I hate wordpress!!!

They have changed the editor again and I am not able to insert a photo here
because a menu window is stuck at the botton of my screen and I cannot reach the insert button.

WordPress is a drag!

I anybody knows a WAY TO MIGRATE BACK TO BLOGGER
it would be highly appreciated if you could let me know how to do it.

Thanks in advance,

 

 

 

100′000 hits on sysdba.wordpress.com

Today my blog has reached to the 100′000 hits landmark.

I am very happy that this has become such a successfull forum here.

Thanks for reading
I’ll keep on posting in the future!

 

forums.oracle.com is down

Oracle seems to have massive problems with the forums on OTN.

The site is down since quite a while now.

=;-(

Free Oracle Clusterware for Linux Support Customers

Oracle Technology Network announces that “Oracle Unbreakable Linux support customers at the Basic and Premier support levels now can download and deploy Oracle Clusterware at no additional license fee or support cost.”

   Oracle Unbreakable Linux.

 Before this the clusterware needed at least one Standard Edition License.

Now you can download the clusterware and use it as an extension of your Linux to make virtually any application highly available even without having an Oracle Database Server.

For more info on this and ready made scripts see my previouse post on how to protect a single instance database with the clusterware.

 This is really cool!

=;-) 

Speaking at Swiss Oracle Usergroup

Today I have delivered two presentation @ the

 yearly conference of the Swiss Oracle Usergroup.

The topics were :

- Real Application Testing with Oracle 11g
     REPLAY DATABASE and
     SQL PERFORMANCE ADVISOR

- SQL Plan Management and Automatic SQL Tuning in 11g

I have used my new courseware which
I have produced in the last few weeks for 11g New Features.

I offer to to deliver special courses for topics such as

- High Availability with Flashback and other 10g and 11g features
- Backup 10g & 11g
- Memory Management 10g & 11g
- Upgrade Issues 10g & 11g
- 11g New Features Overview

If you are interested in these topics please contact me by email:

info@sysdba.ch

Teaching Oracle Support and Trainers

At the moment I am in Cairo delivering a number of 11g New Features trainings.

I have a completely packed class with 21 students.

 Most of the students are Oracle Trainers, Support Agents and Consultants.

Visiting Muhammad Ali

After arriving in Cairo I immediately went to see if the my friend Muhammd Ali is still in living in his place as before 13 years.  I had been living in his place for a while in the 90s.

 Muhammad is an internationally recognized artist and has been painting since more than 25 years now. He had exhibitions in Paris, Hamburg, Berlin, Zurich and many other places.

He lives in a very poor area near the great basar Khan Al-Khalili.

In April he will have an exhibition in Talaat Harb Streeet in Downtown Cairo and I hope  that he will sell a great number of his beautiful naive paintings again.

وصلتُ إلى ام الدنيا

 Today I have arrived in Cairo, the Mother of the Earth.

I will deliver a number of Oracle 11g trainings here.

This is the first time I am in Egypt after 12 years.
In the middel of the ninetees I had been living here for a couple of longer times.
I am very interested in the developments in Egyptian society since then.

Hopefully I will meet a lot of interesting people. 

A spanish evening with Steven Feuerstein

Yesterday I had organized a little dinner with Steven Feuerstein, my former collegue Christoph Burandt and his lovely wife Silvia as well as my dear friend Jenny.

Steven had delivered a two day seminar for Oracle University in Munich. Although he was very sick in the last days, he had caught  a chest cold and swollowed an enormaouse amount of remedies in order to be able to deliver anyway, he preferred not to hang around in his room alone and come for our little dinner.

Thanks for coming Steven! Hope you’re feeling better already.

We talked about everything but PL/SQL and had a lot of fun.
Christoph is the one who had introduced me to PL/SQL in 2000 and I was very happy to meet him once again.
I think that he is one of the best instructors in this field you can get in Germany.
His wife is from Peru and Steven adressed her in Spanish.

Everybody could speak Spanish except me!

=

How to capture a workload in 10g for testing in 11g

Last week the patchset 10.2.0.4 was released by Oracle.

 This patchset not only contains bugfixes but also comes with a number of New Features.

One of the highlights is the possibilty to capture a workload in a 10.2.0.4 database and ship it to an 11g database for testing.

Only with this feature in place the 11g Real Application Testing Feature DATABASE REPLAY makes real sense.
Before this patchset it was only possible to capture a workload in an 11g database and run it for  testing in an also 11g database.

For more detailed evaluation please see my chapter on CHANGE MANAGEMENT in the forthcoming 11g New Features book.

