I’ve been invited to speak at Miracle Open World 2012 in Billund, Denmark! My topic will be “Oracle Database Appliance Internals,” which I’ll try to make fun and exciting. I’m definitely looking forward to the experience, and it’ll be great to spend time with the other speakers and attendees. My session is currently scheduled for Thursday… Read More »
Oracle has announced a new patching strategy for Exadata, starting with databases running 11.2.0.3. Oracle will be moving away from the monthly bundle patch philosophy, which was panned by many administrators as coming too often to keep up with, given the tight schedules held around most Exadata systems. Instead, Oracle will be releasing a Quarterly… Read More »
A recent discussion thread on the OTN Exadata forum made me want to test a feature of 11.2 RAC – voting disk redundancy. There was one section of the Clusterware Adminsitration and Deployment Guide (http://goo.gl/eMrQM) that made me want to test it out to see how well it worked: If voting disks are stored on… Read More »
Oracle has released a critical patch for storage server versions 11.2.2.3.x through 11.2.2.4.1. While 11.2.2.4.1 was released last week, there were a few oneoff patches from 11.2.2.4.0 that didn’t seem to make it in to the release. Oracle has since released 11.2.2.4.2 (patch #13513611, supplemental note #1388400.1). Similar to 11.2.2.4.1, this release looks to patch… Read More »
As business has picked up since OpenWorld (didn’t think that was possible, but that’s another story for another day), we have been seeing more customers adopt or seriously look at Exadata as an option for new hardware implementations. While many will complain that there isn’t enough room for customization in the rigid process of configuring… Read More »
In part 1 of this series, we took a look inside the ODA to see what the OS was doing. Here, we’ll dig in a little further to the disk and storage architecture with regard to the hardware and ASM. There have been a lot of questions about the storage layout of the shared disks.… Read More »
It appears that Oracle has resolved the issue with the 10GbE drivers that were introduced in version 11.2.2.4.0. There is an updated note (1376664.1) that includes the patch to fix it. The issue was apparently related to TCP segmentation offloading, and can be fixed by installing the patch found in the note listed above. It… Read More »
Oracle has upgraded the supplemental note for 11.2.2.4.0 (1348647.1) with a handful of critical issues. First, there is an issue mentioned by Vishal Gupta here regarding 10 gigabit ethernet on the database servers. Currently, there is no workaround for this bug, and it is advised that customers utilizing 10 GbE on the database servers should… Read More »
After seeing this press release, I couldn’t help but think back on the last year and a half that I’ve been working on Exadata, and all of the interesting projects and implementations we’ve worked on. When you think about the number of Exadata systems that are out there (Oracle claims over 1,000), and we at… Read More »
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been working on some new (and older) installations of Exadata, and came across a few items that piqued my interest. Each of these things had been on my mind for a while, but it’s nice to see them finally resolved. The first is a small change to the installation… Read More »