- @NishantK Just wait until he gets to the Solaris and Linux piece, its some seriously cool extensions in reply to NishantK #
- I want to see how fast a Hadoop cluster runs on a full #exalogic rack #
- Ut oh, #Exadata 3 coming tomorrow for OLTP #
- Communication is not the strong point of any contractor in the Northern Virginia area. #fb #
- Is that @dannorris on stage? http://is.gd/fjL61 Nice socks #
- Thinking that a 2,400 mile drive in a 34 year old car might now be the best idea I've ever had #fb #
- @jkuramot can I do a B+P for one of those? #
- @jkuramot Blank and postage, I'll send you the stamps 😉 can you steal me a new github sticker too #
- @jkuramot @jkuramot have them on the ole MacBook but MBP needs new ones http://yfrog.com/ma4aqj #
- @dannorris happy birthday, you should make an impromptu dive into the shark tank #
- Who put that no talent ass clown on dancing with the stars? #fb #
- Reading a bunch of Paul Grahams essays #
- Proof our printer is broken #fb http://yfrog.com/3totuj #
- @oraclenerd Only you would say the first thing you remember about Bex is that he has a hot wife in reply to oraclenerd #
- @jkuramot @oraclenerd I understand, maybe next year I'll find an excuse to come out and partake in the festivities in reply to jkuramot #
Archives
All posts by Topper
As I’m sure all of you have seen Larry finally announced our new Exalogic box tonight. An amazing piece of hardware and software married together. I’ll probably be posting more about this over the next few weeks but here are my notes from the keynote below:
360 Cores
30 Servers
40 GBps Infiniband Backend
Direct connection to Exadata
Integrated Storage Appliance to house application software and files, patch the VM by downloading one file and it patches all the software on the device by placing it on the storage appliance
2 Guest OSes: Solaris and Linux
Coherence for memory synchronization, illusion of one unified memory system
Software optimized for the hardware
No single points of failure on the box at all
Duplexed fault tolerant storage
Can patch the hardware and software consistently across all their customers because its all engineered the same with standard configurations
Internet Apps: 12x improvement, over 1 million http requests per second, facebooks traffic in 2 full racks
Messaging Apps: 4.5x improvement, 1.8 million messages per second, all china rail ticketing in 1 rack
2.8 TB of DRAM
960 GB of solid state disk for persistence
4 TB Read Cache
40 TB SAS Disk Storage
72 GB Write Cache
1.2 microsecond latency
10 GB Ethernet to the Database
10x Network Latency reduction
Eliminated buffer copies
64K packets vs. standard 4K
3x throughput vs. 10 GbE
Parallelized Message Queues in WebLogic for Exalogic, multiplexed over infiniband
Dynamic load balancing to Exadata Database RAC nodes with transaction affinity to appropriate RAC nodes to maximize locality
SQLNet over Inifiniband (SDP) to maximize JDBC performance
Instant failover in case of node failure due to Infinibands underlying protocol
Cache Coherence
Instance state replication across nodes
Near instant access to data from other compute nodes
Lossless infiniband network enables instantaneous state failure detection and failover
Solid State Disk eliminates Java VM heap limitations
Reduces GC pause times and increases cache capacity
1/4 of a rack to 8 full racks in a single cloud
Runs all applications, not just WebLogic
Built in application isolation and security with weblogic domains
Built in network isolation and security with infiniband partitions and virtual lanes
Build for elastic capacity on demand
Maintain a balanced system as your size and number of racks grow
Standardized and easy to manage
Exadata machines phone home when there are problems, unified management and monitoring interfaces
Single patch for exalogic systems
all customers run the same configuration
all software components can be patched together
all patches are built, packaged, and tested together
enterprise manager automates patch and upgrade procedures
IBMs best vs Exalogic
Exalogic => $1,075,000, 40% more CPUs over IBM, horizontal scale out infrastructure, inifiniband fabric, fully fault tolerant
Power 795 => $4,440,000, Old SMP vertical scale-up system, no fault tolerance
Elastic and Virtual Public and Private Clouds in a Box
Best Performance and Cost Performance in one
Exalogic VM and OS
Both Linux and Solaris as the guest OSes
Elastic Capacity on Demand to add and remove VMs
Fault Isolation to the virtual network level
2-4% CPU overhead for OracleVM virtualization
Instantaneous migration across VMs
Single Route I/O (SR-IOV) Virtualization
dedicated I/O bypassing hypervisor
low latency
50% better infiniband utilization
Dual Personality to Next Version of Linux
OEL -> 5000 customers
Compatible with RHEL
Never been a compatibility bug between RHEL and OEL
RH does not test releases with Oracle products
RedHat is slow to mainline community enhancements, their current kernel is nearly 4 years old
Announcing: The Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel for Linux
