Oracle Contest: Are You The Smartest 2010 - WINNER!!!

In the past half year Oracle BeNeLux organized a contest, called Are You The Smartest. This is a contest for Oracle Partners, and covered 7 evening sessions.
The idea behind this contest is to get Oracle Partner consultants up to speed with new products and strategies on the technology level. Seven evenings packed with information on the following topics:

 

• Oracle Technology Overview
• Layering your Enterprise Security
• Database 11g r2 New Features
• Enterprise 2.0 and moreLarge Databases, Partitioning, Exadata, OWB-ODI, Golden GateOracle
• Enterprise Manager from OS to Application
• Application Grid 11g with WLS, Coherence, Tuxedo, JRockit, RealTime, ...

 

Every topic was followed by an exam, to be taken right before the next session.
These were no easy exams, I can tell you. 20 questions in half an hour. Half of the questions were taken directly from the session content, the other half from other documentation and information on the web. Scoring is quite particular: every correct answer is a point, every wrong answer is a negative... So in theory, a negative score can be achieved... Hence, study was necessary.

 

My company (Inter Access B.V.) subscribed with approximately 25 consultants, so we were a "big" partner. One of us was to be rewarded the grand prize: An All-inclusive trip to San Francisco and Las Vegas, including a visit to Oracle Headquarters in Redwood Shores.

 

Three weeks ago, I received the good news: I am one of the winners of the grand prize! Yesterday evening I was awarded the prize, and next week I will be flying to San Francisco for the trip.

 

For a complete coverage of the trip, please visit http://ayts2010.blogspot.com/. Stay Tuned!

ACFS: NOT for Database Files!

ASM Cluster File System was introduced with Grid Infrastructure along with Oracle 11g Release 2. To be honest, I assumed this file system layer was also provided to store database files, a kind of improvement, because ASM, being a black box to many, 'hided' these database files from sight on the Operating System. Which - on the other side - was kind of neat, because chances were lowered these files to be accidentally removed by non-knowledgable users.

It is technically possible to store your database files on ACFS, no question about that. I already deployed a number of test databases on ACFS. However, the Oracle 11g Release 2 Storage Administrator's Guide, Chapter 5 states:

• Oracle ASM is the preferred storage manager for all database files. It has been specifically designed and optimized to provide the best performance for database file types.

• Oracle ACFS is the preferred file manager for non-database files. It is optimized for general purpose files.

• Oracle ACFS does not support any file that can be directly stored in Oracle ASM.

  Not supported means Oracle Support Services will not take calls and development will not fix bugs associated with storing unsupported file types in Oracle ACFS.

Especially that last sentence says it all: If you run into trouble with your database stored on ACFS, you will not be assisted by Oracle Support.

Here is the list of file types that are NOT supported to be stored on ACFS:

Control files

Data files

Redo log files

Archive log files

Temporary files

Data file backup pieces

Data file incremental backup pieces

Archive log backup piece

Data file copy

Persistent initialization parameter file (SPFILE)

Flashback logs

Change tracking file

Data Pump dumpset

Automatically generated control file backup

Cross-platform transportable data files

Flash file

Oracle ASM Persistent initialization parameter file (SPFILE)

backup

Oracle Cluster Registry file

Be aware of this when you are designing your Grid Infrastructure!

UKOUG RAC & HA SIG Meeting Agenda Available

On February 10 I will present at the UKOUG RAC & HA SIG meeting at Oracle in Reading.
The agenda has been published and will contain the following interesting sessions:

10:00
Welcome and Introduction

10:15
Support Roundup - Phil Davies, Oracle

10:35
Recovery of very Large Database in shortest time possible - Arnoud Roth, Inter Access

11:45
ASM Split Brain - Problem Description - Pavel Rabel, DSP Managed Services

12:15
Application Consolidation Experiences on a 3-node RAC Cluster - Martin Bach, Markit Group Ltd.

14:00
Using RAC and Grid for Database Consolidation - Panel Discussion

14:45
Rolling Database Upgrade, a Real World Experience - Thomas Ramanauskas, ekc

15:15
Oracle RAC on Cisco UCS hardware, boxes to blades by brunch - Dev Nayak, DSP Managed Services and Carl Bradshaw, Cisco

16:00
Stretched RAC Cluster with 11gR2, David Burnham, Ioko365

16:30
Close


Looks to be a promising day!
I am really looking forward being there.

