I have written a few articles about Tracefile Analyzer (TFA) in the recent past. As you may recall from these posts, a more comprehensive TFA version than the one provided with the installation media is available from My Oracle Support (MOS for short). As part of this version, you get a lot of useful, additional tools, including OSWatcher. I love OSWatcher, simply because it gives me insights that would be very hard to get with sar for example. SAR tends to be the least common denominator on most (proper) operating systems and it’s better than nothing, but please read on and let me explain why I like OSWatcher so much.

Feel free to head back to my earlier posts if you like to get some more details about “stock TFA” and “MOS TFA”. These are terms I coined by the way, you won’t find them in a MOS search.

This is a writeup on some scenario’s for disk issues that you could encounter when running linux systems. The linux systems I am talking about are centos/redhat/oracle (EL) version 7 systems. This is just a writeup for myself to know how to deal with different scenario’s, hopefully other people find this interesting too. I don’t believe there is any difference for the below scenario’s and resolutions between running physical/bare metal, virtualised or in the cloud, provided you can get access the you need (like the BIOS POST console). The test configuration uses (legacy) MBR (meaning non UEFI), grub2 as boot loader, LVM for meta devices (you don’t want to run without LVM!!) and XFS for the filesystems.

I’ve started to write a series of articles on Simple Talk from Redgate on Linux for the SQL Server DBA.  Thanks to Kathi Kellenberger, who came to my pre-con in Indianapolis SQL Saturday and then asked if it was something that I’d be up to doing.

The biggest challenge when doing one hour sessions on Linux at SQL Saturdays is that you find out, one hour is just no where, near enough.  The eight hour pre-con we get to dig in deeper, actually work through a number of labs and I feel like students leave with a better grasp on how to work with this new operating system in preparation for managing a database on it.

Here are the commands I use to setup ZFS on Oracle Linux

#This was tested on OEL 7.2 in Oracle Cloud Compute Classic and OEL 7.5 in Oracle Cloud infrastructure
set -x
cat /etc/oracle-release
yum -y install kernel-uek-devel-$(uname -r)
yum install -y yum-utils
yum-config-manager --enable ol7_developer_EPEL
yum install -y dkms
rpm -Uvh http://download.zfsonlinux.org/epel/zfs-release.el7_5.noarch.rpm
sudo yum install -y zfs
dkms status
/sbin/modprobe zfs
systemctl -a | grep zfs
echo "ZFS Pool creation on the last disk added:" 
zpool create -f myzpool -m /mnt/myzpool /dev/$(lsblk | awk 'END{print $1}')
zpool status
zpool list

The full blog is on:

Installing ZFS on OEL7 UEK4 for Docker storage - Blog dbi services

I just finished teaching an 8 hour pre-con at SQL Saturday Indianapolis on Essential Linux for the DBA.  The focus of the class was on what the Microsoft DBA would need to know as more SQL Server environments begin to run on Linux.

The obstacles and demands of them will be a bit different than the Oracle crowd, as they may not have the Linux Admin or Unix expertise onsite for support and have to fend for themselves more than I did starting out on Linux.

Some folks asked me why I chose to use Docker with the SQL Server image to teach the class and I wanted to demonstrate why this, over VMWare or other options were my final choice.

In a previous post I shared how I found out that RAC One Node databases are relocated on-line during patching and I promised a few more tests and sharing of implications. If you aren’t familiar with RAC One Node I recommend having a look at the official documentation: The Real Application Clusters Administration and Deployment Guide features it prominently in the introduction. One of the things I like to keep in mind when working with RAC One Node is this, quoting from section 1.3 in said admin and deployment guide:

This is an interesting observation I wanted to share. I have a feeling as if there didn’t seem to be too much information out there for RAC One Node (RON) users, and I hope this helps someone thinking about patching his system.

RAC-rolling patching is well documented in patch readme files, blog posts and official white papers. Most RAC DBAs have a solid handle on the procedure. Patching RAC One Node is a different affair.

What happens when patching a RAC One Node system? As the name suggests a RAC One Node database is a cluster database restricted to one active instance in normal operations. It is possible to relocate the database from one node to another online. Oracle does this by temporarily adding a second instance to the cluster database with the intention of letting it take over from the source instance. At the end of the online relocation, the source instance is shut down, and only the destination instance remains up and running.

Well, finally it’s here! 18c for on-premise installation so the world can all get stuck into the cool new features of the latest release on their own laptops   At least that is what I’ll be doing!

Naturally as soon as I heard the news, I downloaded the software and got ready to set aside the day for installation and creation of an 18c database. But I didn’t need that long – I didn’t need that long at all. Just a few clicks and a few commands and there it was – my 18c database up and running.

Check out how easy it is with my three videos.

Software Installation

This post is going to be super short, and mostly just a note to myself as I constantly forget how to create a RAC One database on the command line. This post is for 12.2.0.1 but should be similar on 12.1 (although I didn’t test!).

Provided you are licensed appropriately, this is probably the most basic way how you create an admin-managed RAC One database on Linux for use in a lab environment:

When I started the series about Tracefile Analyzer (TFA) I promised three parts. One for single instance, another one for Oracle Restart and this one is going to be about Real Application Clusters. The previous two parts are published already, this is the final piece.

The environment

I am using a virtualised 2-node cluster named rac122pri with nodes rac122pri1{1,2} based on Oracle Linux 7.4. RAC is patched to 12.2.0.1.180116. I installed a Grid Home and an RDBMS home (Enterprise Edition).

Real Application Clusters

Before starting this discussion it’s worth pointing out that TFA integration in RAC 12.2 works really well. TFA is installed as part of the initial setup of the binaries and documented in the Autonomous Health Framework.