Fast, modern, reliable, and optimized for Oracle
Used by Exa-machines for extreme performance
Allows oracle to innovate without sacrificing compatibility
Oracle vs RedHat
5x on flash cache reads
2.4x on solid state disk access
3x Infiniband RDS messages (IOPS)
1.8x transactions per minute on 8 socket database OLTP
Bigger servers up to 4096 CPUs and 2TB of memory
Up to 4 PB of disks
Advanced NUMA support
APCI 4.0 support for power and cooling savings
Data integrity to make sure corrupt data cannot be written
Database data integrity enabled ASM drivers now
Hardware Fault Management built in
Diagnostic Tools with less overhead and performance for tracing
Upgrade by recompiling the kernel, no reinstall needed, OEL and RHEL customers both
Some more updates:
All of the middleware machines are disk less and boot from the storage server, this also centralizes all the logs
The storage server is a Sun Storage 7000 at its core
Most organizations will get over 240 managed servers per full rack
You obviously don’t have to utilize an Exadata rack with Exalogic, but its certainly going to be better with the Infiniband backends
Each managed server should be assigned it own VIP for failover and load balancing as they move across the nodes that maps to a single application VIP
Any OEL5 or Solaris 11 application should be able to run on the machine out of the box, doesn’t get the secret sauce of java performance, but will likely see gains due to the matched hardware.
Most customers will also need to license the ExaLogic Elastic Cloud software and WebLogic Suite for each compute node they purchase (per processor). Can reuse if they already have them.
BI Publisher is shipped to report on top of the audit logs generated from the server, it is recommended that the logs are loaded into an Oracle Database for easier reporting.
ExaLogic machines will be available in the ETC’s throughout the country on the rotation program.
No word yet if you can combine a 1/2 rack of ExaLogic and a 1/2 rack of ExaData into a single physical rack when ordering.
- My mind's still rolling through all the use cases I need to write down from last week's cross domain identity discussion at #iiw #
- @dannorris ugh, jail broken Intelliscreen on the iPhone doesn't always open to respond to the person who texted me last, thx in reply to dannorris #
- Too many ideas in my head lately and not enough time to work on any of them, I need an army to outsource these ideas to #fb #
- @ppedrazzi the logitech pieces are interesting, have always found, iPod remote + airport + small t-amp is best #
- @ckras I'm sure it wasn't a portal, it was a collaborative information sharing environment #
- @ckras but but but you don't understand, ours is different in reply to ckras #
- 9am meeting in Bethesda, ugh #
- Suck it Notre Dame #fb #
- Late for #iiw love DC traffic #
- Finally made it to #iiw the local guy should have expected the first week of school traffic #
- Discussing the lack of authoritative attribute providers and standards moving forward through backend attribute exchange #iiw #
- @brad_tumy surprised you're not here at #iiw in reply to brad_tumy #
- @ckras Might be a nice way to start a date, hand it to her over appetizers in reply to ckras #
- Good luck taking your 16' molding pieces home in your PT cruiser #
- Just put in a switch for the doorbell, never would have thought it was a good idea until you think about sleeping babies and barking dogs #
- Is it mean to throw snowballs at a pregnant lady? #
- @jkuramot You could always get one of these: http://bit.ly/dxEldB #
I’m known to have a set of headphones glued to my head while working. Sadly on a daily basis I find myself blowing my ears out when I hit a tab in VMWare and the PC speaker beep goes off. Luckily I found this command to disable that from happening ever again:
$ echo "blacklist pcspkr"|sudo tee -a /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf
I’ve added that to all my VM templates so hopefully I’ll save my hearing from now on. Pretty sad that this is my only blog post this year.
I’ve been spending a lot of time working with Oracle Identity Manager (OIM) lately and I’m putting together some walkthroughs / tips and tricks on working with the product. I’ll start with a quick and short one today. Sometimes DBA’s get wild hairs, I think its in their nature, the just decide they want to rename a database and tell all the developers that they need to make updates to their code / jdbc data sources to reflect that. Inside an OIM deploy with OC4J there are two files you need to change to make this happen. They are:
- <OH>/j2ee/<oim container>/config/data-sources.xml (2 places)
- <OIM HOME>/xellerate/config/xlconfig.xml (1 place)
If you search for ‘jdbc:oracle’ in each of the files you should be able to find these references pretty quickly. These are also the places you need to modify things if you are migrating into a RAC environment or if your IP address / hostname / port change on the database.
