-10-04T11:55:00.004+03:00

Yesterday (October 03), Oracle announced Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c (c for cloud). It's the only complete management solution for enterprise cloud. Oracle Enterprise Manager is the first "12c" Oracle product. I'm sure that we'll see more "12c" products in future.

You can read the press release of Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c:

http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/512064

I have noticed that Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control is mentioned in all keynotes at Oracle Open World 2011. In my opinion, Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control and Ops Center are the key components of the cloud environment. You can read what Oracle Partners are saying about Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c:

http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/512051

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Integrating Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control with Ops Center

2011-09-28T12:34:00.002+03:00

Oracle Enterprise Manager aims to help IT organizations to manage entire Oracle-based cloud stack from application to disk. While Grid Control manages Applications, Middleware and Database layers, Ops Center manages hardware, storage, network, virtualization, and operating system layers.

I tried to demonstrate how to install Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control 11g and Ops Center 11g in my previous blogs (Ops Center, Grid Contol). Now I'll try to show how to integrate Grid Control with Ops Center to manage both software and hardware infrastructure.

Before we begin to set up the integration, let's examine the following diagrams to see how the integration will work.

This is a simple diagram showing communication between a target server and OEM Grid Control. We install an agent to the target server. This agent communicates with OMS service. OMS stores the data it has collected in the repository database.

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