I have stated this before. I am not a lawyer.
Neither am I an investment expert. Heck I ploughed money into Transocean two months before the Deepwater Horizon sank to the bottom of the Gulf and left a destructive oily mess all over the Gulf Coast.
So don’t take any stock picks from me.
But on a recent trip to the Midwest I met with a customer in an interesting predicament.
It seemed a simple enough thing to need to do;
Use the Swingbench oewizard tool to generate 1TB of data in my test database on DSSD, using the lights-out mode.
I am guessing everyone else knows how to do this, but it wasn’t obvious to me! And after spending nearly thirty minutes online trying to figure out how to connect through JDBC thin drivers as a SYSDBA privileged account, I finally realized that you specify the SYS password, but you DON’T specify the SYS username
So for any other DBAs as dense as me; here is how to create a 1TB Swingbench SOE schema using the oewizard in lights-out mode:
./oewizard -cl -create -scale 1000 -u soe -p soe -ts soe -tc 96 -df +DATA -cs //localhost:1521/dssd04 -dt thin -part -allindexes -bigfile -dbap oracle
After indexes are added, the SOE tablespace will be about 2.2TB.
EMC recently announced the availability of its DSSD rack scale flash storage appliance.
DSSD’s specs are impressive:
The DSSD D5 takes a different approach to flash storage, by eliminating the latency prone networking layer typically handled by Fibre Channel, Infiniband or iSCSI. DSSD replaces this with a PCI extension through a proprietary PCIe Isley Card that connects servers to the D5.
DSSD also replaces conventional SSDs that package NAND technology and makes them look like fast spinning disks, with Flash Modules that eliminate much of the latency of mimicking spinning disks.
There’s a lot more to the D5 that just that, but I am taking a DBA centric approach, and all I want to know is, how do I consume this fast storage in my database?
Yesterday we saw the latest decision in the long-running legal spectacle of Oracle suing Google for allegedly infringing Oracle’s Java API.
Google defeats Oracle in Java code copyright case
I am not a lawyer, nor do I claim any depth of legal expertise. And as engineers, its easy to dismiss these events as one tech giant looking to squeeze some money from another tech giant using their lawyers instead of their products.
But as engineers, these courtroom events should directly concern us.
Increasingly the old paradigm of nightly backing up your large Oracle database to tape, or writing the backup to a NAS share which is then mysteriously swept to tape by some unseen force (the Sys Admins), is becoming an unsustainable approach when backup windows are shrinking, 24/7 availability is becoming the norm and databases are getting larger and larger.
Backup Appliances, such as Sun’s ZDLRA or EMC’s Data Domain, offer many performance and manageability advantages over traditional approaches, and much of the work of traditional backup software is now baked into the appliance itself.
A modern database backup and recovery appliance should include features such as data encryption, compression, de-duplication and remote replication as standard features, to offload those functions from the host CPUs which we want to dedicate to running the database software.
EMC’s Data Domain includes SISL technology – Stream-Informed Segment Layout – to yield some very impressive data reduction numbers using a combination of de-duplication and compression.
But what happens if we choose to use RMAN features in addition to those offered by the backup applicance? What happens if we try to encrypt, de-duplicate, or compress, an RMAN backupset that is itself encrypted or compressed?
During install of Oracle RAC 12c (12.1.0.2), the installer, or possibly the cluster verification utility reports an error:
PRVG-11850 : The system call "connect" failed with error "111" while executing exectask on node ...
So your dutiful Infrastructure Team upgrades the Data Domain backup appliance with the latest DD OS code and patches, bringing you up to the latest patch level.
After this, your RMAN backups using DD Boost start failing, and checking the sbtio.log file, which is found in the user dump destination, we see entries like this:
SBT-27970 (211074992) 04/01/16 21:45:01 ERR : [6D42:C94BFB0] ddp_open_file() failed for File: dd0205_boost/XIO11WSB_df_svr1vlas_1_1.bk, Err: 5034-nfs create failed (nfs: Permission denied) SBT-27970 (211074992) 04/01/16 21:45:01 error 7501: sbtbackup: Could not create file XIO11WSB_df_svr1vlas_1_1.bk on host rstdd0205mgmt.us.oracle.com, error 5034 SBT-27973 (227712944) 04/01/16 21:45:01 ERR : [6D45:D929FB0] ddp_open_file() failed for File: dd0205_boost/XIO11WSB_df_t0r1vlas_1_1.bk, Err: 5034-nfs create failed (nfs: Permission denied) SBT-27973 (227712944) 04/01/16 21:45:01 error 7501: sbtbackup: Could not create file XIO11WSB_df_t0r1vlas_1_1.bk on host rstdd0205mgmt.us.oracle.com, error 5034
