What happens when 12c Cloud Control runs out of disk space?

Question: What happens when 12c Cloud Control runs out of disk space?

Answer: It doesn’t work very well. 🙂

I have a 12c Cloud Control installation on an Oracle Linux 6.1 VM and I was pushing an agent to both nodes of an 11.2.0.3 RAC, also on OL6.1 VMs. The agent installation seemed to go fine and the agent upload to CC was fine, but when I tried to discover the database on the nodes it went a bit loopy. After a little messing about I noticed my disk was maxed out on the 12c CC server. Bummer!

So I turned off the VM, added another virtual disk, turned it back on and added the new disk to the existing volume. Bob’s your uncle!

Once Cloud Control was running the database discovery worked fine and it was full steam ahead. 🙂

Before I realized my mistake I was starting to think this was OL6.1 related, but as it stands I’ve still seen no ill effects of running Cloud Control or RAC on Oracle Linux 6.1.

Cheers

Tim…

Mike Carey: Thicker Than Water…

“Thicker Than Water” is book 4 in the Felix Castor series by Mike Carey.

I’m not even going to try and summarize this bad-boy. It’s just a crazy-paced page turner. We find out more about Felix’s life before he became a freelance exorcist. More about his brother, the Catholic Priest. More about the Anathemata, the excommunicated millitant arm of the Catholic Church. Juliet, the succubus, gets involved in the action again. It’s just bam, bam, bam. Love it. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1…

I’ve been looking forward to seeing The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1 for a while. If you follow my blog you will know I pretty much hated all the previous films.

So why was I so keen to watch it? Basically so I could wax lyrical about how bad a film it is…

Well, now I’ve seen it and I’m a little disappointed because it wasn’t as bad as I wanted it to be. Don’t let that get your hopes up. It was terrible, but I wanted it to be worse. Since the last outing the main characters have learned a couple of extra expressions. I wouldn’t call it acting, but it is not so wooden as the previous films. It starts off with a sickly saccharin story line, then descends into something a little darker. It was at this point that for a fleeting moment I thought I might actually… like this film (insert gasp)… But no, it just dragged on and every time there was a scene that could have been developed into something cool, it either petered out, or turned into something from a My Little Pony story. It was just anti-climax after anti-climax.

So in conclusion, it was moderately less toilet than the other films, but not by much!

This has kinda ruined everything for me. I was looking forward to the last film in the series so I could hate that also, but now I feel rather apathetic about it all… 🙁

Cheers

Tim…

BGOUG 2011: Wrap-Up

So that’s another BGOUG finished and once again it was a great event. Every time I go I recognize more faces and my Bulgarian dancing gets a little better. 🙂 I’m already looking forward to the next one I get to attend. A big thanks to Milena and the gang for organizing everything. There was literally nothing I had to do for myself. 🙂 Also a big thank you goes out to the ACE program for funding my travel costs. It’s much appreciated.

For the first flight on my way home I had the pleasure of sitting next to Dimitri‘s wife Crystal (spelling?), which made the trip more interesting. Watching her play games on my iPad was funny. On the second flight I managed to completely screw up my demo database. Thank heavens for backups. 🙂

That’s my last international event for the year, so I guess it’s time for me to get ill and miss the whole of December, including the UKOUG conference. If that happens again this year  I think I will never hear the last of it from Debra Lilley. 🙂

I’m going to hit the gym hard, clean up my diet again and take lots of vitamin C. I will be healthy for UKOUG!

Cheers

Tim…

BGOUG 2011: Day 2…

Day 2 started with a very tired Doug Burns presenting “Performance and Stability with Oracle Database 11g’s SQL Plan Management”. As with his previous talk, this was firmly rooted in his practical experience of the feature and as such contained a mixture of positive and negative results. Essentially it boiled down to, this works great for some applications and not so great for others, so you’ve really got to suck it and see.

Next it was my Clonedb talk, which seemed to go pretty well.

After that it was Joze Senegacnik talking about “To Index or Not to Index, That is the Question”. Having seen Richard Foot‘s presentation at InSync11, I was pretty confident about the answers to some of the questions Joze asked the audience. 🙂

Next up it was me again, this time giving my Edition-Based Redefinition talk. Once again, this seemed to generate a good number of questions.

Then it was back to Joze for “Getting the Best from the Cost Based Optimizer”. This was a mixed bag of tips and features relating to the optimizer. These style of presentations always contain gems that either you didn’t know already, or had forgotten you know. 🙂

After a short break it was off to the evening meal. This was a more sedate affair than the previous evening. I don’t think any of us could have coped with another full-on night. After the food we moved down to the bowling alley in the hotel, where I was spectacularly rubbish. 🙂

This morning we had plans to do some sight-seeing, but everyone was so tired we’re giving it a miss and being lazy in the hotel spa. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

BGOUG 2011: Day 1…

Day 1 was a packed affair. I went to 6 hours of presentations and my brain hurt by the end of it.

