Friday 9th December 2011 – Implementing Oracle 11g Enterprise Manager for Prime Time Monitoring

Oracle Enterprise Manger has evolved over the years and in its latest incarnation, 11g has become a highly efficient Enterprise Management solution. It has evolved from a Database self-management tool to a complete suite that provides Business driven IT Management capabilities. There are plug-ins available to manage Enterprise Applications like EBS, OBIEE etc., and Middleware Technologies like WLS, SOA Suite etc., Being enterprise level monitoring tool, enterprises cannot afford downtime of the repository or its notification services. In this presentation we review the implementation of EM leveraging the HA capabilities provisioned from RAC and Weblogic Clustering behind a load-balancer including DR for EM

Saturday 10th December 2011 – Using 11gR2 Result Cache Feature in a RAC Environment

The result cache feature introduced in Oracle database 11g provides considerable benefits for operations where results sets do not change quite often. This feature helps store the final result sets in memory providing high speed access to the dataset. In a RAC environment it provides an added advantage that, when multiple users execute identical queries from multiple instances in the cluster, instead of the entire dataset being transferred across the interconnect or retrieved by performing an I/O operation, only the final result set is transferred across the interconnect. This provides great benefits in speed and resource utilization providing considerable performance enhancement. This presentation will go deep into the architecture and functioning of this feature in a RAC environment.

The agenda for sangam11 along with the breakout sessions is live at www.aioug.org

Hope to see you at this event..

AIOUG established in 2007 is growing leaps and bounds every year.  Sangam (meeting of the minds) the annual users conference has been a great success in the past two years.  AIOUG is ready to host its third annual users conference Sangam11 on Friday 9th and Saturday 10th December 2011 @ Bangalore India.

The call to submit your abstracts and take the opportunity to showcase your technical knowledge to the highly demanded Oracle users in the world.

Please submit your papers.. at www.aioug.org = > events => Sangam11 CFP

My last stop is Peru.  Two weeks away from home meeting with oracle users and giving presentations.  It was fun.  People in south America are very friendly and helpful.  Anyone would answer questions and will stop to show you directions.  For example the cab drivers at Ecuador for example showed me places along the way, explained and answered several questions.  He also had a business card and like it said on the card, he spoke fluent English.

13th July 2011 – Day 4/Stop 4 – Peru

My sessions:

1. Oracle 11gR2 New features in RAC
2. Oracle tools and utilities for monitoring  a RAC environment.

I have missed posting about my other two stops ..  you know how it is, when you return back to work after a gap of two weeks, you are flooded with stuff to get done.  

11th July 2011 – Day 3 or stop 3 was Colombia. 

at Colombia gave two  presentations,

My Sessions

1. 11gR2 New Features in RAC
2. Tools and Utilities for Monitoring RAC

Colombia really had a mixed but interesting audience.  We had several DBA and developers on the mix and both the tracks where well attended. 

OTN tour team in Colombia

Next and final stop for me is Peru..

After completing San Jose moving on to Quito, Ecuador.  

Boarded the plane to Quito with a stop over at Panama city.  On landing at the Quito airport I was informed that they found my missing luggage and it was here.. Continental Airlines had found it after 4 days.. hurray.. that was good news

At the event, it is always good to meet other experts from the Oracle area… we had a great team on the OTN tour.

8th July 2011  – Quito – Ecuador

My Sessions

1. New Features in 11gR2 RAC
2. Oracle 11g RAC for Developers
3. Tools and Utilities for Monitoring RAC

Audience seem to be interested however all of them where on translators so really could not understand how much of the presentation they got until the end of the conference. The Q & A to the expert panel had several technical questions.

Something new that I learnt here. Ecuador uses American dollar for their currency bills but uses local coins.  I was told that they switched to this system in 2001.

We are part of an Oracle OTN tour covering South America.  This is one of the ways you give back to the Oracle community by educating them and informing them about the latest and greatest available in Oracle technology space. 

As part of the group of ACE directors traveling in South America, I am speaking/presenting in 4 locations.  Starting with Costa Rica and ending in Peru.  The tour goes on beyond Peru to other countries but my share is 4 countries spread over a two week period.

5th July 2011  – San Jose – Costa Rica

I presented three sessions at San Jose, 

1. Using Oracle Result Cache Features in Oracle 11g RAC
2. Oracle 11g RAC for Developers
3. Tools and Utilities for Monitoring RAC

Had an excellent audience.  It was interested to note the amount of interaction that most DBA’s bring to the table in the form of questions and experiences. All the three sessions had both beginners and current RAC users and provided a mix of interest.

Being in Costa Rica was like being at home.  This tropical country is so similar from several angles to the small state called Kerala, in India where I am from.  The plants, the fruits the way the houses are constructed are so similar that apart from the language everything was very close. I enjoyed the fruits and food. The people here are very friendly.   For a minute I felt home sick looking at the nature, I am sure if I was not busy with the presentations and the preparation I would have wanted to go to India instead of continue the tour.  

San Jose – Costa Rica is done and moving on to Quito, Ecuador

I had presented two sessions at Sangam10..  I did not do any RAC presentation during Sangam09, but several folks  asked why I had not given a session.  I  followed the call for papers like others and was selected by the selection panel. Both my sessions were well attended.

Session 1.  Think outside the interconnect when optimizing your RAC environment.

Kept the session of an interactive type.  so that audience can get involved through the entire session.  Was very well accepted and the received good feedback.

Session 2. 11gR2 New features for RAC.

Did not notice how fast the time went by.. when users get interactive and you get several questions time just flies by.  Could not complete the entire presentation.  I was only able to complete the new features for the clusterware.  did not cover ASM and RDBMS new features.   Maybe next time I do this topic, I will request for a longer duration.

Looking forward to Sangam11..  before that Oracle Open World 2010 is just around the corner. I will be giving two sessions at OOW this year.

1. Waits, Enqueues, and Latches in Oracle 11g RAC

2. The Oracle Database 11gR2 Result Cache in an Oracle RAC Environment

More updates on OOW later…

In 11gR2 ASM diskgroups are used 1) by Grid infrastructure for the OCR, Voting disk and the ASMspfile. 2) by the database for DATA and FRA.

ASM redundancy levels, can be a bit misleading in Oracle 11gR2 compared to 10gR2.   They are called the same, Normal redundancy, High Redundancy and External Redundancy.  However, depending on what area of the 11gR2 configuration this will be used, the number of disks required to configure are not the same.  DBA’s seldom are able to take the difference into consideration when requesting disks /LUN’s from the storage administrators and are taken by surprise during installation.

Grid Infrastructure:  When configuring diskgroups for the OCR file, voting disk and ASMspfile, Normal redundancy requires 3 disks/LUNS to be part of the diskgroup.  High redundancy requires 5 disks/LUNS to be part of the diskgroup.  External redundancy requires just one disk/LUN to be part of the diskgroup. The below screen output shows the error message when only one disk/LUN is selected for the GRID diskgroup.

Database: When configuring diskgroups for DATA and FRA, normal redundancy requires 2 disks/LUNS to be part of the diskgroup.  High redundancy requires 3 disks/LUNs or failure groups to be part of the diskgroup.  External redundancy requires just one disk/LUNs or failure groups to be part of the diskgroup

More about configuring OCR and voting disks in the next post.

AIOUG has extended the early bird registrations to 10th August 2010.. Take advantage of this opportunity and register for this user conference on 3rd and 4th September at Hyderabad.

Great speakers, Jonathan Lewis, Mark Rittman, Iggy and more..