Technical – Page 4 – dannorris.com blog

Oracle 11g DB Available For Windows

Oracle 11g Database is now available on Windows. Get it while it’s hot :).

Bharosa software now available for download

Oracle finally closed the deal with Bharosa that I wrote about several weeks ago. They haven’t posted it yet on OTN, but it’s on edelivery.oracle.com under the name “Oracle Adaptive Access Manager”. The documentation isn’t quite up to normal Oracle documentation standards, but it’s enough to get the install up and running. I’m getting my … Continue reading “Bharosa software now available for download”

Oracle finally closed the deal with Bharosa that I wrote about several weeks ago. They haven’t posted it yet on OTN, but it’s on edelivery.oracle.com under the name “Oracle Adaptive Access Manager”. The documentation isn’t quite up to normal Oracle documentation standards, but it’s enough to get the install up and running. I’m getting my own VM installed with this stuff configured and tested, I’ll post some results here.

To find this new stuff, go to http://edelivery.oracle.com/, fill out the form, search for “Oracle Application Server Products” and choose your platform (I chose Linux x86). The first search result returned will likely be “Oracle Adaptive Access Manager 10g (10.1.4.2.0)”. That’s Oracle’s name for the Bharosa software. The downloads are tiny–only about 45Mb total. Happy downloading!

Oracle Identity Manager Advanced Workshop

I spent the past three days at Oracle’s office in downtown Chicago working on the Oracle Identity Manager Advanced Workshop. Ananth Kini and Sid Choudhury from Oracle did a fine job explaining the product and it’s various use cases to us. Most of the time was allocated to working though extensive and applicable lab exercises where we were guided through tasks like putting new logos on the login page, customizing look and feel, configure prepopulate adapters, configuring and customizing notifications, extending an existing connector (provisioning), and developing, implementing, and testing a complete connector from scratch.

The class was offered to Oracle Partners for free and is the second workshop in the series. The basic workshop happened several months before (I wasn’t able to attend). Unfortunately, I won’t be able to post the contents of the workshop (you have to be a partner to get access to the content). If you’re an Oracle employee, you can download the lab exercises and virtual machines from an internal Oracle website (you’ll have to contact the IdM PM team to find out the site if you don’t already know it).

Overall, what I took away from the class are these thoughts:

Almost no one really uses OIM in the “standard” or “out-of-the-box” configuration. Every implementation will require extensive configuration and very likely, some customizations for look and feel.
A background in Java development or at least a strong understanding of programming and OO principles will be very helpful when navigating and using the OIM Design Console.
The hot deploy feature in OC4J is completely underrated. Our test environment used JBoss (which doesn’t have a hot deployment option), so we frequently had to restart it. Restarting took anywhere from 30-60 seconds to handle initialization.
There are plenty of people interested in OIM. Our class was about 13 people. This workshop is being held 3 times in the US (based on the last schedule I saw) and many people came from near and far to attend this session.
The OIM product has impressive capabilities, but it takes more work than expected to take advantage of those capabilities. For a non-programmer-type like me, understanding why 3 properties files all contain the same or similar information still doesn’t make sense, but apparently that’s the way many Java deployments are handled when deployed with i18n.
Connectors include not just provisioning parts (add, modify, delete), but also reconciliation parts.

If you’re a partner and have a chance to attend this event, I’d recommend it. There’s another one happening in November in Reston, VA. Ask your friendly sales rep about it and they should be able to get you the invitation information. Make sure you and your system meet the prerequisites. The workshop uses VMWare images, so having 2Gb of RAM available will be important.

Another Oracle Certification Exam

Tonight I took another Oracle certification beta exam, Oracle Application Server 10g: Administration II (1Z1-312). Since it was a beta, the fee was only $50 and I knew some of the topics to be covered, so I figured I’d wing it and see how I did. I doubt I passed as I wasn’t well-prepared–especially for the questions related to Application Server Guard and some of the questions on Cold Failover Clusters. We’ll see in a few months if I managed to squeak by it or not (they don’t announce scores for the beta exams for about 10 weeks after the beta period ends). The good part about beta exams is the price, but the bad part is that they have you answer all the questions in the test pool. For this exam, there were over 215 questions in 180 minutes (3 hours). I should know better than to schedule such a span through dinner time, but that was all I could fit in to my schedule this time!

