Andreas' Adventures

* (stolen title from a German children book - a week full of Saturdays) This week was different than other weeks. I spend one day working from home (well, almost - as I had to travel to the office to get my laptop re-staged) and also at two Oracle Community meetings. Although this was work (with some great fun-activities as well) this felt like an extraordinary week. Read the book if you want to get the feeling. The first community meeting (SOA and E2.0) was in my own town Utrecht, which was off course very convenient. I met a lot of people from all over Europe and had the chance to exchange ideas about SOA and learned that BPM will be the next big thing. WebCenter will also evolve into something even bigger than it is now, due to the advance of Fusion Apps. The best thing however was the Q&A session with David Shaffer of Oracle. Oracle shows a lot of interest in the activities and concerns of partners. After that I went to Paris to attend the Security Community meeting. Same setti...

This is an age old dilemma for people like me. You work in a project, that has several environments (DEV, TEST, QA, PRD). Typically as a project member you are not allowed access to QA and PRD - which is very good. The main problem is that the QA and PRD environments offer high availability. In order to provide a good installation manual you need to come up with clustering even when you do not have enough machines. So for my current project I have chosen a different approach. I have four blades, three with 1 CPU (dual core) and one with 2 CPU's (dual core as well). I use one for the database, one for the middle tier (the bigger one), one for the web tier, and the fourth one for the load balancer and firewall. The load balancer and firewall will be done with iptables and HAProxy. Now on the middle tier I needed to have 14 different nodes. I created virtual NIC's and put them into the hosts file as well. In order to have "independent" WebLogic Servers I installed them i...

When using the Oracle Database for the storage of WebLogic Portal settings you need to modify the database.properties and run the create_db.sh script. In the database.properties the example uses the Pointbase, so the values in the Oacle section are filled with placeholders. When replacing the jdbc string be carefull not to remove all @ signs. The original value is: oracle.url=jdbc:oracle:thin:@@DB_HOST@:@DB_PORT@:@DB_NAME@ The fisrt @ after the 'thin:@' needs to remain there. Otherwise you will get a sql exception when you run the create_db.sh script.

I'm just busy preparing an article on the history of Oracle on Linux for the Dutch magazine We Love IT. This article will be pulished in edition number 5 of this excellent Oracle & Java magazine. If you want to take a look at We Love IT Oracle & Java Magazine you can also read past editions on-line or register for a free paper copy.

Since Sunday Oracle Open is in full swing. Sessions, hands-on labs, exhibitions, user groups, receptions, parties, and best of all: ALL OF YOU! I meet so many people that I have heard of, people who have blogs as well, familiar faces from Oracle, lots of folks from my company and of course from other companies and Oracle customers. Content of the sessions is usually very good, and again you get the insider information from Oracle product managers, and partners who implemented some cool pieces of Oracle software in their projects. Hope you all enjoy the show and I also hope to see as many of my readers here in sunny San Francisco! cu Andreas

Hit the following problem: After a manual install of a database the database and its instances were not registered with the CRS. Using srvctl I registered the database and its instances in the CRS. Unfortunately I could not start the database or and instance. Well I could start one instance but none of the other three. Same thing happened when I used another instance (start inst1 but not inst2, inst3 and inst4, then start inst4, but not inst1, inst2, inst3). Then I tried to start one of the other instances manually. See what happened: SQL> startup ORACLE instance started. Total System Global Area 838860800 bytes Fixed Size 2074992 bytes Variable Size 218105488 bytes Database Buffers 612368384 bytes Redo Buffers 6311936 bytes ORA-01102: cannot mount database in EXCLUSIVE mode I found out that the culprit was an nice combination of init parameters. CLUSTER_DATABASE_INSTANCES=4 CLUSTER_DATABASE=NO So my explanation was that the data...

When you cluster two Oracle Application Servers (10.1.3) you will receive a warning that it is not recommended (supported) to have two Application Server Controls in this cluster. This week I had the need to enable the second ASC as the deployment of an application failed if it was carried of from the remote ASC. This is how I did this. Go to the server.xml in j2ee/home/config and change into

Had a problem with the installation of MRCA in a RAC cluster. This can happen when you are installing the MRCA in a RAC environment and the total length of the description string is longer than 239 chars. Found this in the logfile of the MRCA assistant: [SQLPlusAction] Connect string: (DESCRIPTION=(ADDRESS_LIST=(ADDRESS=(PROTOCOL=TCP)(HOST=abcdefghijklmno01)(PORT=1582))(ADDRESS=(PROTOCOL=TCP)(HOST=abcdefghijklmno02)(PORT=1582))(ADDRESS=(PROTOCOL=TCP)(HOST=abcdefghijklmno03)(PORT=1582)))(CONNECT_DATA=(SERVICE_NAME=INFRA))) SQL> string beginning "(DESCRIPTI..." is too long. maximum size is 239 characters. Of course the above hostnames are fake (we have different ones, but just as long). The strange thing is that not all parts fail. So apparently each assistant uses a different method. Solution was to use just one or two of the hostnames in the MRCA assistant. It is a RAC cluster - so even one host would be sufficient.