 It will be shipping aroung middle of the year.

Now customers can check in front what an upgrade would bring for them.

Here is a brief desription of the new 1og Feature:

LUTZ AS SYSDBA @ orcl10g SQL> SELECT * FROM v$version;

BANNER
—————————————————————-
Oracle Database 10g Enterprise Edition Release 10.2.0.4.0 - Prod
PL/SQL Release 10.2.0.4.0 - Production
CORE    10.2.0.4.0      Production
TNS for Linux: Version 10.2.0.4.0 - Production
NLSRTL Version 10.2.0.4.0 - Production

In 10.2.0.4 a new paramter is used to enable workload capturing:

LUTZ AS SYSDBA @ orcl10g SQL> show parameter pre_11

NAME                                 TYPE        VALUE
———————————— ———– ——————————
pre_11g_enable_capture               boolean     FALSE
Note:
The PRE_11G_ENABLE_CAPTURE initialization parameter can only be used with Oracle Database 10g Release 2 (10.2). This parameter is not valid in subsequent releases. After upgrading the database, you will need to remove the parameter from the server parameter file (spfile) or the initialization parameter file (init.ora); otherwise, the database will fail to start up.

Oracle even has created the script $ORACLE_HOME/rdbms/admin/wrrenbl.sql which can be used to modity the parameter.  The script to disable workload capture is $ORACLE_HOME/rdbms/admin/wrrdsbl.sql.  

The package DBMS_WORKLOAD_CAPTURE has been added to the 10g RDBMS. This is the interface to workload capturing and filtering:

SYS AS SYSDBA @ orcl10g SQL> desc dbms_workload_capture

PROCEDURE ADD_FILTER
 Argument Name                  Type                    In/Out Default?
 —————————— ———————– —— ——–
 FNAME                          VARCHAR2                IN
 FATTRIBUTE                     VARCHAR2                IN
 FVALUE                         VARCHAR2                IN
PROCEDURE ADD_FILTER
 Argument Name                  Type                    In/Out Default?
 —————————— ———————– —— ——–
 FNAME                          VARCHAR2                IN
 FATTRIBUTE                     VARCHAR2                IN
 FVALUE                         NUMBER                  IN
PROCEDURE DELETE_CAPTURE_INFO
 Argument Name                  Type                    In/Out Default?
 —————————— ———————– —— ——–
 CAPTURE_ID                     NUMBER                  IN
PROCEDURE DELETE_FILTER
 Argument Name                  Type                    In/Out Default?
 —————————— ———————– —— ——–
 FNAME                          VARCHAR2                IN
PROCEDURE EXPORT_AWR
 Argument Name                  Type                    In/Out Default?
 —————————— ———————– —— ——–
 CAPTURE_ID                     NUMBER                  IN
PROCEDURE FINISH_CAPTURE
 Argument Name                  Type                    In/Out Default?
 —————————— ———————– —— ——–
 TIMEOUT                        NUMBER                  IN     DEFAULT
 REASON                         VARCHAR2                IN     DEFAULT
FUNCTION GET_CAPTURE_INFO RETURNS NUMBER
 Argument Name                  Type                    In/Out Default?
 —————————— ———————– —— ——–
 DIR                            VARCHAR2                IN
FUNCTION REPORT RETURNS CLOB
 Argument Name                  Type                    In/Out Default?
 —————————— ———————– —— ——–
 CAPTURE_ID                     NUMBER                  IN
 FORMAT                         VARCHAR2                IN
PROCEDURE START_CAPTURE
 Argument Name                  Type                    In/Out Default?
 —————————— ———————– —— ——–
 NAME                           VARCHAR2                IN
 DIR                            VARCHAR2                IN
 DURATION                       NUMBER                  IN     DEFAULT
 DEFAULT_ACTION                 VARCHAR2                IN     DEFAULT
 AUTO_UNRESTRICT                BOOLEAN                 IN     DEFAULT

And the data dictionary views DBA_WORKLOAD_CAPTURES and DBA_WORKLOAD_FILTERS can be used to monitor the captures.

 As in 11g the packages captures all incomming requestes into external files which need to be shipped to a testing system and pre-processed on the testing system. Those files contain logical information to replay client requests in the appropriate sequence and with all contention and waiting as it happened on the capture site. On the testing site we need to start replay clients to run the test workload.

This is the interface for REPLAY DATABASE in the OEM GUI:

The executable $ORACLE_HOME/bin/wrc is only available in 11g.

 So we can now capture in 10g and replay in 11g.