Happy Holidays!

Wishing everybody out there a very merry Christmas and a prosperous 2010, full of learning and sharing!
Keep in Touch!
Arnoud

Presenting @ UKOUG RAC & HA SIG meeting on Feb 10

On February 10, 2010, the UKOUG RAC & HA SIG will organize it's half-yearly SIG meeting.

I am very pleased to tell you that I have been invited to join this meeting and present about the recovery method I have been exploring lately (see this post, with all its referring posts).

The agenda is not yet fully confirmed, but there will be

• a forum discussion on the topic of using Grid and/or Real Applications Cluster for consolidation;
  
• Martin Bach (Oracle 10g Certified Master) will do a presentation.
  
• My presentation - Lightning fast recovery of (physically) corrupted databases without the need to restore the backup - or - To Restore Or Not?
  

Other presentations / sessions have to be confirmed yet, but it all seems quite promising (if I may speak - partially - for myself:-).
Once the program is confirmed completely, I will post about it again.

The event will take place on Feb. 10 at the Customer Visitor Center at Oracle Thames Valley Park in Reading, UK.

Looking forward to an incredible day of learning and sharing.

E-Business Suite Release 12.1.2 available

Having been ill for a couple of days, I missed Steven Chan's announcement for Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1.2.
In an earlier post I already elaborated on the new Technology Features of this release.
I will get my 12.1.1 environment started up this weekend and see whether I can upgrade to 12.1.2 according to Metalink Note 845809.1.

Nice new feature: Oracle Database 11gR2 is certified with R12.1.2 (or should it be the other way around?)!

I will keep you updated on my progress.

E-Business Suite R12: Shared Application Tier File System

In Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12, one of the eye-catching new features was the Instance Home, or $INST_TOP. The result of this Instance Home is that you can now share the APPL_TOP between multiple installations of Oracle E-Business Suite.
I have seen a number of articles and discussions on the Internet discussing the reasons why one would want to share the APPL_TOP between E-Business Suites.

Why share?
Personally, I didn't see any reason why I would want this, other than to see it work and be able to use the feature, when time would come that I would need it.
I cannot remember where anymore, but I saw a reason lately that actually made sense to me:
As a DBA, it could be of use when I would want to replay issues that have been reported to me, being sure that I would be using the exact same APPL_TOP. I could set up a separate E-Business Suite, sharing the APPL_TOP, but having my own database. Now I can play around with my own E-Business Suite, without making changes to the production data, but I am still using the very same code as in the production environment. To make sure I do not break anything, I could even mount the APPL_TOP read only.
Recently I found another reason why it could be interesting to share the APPL_TOP: When your production environment consists of multiple E-Business Suites. I heard about Oracle's recommendations to separate Advanced Supply Chain Planning from your OLTP E-Business Suite environment. You would have to maintain two E-Business Suites, and I can see a couple of reasons why you would want to have identical code versions on each of them. In order to keep the two (or any number of) environments synchronous, you might want to implement the shared APPL_TOP.

Share what? APPL_TOP vs. Application Tier File System
By the way, can "shared APPL_TOP" also be read as "Shared Application Tier File System"? I have taken up the habit of asking whether APPL_TOP means Application Tier File System, or it just reflects the $APPL_TOP directory with all its subdirectories. It happens to be that the two are not the same, even though many of us use the two simultaneously.
In my opinion (but that may be because my experience goes back to the days these technologies were introduced), the APPL_TOP is just the ($)APPL_TOP: the top level directory that contains the product tops (/whatever_directory/apps/apps_st/appl).
The Application Tier File System is more than just the APPL_TOP. It contains the whole set of code that makes the Application Tier, i.e. the APPL_TOP, COMMON_TOP, but also the 10.1.2 and 10.1.3 ORACLE_HOMEs that reside under /whatever_directory/apps/tech_st. To conclude: The Application Tier File System is everything that resides under /whatever_directory/apps. That is a whole lot more.
But hang on? The question now is what Oracle means by stating that the APPL_TOP can be shared among multiple E-Business Suite environments. Do they mean just the APPL_TOP, or the Application Tier File System?
The official answer can be found in Metalink Note 384248.1, Appendix B where you can read that it is possible to share the complete Application Tier File System among multiple unshared E-Business Suite Databases.