First up was Dimitri Gielis presenting “APEX 4.1 Charts Inside Out”. The talk included a whole bunch of ways to do charting in APEX, from the simple and declarative all the way to the custom and complex. There’s some really cool eye candy!

Second was Dimitri again, this time presenting “Oracle Application Express and Locator/Spatial Features: A Success Story”. The title gives away most of the technical content, but add in some maps and buses as well and you know the score. 🙂 Once again, some nice functionality on display in this talk.

Next was Julian Dontcheff presenting “Tuning Toolkits for advanced DBAs: Oracle Cloud Management with OEM 12c”. I’ve known Julian a long time and I know he has worked in companies that deal with thousands of instances, so his approach is very much, “What gives me the best result for the least effort?” I am a fan of this approach. 🙂 Most of your time should be spent on the few systems that people really care about, not obsessing about every detail on systems hardly anybody uses.

Toon Koppelaars came next with “”Triggers Considered Harmful”, Considered Harmful”. The premise of this talk was, just because people abuse triggers, that’s no reason to develop an irrational hatred of them. He gave a good balance of why triggers are bad, but then moved on to cases where they are really useful. I must admit to being stung by dodgy triggers so many times in my life that I would rather avoid them. That’s not to say I never use them, but they give me a nervous tick. 🙂 Technically I am completely with him. In practice I’m still cautious.

Toon followed up with “Fat Databases, a Layered Approach”. This was based on The Helsinki Declaration. I think Toon and I share almost exactly the same opinions on many things in this respect, but then we are both PL/SQL guys (amongst other things), so I guess we would. Definitely read his blog from start to finish.

The final presentation of the day was Doug Burns with “Statistics on Partitioned Objects”. This was cool because it wasn’t just syntax and obsessive analysis of statistics, but more of the process he went through and lessons learned when dealing with large partitioned tables. It was like a theoretical vs practical comparison.

From there it was off to the evening dinner. Lots of food and lots of dancing and lots of talking about Oracle towards the end of the evening. It was a very late night… 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

BGOUG: I’m on my way…

I’m at the airport waiting for my flight to Sofia (via Munich), on my way to the BGOUG conference in Hissarya.

It’s early and I’m totally knackered. I had a killer tabata-style circuits class last night and a nightmare tabata-style kettlebell class the night before. I still have bruises from the latter. If only I could stop eating rubbish I would look quite buff. 🙂

This is my last overseas event of the year and I’m glad it is the BGOUG event. Anything else and I think I would be looking for an excuse not to go. It will be great to get back amongst my Bulgarian buddies again.

Cheers

Tim…

Mike Carey: Dead Men’s Boots…

Number 3 in the Felix Castor series from Mike Carey, Dead Men’s Boots is about ghosts of criminals possessing humans to effectively allow them to live forever. I got about 2/3 the way through this book then left it on a plane and was stuck for a couple of weeks. As soon as I got home I bought another copy and continued.

I am now totally invested in Felix Castor. I’ve got two more books to read (and another due out at the end of the year) and I’m already starting to get separation anxiety at the thought of finishing the series. This is exactly how I felt about Harry Dresden when I was reading The Dresden Files.

Cheers

Tim…

Configuring VNC Server on Fedora 16…

When Fedora 15 rocked up it brought with it a replacement for the old init-style startup called systemd. In Fedora 15, it was pretty easy to ignore this change as everything (including vncserver) ran pretty much the same as before.

Fedora 16 is a little more “aggressive” about it’s use of systemd. When you issue and old-style service command, you are in no doubt that things have changed.

[root@homer system]# service nfs stop
Redirecting to /bin/systemctl  stop nfs.service
[root@homer system]#

Once again, not a big deal in itself.

So that brings me to the reason for this post. The configuration of VNC Server has changed completely between Fedora 15 and Fedora 16. By default you can’t get away with editing the “/etc/sysconfig/vncservers” file anymore. That issue prompted me to knock up a quick article to remind myself how to do the systemd-style setup.

I included the old method for the sake of comparison.

Cheers

Tim…

Immortals…

Immortals is a lack-luster and truly forgettable film. So forgettable I’m already starting to doubt I went to see it.

Visually is it dark and grimy, similar to 300, which I was also not a big fan of. I imagined the film would be really big and epic, but instead most of the scenes were really small scale. Some of the sets looked positively “amateur dramatic” at times. I guess someone got a bit bored during the CGI touching up.

It’s not a really bad film, but it’s not good either. It’s just kinda meh, which has got to be one of the worst reactions a film can get. If I were to make a film I would hope it was either amazing or really terrible. Mediocre is so not worth it.

I’m still eagerly anticipating the new Twilight film, because I know it is going to be really terrible! Something I can really and truly hate with every fibre of my being! 🙂

Cheers

Tim…