Another reason it was challenging for me was due to a thought that occurred to me as I got about half way through the exam. That is, why are Oracle ACE Directors (for Middleware, Database, or otherwise) not required to have completed some certification. I’ll be the first to agree that having a certification doesn’t necessarily mean you know what you’re talking about. I also know from friends that have already been given the ACE Director honor, the process can be a long one and, at least for them, there were several technical interviews that were required as well. I guess if I were in Oracle’s Certification Program Office, I’d sure like the ACE Directors to take and pass my exams as a sign that the exams were worth taking and that they actually stood for something meaningful. After all, if the ACE Directors are required to take them, it would add at least a little legitimacy to the certification program, wouldn’t it?

I’m not looking to start a flame war or drag the ACE Director program over the coals. I am wondering what others may think of certifications. Note that I’ve already posted my thoughts on certifications, so you’ll see I’m not proposing that certifications be the sole measure of anything. However, they are an interesting tool and provide at least one relatively objective metric as a starting point for evaluating a candidate (for a job or for an elite honorary title like ACE Director).

Let’s see if anyone’s reading…comment away! 🙂

Monday (on a Tuesday) morning finds

I was catching up on my reading this fine Chicagoland morning and found some interesting articles that are definitely worth a short post. First, there’s a strong endorsement for Rich Niemiec’s new book Oracle 10g Performance Tuning Tips and Techniques. I’m still waiting for my copy, but Mary Ann Davidson doesn’t dish out endorsements every … Continue reading “Monday (on a Tuesday) morning finds”

I was catching up on my reading this fine Chicagoland morning and found some interesting articles that are definitely worth a short post.

First, there’s a strong endorsement for Rich Niemiec’s new book Oracle 10g Performance Tuning Tips and Techniques. I’m still waiting for my copy, but Mary Ann Davidson doesn’t dish out endorsements every day, so now I’m getting anxious to dig in.

Next in my “interesting reading” list is the aritcle on integrating reCAPTCHA with Oracle SSO by Paul Gallagher. This posting provides the code necessary to perform all the steps necessary to put a captcha on your Oracle SSO login page. Very cool stuff indeed. Bex Huff indicated in one of the comments that he wouldn’t recommend reCAPTCHA right now because while it is free, it seems to be filling his inbox with a lot of spam. Of course, it’s probably hard to determine if this is due to Bex’s general fame or reCAPTCHA! 🙂

Tanel Poder posted an article about a nice feature in Windows to allow you to color sections in the Windows Command Prompt. It isn’t that hard to implement and could be a great help for those that teach classes or even doing a presentation. It also makes screenshots more meaningful by highlighting the interesting parts of your screen. I’m definitely keeping this posting handy!

Now if I can just keep the days of the week straight this week, I’ll be doing well. I’m working on building the RAC VMs for www.OracleVMs.com and also some other installs for some of the Oracle Identity Management products inside of VMs too. So, watch for more articles about what I’ve learned here over the next week or two.

Cloning a VM on ESX Server 3.0.1

I’ve had time this week to get familiar with our test server environment which is a rather old Dell server running VMWare ESX Server 3.0.1. After creating a new VM and getting a base linux OS configured, I wanted to clone it for later use. I’ve used VMWare Workstation and VMWare Server before and the … Continue reading “Cloning a VM on ESX Server 3.0.1”

I’ve had time this week to get familiar with our test server environment which is a rather old Dell server running VMWare ESX Server 3.0.1. After creating a new VM and getting a base linux OS configured, I wanted to clone it for later use. I’ve used VMWare Workstation and VMWare Server before and the cloning process there is very simple–just copy. On ESX Server, there are a couple more steps required and then some other steps that are optional, but make life easier in the long run.

Here is the process I followed to perform a clone. It worked well and I was successful in getting my cloned VM running. I didn’t find a process describing exactly what I did, so I thought I’d post it (mostly so I can find it later when I forget what I did). I did find a similar process for a slightly older version and most of this post comes from that process with a few exceptions. Continue reading “Cloning a VM on ESX Server 3.0.1”

Oracle 11g dbhome broken…oh, wait, nevermind.

