Oracle Openworld 2011 afterthoughts

Oracle OpenWorld  Came to a close Oct 7. Unfortunately too many issues prevented me from posting anything to this blog.
This year was the Year of the Cloud at Oracle Openworld.  Oracle released many products including Exalytics, The Oracle Database Appliance, The Big Data Appliance,  Oracle R Enterprise , Oracle Enterprise Manager 12C  (Cloud Control) and Oracle in the Cloud. These were just the big announcements but there was alot of fun and learning this year.  The RAC Attack OTN Lounge was the best place to hangout since there were so many people to learn  from . It is always interesting to meet people from All Aorund the world with a variety of experiences and exposure to so many technologies.

The Bloggers meetup was the culmination and the meeting of all the minds from all over the Oracle Community . Sponsored by the Good old folks at Pythian . This was a very well done and fun event.
My takeaways and the most exciting thing for me has been EM 12C . I plan on playing around with it and understanding how it can benefit me and my team.
It was very sad to be in CA when Steve Jobs died and  hearing about it during Larry's big keynote. Truly an inspirational person.
Some funny some Sad pictures from my Days at Openworld .

Oracle Openworld day 1

Day 1 here was IOUG Day.
There were a lot of good  sessions .

One of my Favorite for the Day was Arup Nanda's Exadata for DBA's . It was  very well presented   and Arup has already posted the details at his blog.
The RAC Expert Panel SIG was very well done and it seems like most of the questions were related to 11.2.0.3 which was just released Last Week.
The Announcement of the Day was the new member of the Exa family #Exalytics. Exalytics is a BI optimized Server. Larry Ellison announced the new addition to the Family along with his familiar Next Slide Please.
Since BI has not been my area. I'll defer to the pros like Alex Gorbachev to explain and the details are on Alex's Blog.
It Seems Like there will be a flurry of announcement this weeks and stay tuned on this Blog and My twitter Feed as well #oow11.
Some Pics of Day 1 are below for #oow11

Oracle Openworld 2011 My Schedule

Below is some of the sessions i intend to attend this Openworld 2011

Oracle openworld day 0

Day 0 of oracle openworld is here . Tomorrow the fun begins . Got my registration done and got to see Eddie Awad , Chris muir, Tim Hall , Arup Nanda.
Hoping to meet up with more fellow bloggers soon.
I will mostly be in RAC related sessions tomorrow.
Here are some pics of the registrations.

Oracle openworld 2011

Oracle openworld 2011 is almost here . Starting Sunday I will be very active in tweeting as @fuadar an blogging via this blog . This is an exciting year to be at openworld and hopefully there will much to report see and publish

Compatibility parameter and testing

As with any upgrade it is very important to have as proper test plan to test your application prior to a database upgrade. DBA's try to work with their application teams to ensure that the test are fair and balanced and go thru many weeks of planning before actually upgrading a major system.
One thing many DBA's do  as  a precautionary measure is to ensure that a backout plan is in place. For most it might includes backup, flashback or both. Once other medium of protecting your self is the compatibility parameters. After an upgrade the compatibility parameter is most often not changed till the application is stable. The compatibility parameter to a lower value allows for  potentially downgrading your database.
But what if your application testing was done with the compatibility parameter not set to the right version. This can cause a lot of headaches for the DBA's and the Application teams that are testing/
Compatibility parameters not only change the redo logs and the control file structure but also allow for oracle to take new code paths. Something that was very painfully evident to us when we migrated from 10.2.0.4 to 11.2.0.2 RAC. The compatibility changed actually caused us a lot of instability due to some new processes that oracle introduced. This  change caused us to go from a fully stable system to crashing down every couple of hours.
Unfortunately there is no easy remedy for changing the compatible parameter and we had to work thru the issues. A lesson well learned for us. Testing needs to be done with compatibility changes done  on dev and test to ensure process behaviour does not change

GTX Processes in Oracle 11.2.X

Oracle Has introduced new processes in Oracle 11 and above to handle XA type processes.
The Parameter global_txn_processes control is you want GTX processes to spawn or not.
If global_txn_processes >0  oracle will autotune in 11.2.0 the amount of gtx processes it needs per node.
these processes are normally used for distributed transactions and for XA based transactions. if you are using the OracleXA dataclass in your jdbc driver. you are probably using DTP or distributed transaction processing.

RAC Attack at Oracle Openworld

This year among many things the OTM Lounge will be host to IOUG RAC Attack
Jeremy  has information on this wonderful event at this blog.  Also if you have experience in RAC installation . please hit up  the Rac Attack  webpage for more info.
Hope to see everyone there.

The Arrival of #OOW11 and Festivties galore

Its that time of the year. Oracle OpenWorld 2011  starts in a few weeks.
Oracle Openworld  is host to an insanely massive amount of DBA's architects , developers and vendors. It is a massive Opportunity  not only to learn from peers but network with experts, Oracle ACE's and ACE directors.
While i will be posting the sessions i will be attending in a separate post i just thought I'd point out to some of the festivities  Like the Bloggers Meetup that is probably the best place to meet the greatest minds that have a real job working on Oracle related Technologies . The Details are on the Pythian Blog   and can be read in detail on pythian's blog . An excerpt from the pythian blog is below

"What: Oracle Bloggers Meetup 2011

When: Wed, 5-Oct-2011, 5:00pm

Where: Main Dining Room, Jillian’s Billiards @ Metreon, 101 Fourth Street, San Francisco, CA 94103"

The Other Festivities include the OTN night Details on the OTN Blog. But one thing is good OTN Lounge is going to be in Howard Street which is awesome again. 

One Cool Thing on the OTN Lounge will be RAC SIG stuff

"(Special treat for Oracle RAC fans: Kick back at the OTN Lounge between 9am and 1pm each day of the show with experts from the IOUG RAC SIG, and work together to get an Oracle RAC cluster database running inside virtual machines on your own laptops.)" --From OTN Blog

I' am also hoping Oracle Closed World returns since i was unable to attend any #ocw sessions last year. Thati s a festive geek fest in itself.

Come Join us at Oracle Openworld for lots of fun and learning. and do introduce yourself.

i'm @fuadar on twitter  and #OOW11 is the official tag of Oracle OpenWorld 2011

 

AIX Bug with 64K Memory Pages

After our Production Upgrade to 11.2.0.2 on AIX. we hit an AIX Bug relating to  AIX starving Oracle from memory pages and thus grinding the system to a halt.. Metalink Doc  1088074.1 talk about this but there was conflicting information thru Doc ID 282036.1 which stops at AIX 6.1 TL5 for this particular bug.
It is the Bug is actually fixed in TL6 SP4 .
We were on TL6 SP2 and thus had a system outage.
Moral of the story is it always pays to ensure to look at future TL's and SP's for AIX to ensure the bug was actually fixed.