TheBonsai's Blog

At the beginning of the week we lost a 10gR2 test server (some mass data application – sizes similar to warehousing) due to the complete loss of a RAID6 (don’t ask!).

Well, test server is test server: We (me as DBA, and a collegue as the responsible application developer) finally decided to step into the Oracle 11 world: The new system will be 11gR2

After some reading in I had no problems to understand the new separated architecture with its HA daemon (keyword: Grid Infrastructure) and install the whole software and create a database. And, very important, there was no, not one damn small, problem when importing 10gR2 datapump files (from the productive system). I heard some weird stories before, and I was a bit afraid about that. But nothing, all data was pumped in like a charm.

The first thing I changed, for me as DBA one of the most interesting features on those large databases, I really parallelized RMAN for backup. I hope I can reduce the backup time to a useful amount with that. This was one of the biggest discrepance in 10g: You can create very large datafiles, but you can’t backup them in a true parallel manner. I’ll check my logfiles today and hope…

Well, so far so good, I will see what 11g (especially R2 here) brings to me and, more important, the applications. It will take some time to really explore the pros.

For all of you still at 10g and loose a test system by accident (and have a developer that really wants it…): Try it

For a new system on SLES10SP2 I wanted to operate 3 separate instances (ASM, 2 databases) from 3 separate ORACLE_HOMEs. The theory isn’t that complex, so I simply installed and patched up the 3 different ORACLE_HOMEs.

After configuring the ASM instance with the creation assistant and enabling the instance in /etc/oratab, I did a reboot. Finally I wrote a small shell function db_change() to change ORACLE_HOME, ORACLE_SID and PATH on the fly to operate on the different instances.

Nothing. I wasn’t able to connect with sqlplus. Read the rest of this entry »

This morning I had a really good start. Get the first cup of coffee, activate the NX session, open the IRC client, go to Freenode’s #oracle channel, and saw a question:

super noob question , how do i query my oracle database online, do i need to setup bind9 and allow incoming connections so it can be accessed

I just wanted to share that

Have a good day!