Category: Oracle

Oracle OpenWorld and famous namesake…

One of the perks of being an Oracle ACE is getting a free pass to Oracle OpenWorld in October. Fun, fun, fun! See you in San Francisco 🙂

I noticed today that there is a famous Tim Hall from Shropshire (my original county), seen here. I must outdo him by blogging from space, or something like that 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

I need inspiration…

I usually have a list of things I’m mulling over, most of which end up as articles on my website, but at the moment that list is blank. I’m struggling to find inspiration. Usually, something at work or a forum question triggers a course of investigation, but at the moment I’m totally brain dead…

It would be nice if this was because I know everything, but in reality it’s a bit of summer apathy. I guess I better hit the manuals again and remind myself how little I really know about Oracle 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Web Scripting for Oracle Update…

I’ve amended my Web Scripting for Oracle article to include ASP.NET (VB and C#).

I don’t claim to be an expert in any of these languages, so I can’t guarantee I’m using the best practices, but I like to keep some simple examples for those, “You’ve got to use bind variables!”, conversations 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Should Oracle charge for patches?

I can understand Oracle charging for support and product upgrades, like 9i to 10g. I can even see the point of charging for releases upgrades, like 10gR1 to 10gR2. What I think is a little cheeky is to charge people for regular patchsets.

This line of thought came about because of a post on the Dizwell Forum, where someone mentioned they were running a production system without support. This person is working with 9.2.0.1.0 because they don’t have access to 9.2.0.7.0 as a result of not having a support and updates contract. Personally, I think this is more than a little mean of Oracle. Afterall, these patchsets are only fixing bugs in the product that was bought in good faith. Even Microsoft don’t charge for basic Windows Updates, only for version upgrades.

Personally, I believe patchsets on an existing product should be free to those who have a product license. Access to new releases and new product versions could still be restricted.

I just hope I’m never put in th same position as this guy!

Cheers

Tim…

OCFS2…

I’m nearing the end of my “I wonder what RAC is like on other platforms?” phase. I ran through a basic setup of a cluster file system using OCFS2, just to prove it worked:

OCFS2 On Linux

As I say in the article, the only reason to use it as far as I can see is to provide a shared location or UTL_FILE and external table operations. I can’t see the point in using it for the OCR location or voting disk as raw devices work fine and it’s not recommended for sharing datafiles…

I guess it’s nice to know it’s there if I ever need it 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

ASM with ASMLib or Raw Devices?

I’ve been trying to figure out if it’s better to run ASM on Linux using ASMLib or raw devices. Some of the Oracle documentation claims ASMLib gives better performance that raw devices with 10g Release 2, while other sources claim it only affects candidate disk discovery time…

Whilst setting up a test I wrote this article:

ASM using ASMLib and Raw Devices

I’m sure the configuration information will be useful to others, but my first performance test only convinced me that using VMware on my kit at home is pointless for performance tests. You don’t say!!! 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

FC5 Update… Again…

Over the last few weeks I’ve received lots of comments relating to the Oracle 10gR2 on FC5 issue. Recently, most of these have been people commenting on the success of the installation. As a result, I revisited the article based on all the comments and made the following changes:

  • There was a typo on my amendment on the gennttab script. It’s now corrected.
  • I originally used the source rather than the binary of the openmotif21 package. I now use the binary.
  • I was originally installing from an early download of 10gR2, the one that extracts to give a “./db/Disk1/runInstaller” structure. I downloaded a later release that extracts to “./database/runInstaller”. I now use this later release.

I ran through the installation again this morning and it worked perfectly. I don’t know which of the three changes made the difference and to be totally frank, I don’t care. So as it stands, the installation works fine and I hope this is the last time I’ll have to use FC5.

Thanks to everyone who helped in the production of the final article. All your comments were appreciated. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

PS. The document has been released, so it is now listed as a new article. You gotta laugh 🙂