Archive for October, 2010
Moving from ASM to a Filesystem
I’m in the middle of running a migration of a number of 10.x databases to a new virtualized environment. During the course of this I ran across bug 7207932 (metalink login required). I summarized the situation in a mail to my coworkers as follows
XXXXX is currently a database on ASM. It’s being moved to the new VM and hosted on a filesystem again. Restoring the database succeeded, but alter database open resetlogs failed with ORA-600 [KGEADE_IS_0]
This turns out to be the same as a bug when renaming a file ‘alter database rename file….’ in 10.2. Fortunately the filename really succeeds. In my case I’d forgotten about renaming the redo logs and got the error but manually renaming the files and then doing alter database open resetlogs from sqlplus succeeded. Anyway net result, if you are asked to restore (or duplicate or create a standby) an ASM hosted database to a filesystem in 10.2 expect the rename logfile step to “fail” with this error.
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Cricinfo All Time World XI
The Cricinfo all time world 11 is now out. Unsurprisingly there are a few differences (though I was expecting more). Hutton ahead of Greenidge is on pure style terms pretty straightforward. Similarly Wasim would make a great replacement for Freddie Trueman.
I personally don’t subscribe to the view that an all-rounder is needed in a world XI – if you are going to pick one then there is indeed only one choice. This point is perhaps best expressed by Rob Steen here. Talking about Gilchrist he suggests that picking him is overly cautious given the batting talent available. I’d suggest the same argument applies to Gary Sobers.
One decision, though, sticks out as strategically unsound. With a top six as superlative as this on tap, nominating Gilchrist seems excessively cautious. Those to whom glovemanship is first, last and everything – i.e. the bowlers – would surely have preferred Alan Knott or Ian Healy
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UKOUG Conference Series 2010
The annual UKOUG Technology and E-Business Suite Conference takes place from November 29th to December 1st in Birmingham (UK not Alabama). You can book here. One of the neat features of this event is that you can pre-register your interest in sessions and build a handy one page personalized agenda. This saves carting around the details of approximately 65,238 sessions during the 3 days. Pre-registering does not commit you to attending those sessions (should you perhaps have over-indulged the night before) but it does help allocate speakers to rooms.
I thought I’d share my agenda as a way of encouraging you to register, to give a taste of the excellent speakers.
Monday
10:25 – 11:10 Premier League Peek: Large Scale ASM Adoptions and Lessons Learned
Mr Jeremy Schneider
Ardent Performance Computing
I’m quite a big fan of ASM, but I’m mostly going to see Jeremy who online is consistently clear, knowledgeable and helpful.
13:20 – 14:05 Defining a Recovery & Backup Strategy: A Durham University Case Study
Ms Lisa Dobson
Durham University
Always good to see how the documentation and ‘best practice’ translates into the real world with constraints and business drivers. Sippy cups not required.
15:40 – 16:40 Oracle Extended SQL Trace Data for Developers and Performance Analysts
Mr Cary Millsap
Method R Corporation
I may revisit this decision in the light of “thinking clearly” but Cary is the man who put method R in the limelight big time.
16:50 – 17:35 Customising ASH and AWR: Beyond ashrpt.sql and awrrpt.sql
Mr Daniel Fink
The Pythian Group
One of the challenges facing performance analysts is analysing and presenting clearly the multiple sources of performance data now available to us (when I started out it was finding the data!). I’m hoping to learn a lot from this presentation as regards the ASH and AWR components of performance diagnostics.
Tuesday
08:45 – 10:45 Thinking Clearly about Performance
Mr Cary Millsap
Method R Corporation
The presentation of the conference. I’ve read the paper, but definitely expect to get more from the man himself here. The only problem is that I may not be thinking clearly at 8:45am!
12:15 – 13:00 Time Series Analysis Techniques for Statspack or AWR
Mr Wolfgang Breitling
Centrex Consulting Corporation
I’m pretty much heading here for the same reason as Dan’s presentation above.
14:05 – 14:50 Grid Control and improving its notification potential via Nagios
Mr Eter Pani
STFC
I’m always interested in creative solutions to enterprise management, especially in a heterogenous environment.
