Monday, August 29, 2011

Book review - Oracle 11g R1/R2 Real Application Clusters Essentials

Recently I have read a new book “Oracle 11g R1/R2 Real Application Clusters Essentials” by Ben Prusinski and Syed Jaffer Hussain.. First of all I would like to thanks both authors for good lecture for few days. Whole book is divided into a few parts:
  • introduction to Oracle Real Application Server including High Availability concepts, various storage options and overall Oracle RAC architecture - chapter 1 and 2
  • installation of Oracle RAC components - Clusterware, Automatic Storage Management - chapter 3
  • overview of Oracle ASM - chapter 4
  • cluster components troubleshooting - chapter 5
  • Oracle Database installation  - chapter 6
  • Day by day topics including administration, backup, performance tuning and upgrade of Oracle Real Application Cluster - chapter 6, 7, 8 and 9
  • Real life examples including implementation of Oracle EBS using Oracle RAC - chapter 10 and 11
  • Oracle Maximum Availability - Chapter 12
  • Overview of Oracle tools for more experience users - Appendinx
In a first part authors are presenting High Availability options for Oracle and describing all main hardware components required for Oracle RAC implementation (server, network and storage options). Next chapter is covering an Oracle RAC architecture and it is covering mostly 11g Release 1. There is some information about a 11g Release 2 as well but due to number of changes between both version I would like to see two chapters instead of one - some additional information about a 11gR2 is covered at the end of appendix.

The next part is a guide how to install whole an Oracle RAC infrastructure - Clusterware and Automatic Storage Management in case of 11g Release 1 or Grid Infrastructure in case of version 11g Release 2. It is well documented and I will help new users to go though this process.

The next chapter is covering all topics related to Oracle Automatic Storage Management. Authors are presenting concepts and overview of this component as well as basic administration options. There is also separate part about new features of Oracle ASM 11g Release 2 covering ACFS file system.   

Chapter 5 is about managing and  troubleshooting Oracle RAC components. Some tools and common scenarios based on typical clusterware issues are presented there together with solving tips.

The next chapters (6,7,8 and 9) describe installation of database as well as new features of an Oracle 11g Release 1 and Release 2. In subsequent paragraph we can read about Oracle RAC High Availability features like - Load Balancing, Transparent Application Failover and Fast Connection Failover. After that backup and recovery strategy for database and whole clusterware comes to play. From management perspective this part is very important and should be study carefully. Next part is a overview of performance tuning tools, wait event and statistics important any performance improvement work.

Real life examples is in my opinion most interesting part of the book. All readers can go though typical scenario like adding or deleting node from cluster or converting database from single instance to RAC database. Configuration of Oracle EBS with Oracle RAC is also very well documented.

When I went though whole book I have to say that it was a good lecture and I can recommend it for everybody who want to do first dive into Oracle RAC world. Furthermore I think that more experience users will find this book interesting and worth to read too.

regards,
Marcin

Wednesday, August 24, 2011

Oracle VM 3.0

Announced yesterday Oracle VM 3.0 can be downloaded from edelivery.oracle.com.
I have downloaded Oracle VM server - 177 M and Oracle VM Manager - 2.4 GB. As far as I remember Oracle VM Manager is based on Oracle Database and Weblogic stack and this explain a little bit size of iso image with VM manager.
Documentation can found here -Oracle VM 3.0 documentation.
ps. Going to install it now

regards,
Marcin

Saturday, August 6, 2011

PL/SQL myths busted

RSS feed from Oakie's blog point me to Toon's Koppelaars post and his redirection to Morten Braten blog. Morten wrote excellent post about stored PL/SQL procedures - Mythbusters: Stored Procedures Edition.

regards,
Marcin