I woke up this morning and did what I do most days – doomscroll through twitter. One of the benefits of being in the US is that there are usually some interesting discussions going on with people I follow in Europe. I saw an interesting question from Martin Berger: I’ve had my fights with datapatch… Read More »
As part of an ongoing project, I’ve been performing a fair amount of upgrades to 19c on Exadata systems. Several of those systems are virtualized, running Oracle VM (based on Xen). I’ve previously mentioned Oracle’s oedacli tool that can be used to make upgrades easier, and it’s been very useful once you are familiar with… Read More »
One of the cool things that Oracle has done with Exadata is give users the ability to upgrade from Oracle Linux 6 to Oracle Linux 7 with an in-place upgrade process. This comes automatically when you upgrade the Exadata compute image from 18c to 19c. Upgrading the compute nodes to 19c give you the ability… Read More »
As part of the Oracle Exadata Deployment Assistant (“OEDA”), Oracle includes a command line utility to read and modify the XML files used for deployment of an Exadata cluster. Typical use cases are to install additional Oracle database versions, or to create multiple databases before deployment. There are several additional features included for virtualized clusters,… Read More »
I can still remember the surprise when Frits Hoogland pointed out that Oracle had replaced the old OC4J instance on Exadata storage servers with a WebLogic service. I wasn’t quite sure what to make of this, but it’s become apparent as things move cloudward that it would enable an entire set of REST operations for… Read More »
One of the cool new features that was introduced with 18.1.0.0.0 was a subtle change in the Exadata storage server patching process. While not required, this new functionality removes the need to use patchmgr to drive Exadata storage server patches. In Juan Loaiza’s Open World session on new Exadata features, this slide jumped out to… Read More »
When applying quarterly PSUs to an Oracle database, there are generally two steps – one step that applies updates to the binaries inside the Oracle home, and one step that updates objects inside the database catalog via registry$sqlpatch. The first step has long been performed with OPatch, but beginning with Oracle 12.1.0.1, the second task… Read More »
I was playing around with the Exadata X2-2 in the Enkitec lab this weekend, and hit an interesting issue when patching the storage servers. We were taking the system up to version 12.1.2.3.3 for testing purposes. I fired off the patchmgr script, and one of the storage servers failed when beginning the first phase of the patching… Read More »
I ran in to a small issue while applying the July 2016 quarterly patch to a couple of Exadata racks last week. The systems were running GI 12.1.0.2, previously with the January 2016 PSU. The patches applied successfully, and we were beginning the process of running the post-patch scripts on the databases in the cluster. This… Read More »
While preparing for a virtualized Exalytics upgrade, I was testing the various connection methods that would be needed. Last on the list was to validate that I could connect to the ILOM’s web interface, launch the java console, and mount an ISO file from my laptop to the machine. This is necessary because the… Read More »