NetApp fully HARD Complient

Last week NetApp announced that it was the only company which is fully complient with Oracle’s HARD-Initiative for the prevention of data corrution on  NFS, FCP, and iSCSI protocols with its Snapvalidator software.

This software validates a checksum which Oracle created for a buffer before it started writing it to disk. If the checksum of the block which NetApp is to write to the storage is not the same than the one Oracle has produced Snapvalidator creates an error message and prevents the data from being written to the storage.

Only with such a check we can be sure that exactly what we sent from the buffer cache is what arrives on disk in the end.

Let’s test it!

=;-)

sysdba @ CERNs CMS experiment

Today I had the chance to visit CMS one of the experiments @ CERN.
Anton Topurov had organized it for me.
Thanks a lot Anton! This was one of the most imresssing sites I have ever visited!
I am very glad that I could see it before it is started and nobody can visit it any more!

Here are a few impressions:

Cern testing 10.2.0.4 features

Last week I deliver another specially condensed training for CERN. Again I had a very strong group od DBAs who gave me a hard time with their questions.

  Elzbieta Gajewska 
is an outstandingly fast learning young computer scientist from Poland. She was already in my RAC course a few months ago.  And again she asked me brilliant questions, some of  them could be good for challenging the Oaktable Network.

Some of the delegates are already taking part in the second class from me. It is always fun to deliver a course for CERN since it is never boring since these people are so highly motivated.

And again I met Anton Topurov
who is already testing with 11g in CERN and has also the Beta Version of the yet to come soon 10.2.0.4. patch already. But he does not talk about it yet. 
He also was in my RAC class recently.

I am very greateful that he has managed to get me into a group of people who can visit the CMS experiment.

Oracle VM sources

This is a compilation of relevant links related with Oracle VM:

Download sources

Oracle Virtualization Homepage

Official Discussion Forum for VM

Documentation for VM

VM Wiki

Pre Configured Templates

FAQ

Podcast with Kurt Hackel (Oracle VM Architect)

I have asked Wim Coekaerts  during his Meet the Experts session
in the OTN lounge last week at the OOW about trainings on Oracle VM.  He said that there will be new courses on this available soon from Oracle University.

DOAG News arrived

When I came home from San Francisco I found

the latest DOAG NEWS   4/2007 in my mailbox.
It contains the German version of my article on 11g New Features of the Cost Based Optimizer.

The DOAG (Deutsche Oracle Anwender Gruppe) is the German Oracle user group which celebrates its 20 aniversary this year.

Congratulations DOAG!

No AUTO RESULT_CACHE_MODE!!!

I have recently posted about the result cache feature in 11g.

I have recceived a number of comments on this post by Peter about the AUTO mode of the parameter who asked if it really works because he had tewsted and did not find the result he had expected. This made me test as well and I had the same experience as Peter.

So I went to the demo ground here at the OOW yesterday and asked the guys from Server Technologies directly what the algorithm used is and received a surprising answer:

They told me that only MANUAL and FORCE are supported settings for the parameter. AUTO is neither documented nor supported!!!!

I asked them why it is possible to set the parameter to AUTO in the Enterprise manager and also there is an error message telling me this:

SYS AS SYSDBA @ ocrl11 SQL> show parameter result_cache

NAME                                 TYPE        VALUE
———————————— ———– ——————————
client_result_cache_lag              big integer 3000
client_result_cache_size             big integer 0
result_cache_max_result              integer     5
result_cache_max_size                big integer 1280K
result_cache_mode                    string      MANUAL
result_cache_remote_expiration       integer     0
 

SYS AS SYSDBA @ ocrl11 SQL> alter system set result_cache_mode=nonsense;
alter system set result_cache_mode=nonsense
*
ERROR at line 1:
ORA-00096: invalid value NONSENSE for parameter result_cache_mode, must be from among FORCE, MANUAL, AUTO

And as Peter has found out: IT DOES NOT WORK WITH AUTO obviousely!
Very good catch Peter!

The guys from Server Technologies told me that it will probably never work and will never be supported with AUTO. And if I think it over it is not bad to manually control which statements are cached and which not.

=;-)

Oracle Virtualization Server is downloadable now!

It is out for download now:

http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/virtualization/index.html?rssid=rss_otn_news

Virtualization Technology Center Virtualization is the process of abstracting computing resources such that multiple operating system and application images can share a single physical server, bringing significant cost-of-ownership and manageability benefits. Through its Oracle VM product, Oracle offers scalable, low-cost server virtualization for heterogeneous applications.

my presentation on OOW: how to migrate a DB from FS into ASM

I will deliver a presentation today in the uncoference area next to OTN lounge.

Topic: How to migrate a DB from file system in to ASM storage
Time: 5:00 pm
Location: uncoference overlook II @ Moscone West Level 3 (next to OTN lounge)

 It will be life demo with open end Q&A.

Borders bookstore just provided me with two copies of the new book on ASM
which I will raffle at my little presentation today.

Oracle Automatic Storage Management  by Nitin Vengurlekar, Murali Vallath & Richard Long

Good luck!

Looking forward to meeting you all there

=;-)

New book on 11g ASM published

There are a couple of books on the market already which cover 11g features.
As always many of them do not really cover a lot of the new features because everything is so new and the books were written under preasure. So the have the “COVERS 11g” on the cover but inside it is mostly 10g stuff.

Here is one which is a MUST READ for everybody who is interested how Automatic Storage Management (ASM) really works:
Oracle Automatic Storage Management  
What makes this book especially interesting is the fact that the authors are the Oracle developers of ASM themselves, Nitin Vengurlekar and  Richard Long, and Murali Vallath., the president of the RAC SIG,  plus the architect of the technology Bill Bridge who wrote the foreword for the book .

This book keeps its promises and covers the 10g and 11g features of ASM in detail.
And it is an easy reader with a sence of humor:

“The ACD is a log that allows ASM to make atomic changes to multiple data structures. It is similar to the redo logs used by the Oracle RDBMS. Each instance gests a 42 MB chunk of the ACD. (As Douglas Adams explained in Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galary, “42″ is the answer to the ultimate question of life, the Univese and Everything.) …

 This is the way of reading I like!!

Thank you guys, I love it

Real Application Testing new features announced

Leng Leng Tan announced in her presentation yesterday, that
patchset 10.2.0.4 which will be available very soon!!!

which will allow to mask sensitive data in a captured workload 
so it is not possible to read the data in plain in the testing environment, but still run the workload for testing anyway. This will definitively make it more attractive for a number of customers to use Database Replay, one of the Real Application Testing (RAT) features in 11g.

Also it will be possible to capture a workload on a 10.2.0.4 database and run it on an 11g database for testing!!!