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  • Why is my Exadata smart scan not offloading?

    After receiving the excellent “Expert Oracle Exadata” book I decided to spend some time looking into Exadata performance after I having spent most of the time previously on infrastructure related questions such as “how can I prevent someone from overwriting my DR system with UAT data”, patching etc. Now there is one thing to keep…

  • Pimp my collectl-advanced system monitoring using collect-utils part I

    I have recently written about collectl, a truly superb troubleshooting utility, in a previous post. After comments from Mark Seeger (the author) and Kevin Closson (who has used it extensively and really loves it), I have decided to elaborate a bit more about what you can do with collectl. Even though it’s hard to believe,…

  • A day at Cisco’s labs and an introduction to the UCS

    I recently had the immense pleasure of visiting Cisco’s labs at Bedfont Lakes for a day of intensive information exchange about their UCS offering. To summarise the day: I was impressed. Even more so by the fact that there is more to come, I’m assuming a few more blogs posts about UCS will get published…

  • An introduction to collectl

    Some of you may have seen on twitter that I was working on understanding collectl. So why did I start with this? First of all, I was after a tool that records a lot of information on a Linux box. It can also play information back, but this is out of scope of this introduction.…

  • Oracle RAC SIG presentation tips

    Yesterday I proudly presented a one hour training class about upgrading to Oracle 11.2 RAC at oracleracsig.org. This was the first time I presented using this facility and thought it might be useful for others to learn about the procedures and hopefully encourage other speakers to follow suit. It’s really straight forward and there is…

  • So you don’t see any disks when trying to install ASM?

    This is a post that highlights the difference between operating systems, but also the fact that sometime it is hard to break out of a habit once you got used to it. My background is that of a Linux enthusiast, even though I equally like Solaris and AIX but I have a little less exposure…

  • Compiling iozone for Solaris 10 on SPARC

    I have started working with ZFS and its various ways of protecting disks from failure. It’s a low end setup at best, where a JBOD is used as an extension to a M-series server. Many JBODs come with SAS connectivity only, and no on-board intelligence so a host based solution has to be chosen to…

  • Using Connection Manager to protect a database

    I have known about Oracle’s connection manager (CMAN) for quite a while but never managed to use it in anger. In short there was no need to do so. Now however I have been asked to help in finding a solution to an interesting problem. A long story short is that access to databases has…

  • Open VPN for the Road Warrior

    UPDATE I have updated the post on 05-DEC-2013 to be relevant for openvpn-2.2.2-9.5.1.x86_64 on OpenSuSE 12.3. Instead of Xen I switched to KVM as it was easier to implement. I left the by now outdated versions of the Oracle software as they were, they don’t matter. The Xen “virtual machine” is called domU, KVM calls…

  • Additional date for my Grid Infrastructure seminar in the UK

    I was very pleasently surprised that Oracle University are offering another day for my “Grid Infrastructure and Database High Availability Deep Dive” seminar. In addition to the immenent seminars in June (I blogged about them earlier), this one is in London, England. For anyone interested, here is the link: http://education.oracle.com/pls/web_prod-plq-dad/db_pages.getCourseDesc?dc=D70365_1439069&p_org_id=28&lang=US The date has been set…