I’ve been doing a lot of testing with Oracle Database 11g lately and I’m a big fan of using oraenv to set the environment. For many releases, it seemed that Oracle had completely ignored oraenv and dbhome, but they’ve made some changes in 11g that aren’t quite so helpful it seems. I’ll probably file an … Continue reading “Oracle 11g dbhome broken…oh, wait, nevermind.”

The issue I encountered was that the dbhome script (which is called by oraenv to determine the ORACLE_HOME for a given ORACLE_SID) failed to return the proper ORACLE_HOME in some cases. After reading dbhome (it’s less than 100 lines long), I realized that the issue was…

Oh, nevermind. I started writing this from memory of one of the beta versions and when I went to check (right where I left off typing in the previous paragraph), I found that the issue had been fixed in the production release. So, apparently that bug did get fixed.

To summarize, the bug in dbhome in beta 5 was particularly interesting since it only came up when the first character in your ORACLE_SID name became a special metacharacter when preceded by a backslash (\). So, everything was going along fine until I created an instance named “rac11g1” and then dbhome failed to work, which also caused in oraenv becoming ineffective. All fixed now, nevermind. Kudos to Oracle for improving the oraenv and dbhome scripts in 11g to now also look for the ORACLE_BASE setting. As many of you have noted or will find out, ORACLE_BASE is becoming increasingly important to Oracle installations.

Oracle Clusterware & Fencing

I was just catching up on my reading and found an excellent post on Kirk McGowan’s blog discussing Oracle Clusterware’s fencing mechanisms. As Kirk details, there are many theories regarding the effectiveness and safety of Oracle’s fencing approach and he provides his usual no-nonsense responses to those theories. Incase you are lost, a little background … Continue reading “Oracle Clusterware & Fencing”

Incase you are lost, a little background may helpful. Fencing (generally speaking) is a mechanism employed by clusterware software to force one or more nodes out of a cluster in the event of a problem. The problems can be, and usually are, serious ones and if fencing algorithms weren’t included, it is likely that most clusters would implode and be very unstable. There are many different approaches to fencing. Some vendors provide I/O fencing which works with the storage to stop any I/O from the node being evicted from the cluster and therefore, prevents corruption to the cluster filesystem and/or database files residing in non-filesystem storage (like ASM or RAW). Oracle performs fencing at the node-level and it uses a modified algorithm known as STONITH (Shoot The Other Node In The Head). As Kirk explains, since there are not easily-accessible APIs to do remote power-off for other cluster nodes, Oracle Clusterware instead uses node suicide where instead of kicking the other node out of the cluster, it removes itself by rebooting. Presumably, when the node restarts, if there is some persistent failure, the node won’t be able to rejoin the cluster and administrator intervention will be required to resolve the problem.

Anyway, Kirk’s treatment of the topic is great and I learned a lot (as I often do when listening to Kirk). Thanks for a great article (and your usual wit) Kirk!

Oracle buys Bharosa

I’m completely impressed just by the descriptions of the new tools that Oracle is getting with its Bharosa acquisition. If this stuff does even half of what it is advertising it can do, I’ll be very impressed. If you’re wondering what this is all about, please check out the post on the Talking Identity blog … Continue reading “Oracle buys Bharosa”

As I learn more, I’ll be continuing to post more information here. For now, it’s on to a vacation day tomorrow!

The Best Oracle Database 11g New Features

Oracle Database 11g was officially launched today. As a beta tester for the product, I can say that this product has some very interesting new features that really make me want to recommend the upgrade to Oracle Database 11g. Here are my thoughts on a few of the new features in Oracle Database 11g. Database … Continue reading “The Best Oracle Database 11g New Features”

Here are my thoughts on a few of the new features in Oracle Database 11g.