I encountered another strange thing in the Grid Control. The intention was to secure the communication between the agents on AIX and the OMS. However on one machine this was working, while the other two machines where I installed the agent succeeded in putting the agent in secure mode but did never upload their data. Using emctl status agent -secure I found out that they thought that they were not in secure mode. The solution was pretty simple (and another proof that Oracle has to find some unique way to resolve network addresses).. In my hostfile the hosts that did not work were described as 10.1.2.3 hostname hostname.domain.com I changed this to be 10.1.2.3 hostname.domain.com hostname resecured everything (OMS and agents) and it then it worked.

I will be presenting at the Oracle Open World in San Francisco in September. Session details: Session ID: S300515 Session Title: How to Achieve 99.99 Percent Availability Track: Database More to come ....

When extracting a cpio file with Oracle software from OTN on AIX you might encounter the following problem: oracle@mymachine-app:/install/oracle/MRCA>cpio -idmv cpio: 0511-903 Out of phase! cpio attempting to continue... cpio: 0511-904 skipping 642010 bytes to get back in phase! One or more files lost and the previous file is possibly corrupt! Segmentation fault The solution is to use the option -idcmv oracle@mymachine-app:/install/oracle/MRCA>cpio -idcmv c Reads and writes header information in ASCII character form. If a cpio archive was created using the c flag, it must be extracted with c flag.

Found out that the DBCA does not create a specific ARCH location when you do not use the default one. When you are in the dbca and edit the init parameter So after my nice little database was frozen I created the arch directory in the ASM and voila, everything was back to normal.

As I always forget this (and have to look for it) I will put it into my blog - maybe I will memorize it now ;-) SELECT value$ FROM sys.props$ WHERE name = 'NLS_CHARACTERSET';

Setting up Data Guard with Maximum Protection requires the Data Guard Broker. Having setup Data Guard a couple of times without the broker I thought "how difficult can it be?" and started. After some preparations I started the dgmgrl in order to configure the various sites. To my astonishment no command at all was recognized. I have to admit that I even went back to the manuals to see if it was my fault. And then - shame on me - I tried to use the help function inside the dgmgrl. See what happens then: WHAHAHAHA! Ok, so either I was seriously stupid or there was an error - probably a relink issue. A good friend of mine at Oracle PTS - Robert Pastijn - offered the needed help and pointed out that a bug was introduced on AIX in the upgrade from 10.2.0.1.0 to 10.2.0.2.0 . The patch fixed this problem. So after all Oracle did not (yet) follow the classic Microsoft error: Error - No Error.

I thought that using the Oracle Enterprise Linux for the 11g would be a pretty cool idea. Actually the installation experience is not different from a normal RH ES version. I would have thought that a couple of necessary packages were already included (unixODBC, libaio, etc) but I guess that this is the age-old problem of having the OS out there for some time when the software (DB) is still in development. It would be awesome if Oracle would come up with a intermediate release of the OEL when they bring out a new version of the DB or the AS (yes I like to daydream :-) When installing the software no issues were detected. However when I build the Database (dbca) it seemed to hang at 45%. I retried three times (sample schemas on/off). Then I left it running while I was having lunch. And guess what: it just takes a little bit longer. So when installing 11g just bring a little bit of patience with you.

Ok, I promise I will take more time to read things like manuals and other documents when it comes to new features in the database. Take the Flashback Recovery Area (FRA). Oracle does store archive logs in there, which is cool as it speeds up the recovery. The bad thing is that the Oracle Database behaves like a small child. When you do not look it will do strange things. So I was busy setting up the online backup of an infrastructure database. This one is still in 10.1.x while all the others in this environment are on 10.2.x . For the RMAN I have a catalog (also 10.2.x) so I had some problems with the versions as the 10.1.x database refused to get into the 10.2.x RMAN catalog. I thought that I have plenty of space for the archivelogs in the ASM (everything was RAC of course). I turned my attention to some other issues (aka not watching your kid for a moment). Then during an important demo for the client a developer told me that he cannot use the OID. Of course I checked, but the OID wa...

Deployment of an ear file with the Application Server Control usually required to have the ear file on your local host. Very often this is not the case as your Application Server machine will be humming in the Data Center while you sit comfortable behind your PC or laptop. But I just found out that the ASC offers a new functionality: specify the location on the host where the ASC is running. The following screen shot shows this - while I was deploying the Wiki of the Oracle WebCenter: It even gets better - during the deployment instead of the small clock the messages are displayed:

Thanks to my friend Robert I now grasped the concept of the VIP in RAC environments. VIP's were created in order to speed up the process of letting the client know that the server died. Imagine that the server crashed without any possibility to inform the client. The client will then initiate a request and has to wait for the TCP timeout. That can easily be 120 seconds. The client should therefore use the VIP in the tnsnames.ora. Performing a request now will immediately give a response. The client can then initiate its TAF faster.