15:00 – 15:45 Using Instrumentation to Ensure Performance
Ms Robyn Sands
Cisco Systems, Inc.
Robyn knows more about instrumentation and analysis than I’ll ever know.
17:20 – 18:05 How to Build a System that Doesn’t Scale
Mr Graham Wood
Oracle
I’m expecting this to be fun and thought provoking. The ideal preparation for the middle evening.
Wednesday
11:05 – 12:05 Oracle Development Tips: Seamless Application Failover with Oracle Data Guard
Mr Larry Carpenter
Oracle America
Larry is the product manager for DataGuard. I’ll be hoping that this presents real examples of useful techniques rather than just marketing.
12:15 – 13:00 Oracle ‘Hidden’ Features: Features You Probably Didn’t Know About and are FREE
Mr Graham Wood
Oracle
There’s a world of cool features that get built into every release. Approximately 85% of them never get publicity. I hope to uncover at least 5 gems in this presentation.
14:00 – 14:45 Running Oracle Effectively on Windows
Mr Niall Litchfield
Maxima
Probably won’t work so well this one if the presenter isn’t there.
16:05 – 17:05 Transaction Management Internals
Mr Christian Antognini
Trivadis AG
I feel for Chris. This is an important topic presented by a world expert, right at the end of the show. Here’s hoping more than a few developers turn up.
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October 2010 Security Patches
This is just a quick note to list a few of the interesting issues I’ve run into applying the October 2010 Security Patches to Windows 11.1.0.7 databases (32 and 64bit). For *nix platforms Oracle Security Patches come in 2 main flavours a Critical Patch Update and a Patch Set Update -the latter includes more than just the security fixes but is promoted as being better tested. Documentation for this is available on the Oracle Technology Network On Windows platforms the Security Updates are included in a separate bundle of patches (akin to the PSU but a different process). These tend to be quite large downloads and have historically had a few issues (notably the run of 4 consecutive patch bundles which left patched databases unstartable).
My issues with the latest set started with the Readmes, which I always read. The Patch Availability readme (MOS login required) states that Patch Bundle 33 contains the security fixes included in the October 2010 CPU. The Patch Readme states
Table 1 describes installation types and CPU applicability. For each installation type, it indicates the most recent CPU patch to include new security fixes that are pertinent to that installation type. If there are no security fixes to be applied to an installation type, then “None” is indicated. If a specific CPU is listed, then apply that CPU or any later CPU patch to be current with security fixes.
Installation Type Latest CPU with Security Fixes Server homes CPUJul2010 Client-Only Installations CPUJul2010
The following error was recorded twice in the Patch Application logs for the Patch33 bundle on windows when running catcpu.
SQL> @?/Bundle/Patch33/bug9758569.sql
SP2-0310: unable to open file “%ORACLE_HOME%/Bundle/Patch33/bug9758569.sql”
Investigation showed that this file exists in the downloadable zipfile, but not in the %ORACLE_HOME% directory. The file copy action appears to have been missed from the /config/actions.xml included with this patch. Running the file manually or updating the actions.xml file and reapplying the Bundle results in the .sql script being correctly executed.
Secondly some of these databases did not include xmldb. This resulted in the same symptoms as Metalink Note 443440.1 specifically
The catcpu.sql script in 10.2.0.3 patch 6 (p6012742_10203_WINNT.zip) creates invalid objects if XML is not installed
The same problem affects 10.2.0.3 patch 7 and 10.2.0.3 patch 8.
The same problem affects 10.2.0.4 patch 22 and patch 24.
The same problem affects 11.1.0.7 patch 13.
To which it looks like we can add 11.1.0.7 patch 33. The workaround for this is either to install XMLDB and rerun catcpu (which kind of defeats the point of a security process really since you should be reducing your attack surface not increasing it) or else (as we did) rerun catproc.sql and utlrp.sql from %ORACLE_HOME%/rdbms/admin
I’ll update this with any more odd gotchas if I find them. Meanwhile happy patching.