Database Replay (Real Application Testing): This feature allows you to capture the actual workload on one system and then “play back” that workload on another database. It acts sort of like a load testing tool, but better because it actually uses the real workload from a live system to generate the load on the secondary system. The capture will include all queries, DDL, DML, and all other activity in the database. It also includes the actual timing for each event so that concurrency is also kept the same. For me, this is the most compelling new feature in Oracle Database 11g and I think it will ultimately have the most impact. If the capture can be gathered on a 10g or 9i database, the feature will be even more compelling. Rumors abound, but I’ve heard that a 10g capture may be coming in the future. Just imagine–what if you could actually test your real application workload on a new database release before doing the upgrade…awesome!
SecureFiles: I didn’t put this new feature through any performance tests, but from the technical descriptions I’ve received, it will certainly have a positive impact. Basically, SecureFiles are the next generation of LOBs. Syntactically, you can almost miss the STORE AS SECUREFILE in the CREATE TABLE syntax. However, you won’t likely miss the performance impact of using SecureFiles–some testing has shown peformance comparable to filessytem access.
Invisible Indexes: Ever have one query that could use that extra index, but that index causes severe problems for the other queries accessing that object? If so, then an invisible index may be the answer. Basically, an invisible index is one that the optimizer only considers when it is hinted to consider that index. In all other situations, it is ignored (because it is “invisible”).
Partitioning Enhancements: You can use just about any combination of partitioning and subpartitioning schemes together in 11g. The restrictions from previous versions are lifted. The SQL Access Advisor now also includes the ability to recommend partitioning for an object if you’re not sure whether or not it will help.
PL/SQL Enhancements:
- PL/SQL Fine-Grained Dependency Checking: This will enable PL/SQL stored code to remain valid if the object doesn’t require invalidation. For example, if you add a column to a table, the PL/SQL package that depends on that table shouldn’t become invalid in most cases.
- PL/SQL Automatic Native Compilation: Native Compilation has been available for the past several releases, but it had significant prerequisites including a C compiler. This new feature includes the necessary compiler and automates the steps involved so that PL/SQL can be natively compiled automatically.
Results Caching: I’m a skeptic, but if this really does work well and gives current, non-stale data, it will be a very, very big deal.
Flashback Data Archive (“Total Recall”): If you liked the flashback table and flashback transaction features, you’ll love this. It basically takes the undo information that is used to provide the flashback table feature and archive that data so that flashback table can be performed for as long as you have disk space to support it.
Segregation of Ownership: One of the important features for larger organizations is the ability to segregate ownership of the Oracle software. For Oracle RAC clusters, there are typically three separate installations: Clusterware, ASM, and DBMS. With Oracle Database 11g, the beginning of support for separation of duties is visible. Oracle has acknowledged that some customers have system administrators that care for the Clusterware, but don’t know (or really care about) the database. The storage administrators are very interested in ASM and how it works so they can configure and support database storage better, but they don’t really know much about the database. And finally, while some DBAs are fluent in Clusterware and ASM, many know a little about Clusterware, a little more about ASM, but mainly focus on the database. Oracle’s new release will include documentation arranged in a manner that supports this segregation of duties.
Rolling Upgrades: This new feature is what you think it is, but it won’t apply to upgrades to 11g. It will, however, apply to many of the patches that will be released on top of the 11g database. That’s another big motivating factor to upgrade–so that future patches and upgrades will incur less downtime.
Automatic Partition Adds (Interval Partitioning): This is the automation that many people have done via a custom process for years. Basically, if you have a partitioned object that regularly requires you to add new partitions (commonly, this is when s date is in the partition key). With this new feature, Oracle will automatically add the new partition on the first insert that should go into this new partition. Obviously, you can still create new partitions by your own methods, but you might consider doing that by just running an insert and rollback instead of through a custom process as many customers do today.
Managed Recovery Physical Standby: Finally! You can apply logs to a physical standby database while it is open read-only. There’s some black magic that makes this possible that I’m sure will be the source of much speculation until it’s guts are exposed.

Besides these highlights, there are many other features that deserve mention. Many of those features are related to lifecycle management. Some very interesting advancements related to query tuning, testing those tuned queries, and rolling the new execution plans into production in a controlled, straightforward manner are among some of the most interesting to me. In another area of lifecycle management, managing less-frequently-accessed data, Oracle provides methods to migrate that data to less expensive storage to use the storage budget most efficiently without taking data offline.