Hopefully I’ll have something with more meet to post this weekend.
So I’ve been missing from here, email, etc for a while but I’ll address that later, for a sneak preview of why you can see my new disclaimer on the right hand side of this blog. If you’ve been paying attention to the guys over at AppsLab (and who wouldn’t be), you’ll have noticed that they added some new functionality to Oracle Mix to nominate and vote on sessions for this years Oracle Open World. Not too long after the launch Jake mentioned that they needed some new ideas on how to review the submitted sessions. I had an idea to create a wordpress widget that lists all the sessions in a random order. It took me a little while squeezing it out while life got in the way, but here it is:
If you want to check it out you can see it running in the sidebar of every page on this blog. It’s a pretty generic plug-in, if you want to stream any feed from mix it should be pretty simple to modify, just remove the parsing for votes in the code. The installation is pretty simple: Continue Reading
I keep seeing things pop up and people having trouble getting the Discoverer / BIP integration working. I will say this is not the easiest of configurations, but with some additional steps anyone should be able to complete the task. For those of you that have been following along, the latest Discoverer Cumulative Patch (CU4, p6357481) was released and the Discoverer / BIP integration was not included with created a new interop patch for everyone numbered 6622352.
Just a couple notes on the install. If you are applying the patch to a unix system you’re going to have to run the dos2unix command on the CreateOIDContainer.sh file in the <OH>/discoverer/util directory.  Also, notice the CreateOIDContainer.sh file, yes its case sensitive and don’t forget to edit the file and replace the %ORACLE_HOME% directive with your actual Oracle Home path, while you’re at it make sure you chmod 750 CreateOIDContainer.sh too. Can you tell it was a windows guy who wrote the script ;-).
Anyways, before executing the CreateOIDContainer.sh script you’ll also need to properly setup all your paths which includes:
export ORACLE_HOME=<Your Oracle Home Path>
export LIBPATH=$ORACLE_HOME/lib32:$ORACLE_HOME/lib:$ORACLE_HOME/jlib:$LIBPATH
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$ORACLE_HOME/lib32:$ORACLE_HOME/lib:$ORACLE_HOME/jlib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
The big kicker that bit me this last time was that I was getting an error that the Discoverer product container doesn’t exist in the OID Repository. Well, for some reason that container doesn’t actually exist until a user is created in the OID through something like OIDDAS, since this client was using Server Chaining to bring in all their users (another blog post soon) we had never actually created a “new” native user in OID.
Needless to say the 10.1.2.3 Discoverer patch set can’t come soon enough which includes this patch with it. Till then feel free to drop me a line if you have any questions. If you want some more in depth examples of the config let me know and I’ll get some screen shots the next time I do this.
Alright, last night I posted on Twitter that this would be released this morning, well its still morning somewhere. Without further ado here is version two of the click-clack. Make sure you read through to the end for some interesting changes coming to the site soon or already deployed.
- The first story was submitted by me, and not through the big controversial RSS feed option. The story entitled Do you recognize the man in this picture? came to my through my normal RSS feeds. Mashable is a great site that covers new and exciting web 2.0 site and other technology news. Low and behold I’m going through their feed today and saw an article that sparked my interest on a judge who sentenced a hacker for listing the ips coming from a usenet server. I clicked through and look at the picture in the article and its none other than infamous Oracle DBA / Miniature Horseman / Truffle Entrepreneur Don Burleson. Yes that is truly Don, if you don’t believe me, scroll down to the bottom of his own website for the picture. Too funny. 1,000,000 bonus points for Dan Norris for being the first to identify him.
- The next article comes from Patrick Wolf the Oracle ApEx world asking people if its a good thing to create an ApEx certification. Certifications are something that I’ve always debated about with people, many people can read a book, pass a certification test and have no idea how to apply things in the real world. While there are some certifications that combine book and hands-on during the tests many do not. Personally, while certifiable, I don’t carry any certs its just something that doesn’t appeal to me, I prefer to spend my time learning new things and sharing with the world letting me experience and reference speak for themselves. I do agree that for newbies, certifications provide a great way for them Continue Reading