DNS Configuration for SCAN and Editions…

A couple of new articles have crept out recently. The first is me pretending to understand DNS.

I used this configuration in place of the “/etc/hosts” in my VMware RAC installation and it worked great.

The second is a brief romp through edition-based redefinition.

This article started to get really big and feel like a rewrite of the manual, so I stripped most of it out and really just left a couple of examples of how it can be used. I figure this is enough to give you a feel for what it can do, but isn’t as daunting as working through the manuals if all you want is a quick taste.

I’ve seen edition-based redefinition described as a killer feature, but I’m not so sure myself. Don’t get me wrong, I think it is really cool, but “really cool” doesn’t always become “frequently used”. As I was playing with it I had flashbacks to Workspace Management introduced in 9i. I’ve spoken to a lot of poeple over the years and very few even remember it exists, let alone use it.

There is nothing conceptually difficult about edition-based redefintion, but there are potentially a lot of working parts involved and therefore a lot of scope for human error and/or confusion. I’m sure some people have been praying for something like this for a long time, and others will remain blissfully ignorant of it forever. It would be interesting to gaze into a crystal ball and see how much this stuff is used in a few years time (and get some lottery results).

Cheers

Tim…

Avatar…

In my opinion Avatar totally lives up to the hype. I saw it today and I was blown away.

The world they’ve created is great. The Na’vi are really cool. It’s very “Cowboys and Indians”, but who cares.

For me, the mark of a good action/fantasy film is that I want to come out of the cinema wishing it was real and I was there. I came out of Iron Man and I wanted to be Iron Man. I came out of Avatar and I wanted to be a Na’vi, so it did the job for me. 🙂

I saw the 3D version. Some of the scenes worked really well in 3D, some not so well. I’m not convinced about the whole 3D thing. It feels more like a gimmick than necessary for the cinema experience.

Irrespective of that, it was a great film. Can’t wait for the DVD. I think it will join the list of films I watch on a regular basis.

Cheers

Tim…

Something old and something new…

A couple of articles crept out of the last couple of days.

First a revamp of an old article about XML over HTTP to bring it in line with some of the stuff I’ve been presenting recently.

Next, something new that caught my eye to do with auditing in 11gR2.

I know it’s hard to get excited about auditing, but this stuff is pretty neat.

Cheers

Tim…

Google Chrome… Not for enterprise… (LSB 3.2 restriction)

Having seen the fuss over Google Chrome for Linux I decided to jump on the bandwagon and download it.

When I tried to install it I was met with this message:

# rpm -i google-chrome-beta_current_x86_64.rpm
warning: google-chrome-beta_current_x86_64.rpm: Header V3 DSA signature: NOKEY, key ID 7fac5991
error: Failed dependencies:
lsb >= 3.2 is needed by google-chrome-beta-4.0.249.30-33928.x86_64
#

This restriction to LSB (Linux Standard Base) 3.2 presents a bit of a problem for any people running RHEL clones as the latest updates are actually LSB 3.1 (redhat-lsb-3.1-12.3.EL.el5.centos.x86_64).

I suppose that’s one point for the people running desktop Linux distros. I guess I will have to wait for RHEL6. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Oracle 11gR2 on Fedora 12…

I had a play around yesterday and installed Oracle 11gR2 on Fedora 12:

I think this might be the last time I install Oracle on Fedora. Why? For two reasons:

  1. When I first started doing installs on Red Hat 7 (pre Enterprise Linux) it was the only sensible choice. After the introduction of Enterprise Linux there were no free alternatives, so installing on Red Hat Linux, then Fedora Core and now Fedora seemed a viable alternative to paying for an Enterprise Linux distribution. Fast forward a few years and we have Oracle Enterprise Linux which is a supported binary clone of RHEL and most importantly it’s free, so that seems like the logical choice for testing installations.
  2. When I started doing these installations I had to swap hard drives, so having an installation that ran on my Linux desktop was import to me. Once again, fast forward a few years and I never run Oracle directly on my desktop or laptop OS. I always use a Virtual Machine and install Oracle on Oracle Enterprise Linux. Since there are a number of free virtualization products available, there really is no barrier to entry here also.

So why did I bother with this installation? It seems that Fedora12 will likely be the base which RHEL6 is built on, so it is mildly more interesting to me that previous Fedora releases.

Anyway, the articles are there, but do I care about them? No. I’ve always said I write about what interests me and Fedora (or any other Distro for that matter) are completely irrelevant to me now. I see no point in installing Oracle on anything other than RHEL, and really by that I mean Oracle Enterprise Linux, so that is likely to be what I do from now on. Of course, you should never say never. 🙂

For those people banging their heads against a brick wall trying to install Oracle on unsupported distributions, I say download a free virtualization product (VMware Server or VirtualBox) and use it to install Oracle Enterprise Linux and use that for all your future Oracle installs. It’s free and easy.

Cheers

Tim…