I’ve been really busy lately doing a lot of stuff, and most of the time if I’m doing some intensive research on a topic I would just put them all in my braindump (wiki) so if you’ve been following this blog might as well subscribe on my wiki RSS because there are just a bunch of bits of research going-on (see this mindmap) and what usually happens is I put them all together to make an awesome presentation/white paper.

So this 2013.. I’ll be presenting at RMOUG, IOUG Collaborate, and KSCOPE 2013

If you’ll be at RMOUG next (more...)

This is a quick video of our Big Data Appliance first boot yesterday in our server room (with Kerry and Andy), now she’s beside our two Exadata quarter racks all we have to do now is connect both of them through the infiniband spine switch located at the bottom of each of the rack. At the latter part of the video you’ll hear me counting as I power on the top half of the rack, I’ve seen enough blinking green lights yesterday and that’s what I call “server porn”.. thinking about how can I push the limits of those (more...)

This Monday Oct 1, 2:00-2:50PM I’ll be presenting at the OakTable World which used to be called as Oracle Closed World, this year it’s a full two-day conference with awesome speakers lineup and very interesting topics… you can just watch this video by Mogens Norgaard to know more about the roots of this very technical event.

My presentation title is “Where did my CPU go?” – monitoring & capacity planning adventures on a consolidated environment .. and If you love to hack the ASH and AWR data and curious about CPU capacity planning then you’re really going to enjoy (more...)

I’ll be co-speaking with Randy Johnson (one of the authors of Expert Oracle Exadata) at E4 to share about the war stories and detail on a bunch of technical stuff on a Peoplesoft and BIEE consolidation project we had on one of our clients. See the abstract below:

Randy Johnson & Karl Arao
A PeopleSoft & OBIEE Consolidation Success Story
In today’s competitive business climate companies are under constant pressure to reduce costs without sacrificing quality. Many companies see database and server consolidation as the key to meeting this goal. Since its introduction, Exadata has become the obvious choice for (more...)

Last week I had a lengthy post at oracle-l that tackles Calibrate IO, Short Stroking, Stripe size, UEK kernel, and ASM redundancy effect on IOPS Exadata which you can read here
followed by interesting exchange of tweets with Kevin Closson here (see 06/21-22 tweets) which I was replying in between games at UnderwaterHockey US Nationals 2012 which we won the championship for the B division I have my awesome photo with the medal here

This post will detail on the ASM redundancy/parity effect on IOPS… if… by changing the ASM redundancy (external, normal, and high) will it decrease the workload (more...)

I’ve been working on a lot of good schtuff lately on the area of capacity planning. And I’ve greatly improved my time to generate workload characterization visualization and analysis using my AWR scripts which I enhanced to fit on the analytics tool that I’ve been using.. and that is Tableau.

So I’ve got a couple of performance and capacity planning use case scenarios which I will blog in parts in the next few days or weeks. But before that I need to familiarize you on how I mine this valuable AWR performance data.

Let’s get started with the AWR top (more...)

In the next few days I’ll be at RMOUG 2012 training days! and I’ll be again presenting the topic so dear to my heart. Mining the AWR I’ve updated the material with a couple of new research and findings, some of them are as follows:

• CPU Wait (new metric in 11g Performance page)
• Latency issues on virtualized environments

So if you are attending the RMOUG training days, stop by at my session @ room 401 Thursday 9:45 am-10:45 am

There will also be a RAC Attack at the exhibition area so that must be fun

and don’t forget to follow (more...)

Lately I’ve been busy on projects and research so I’m putting more and more stuff on my wiki/braindump… and really I need to catch up on blogging.
I have a longer draft post about SQLTXPLAIN.. but I haven’t finished it yet so I’ll just go with the quick post for now.

SQLTXPLAIN:

I’ve been using SQLTXPLAIN for quite a while, and I can say I’m a really big fan. It’s a cool tool to use for systematic SQL Tuning so I got them all neatly documented here http://karlarao.tiddlyspot.com/#SQLTXPLAIN.

BTW, Carlos Sierra, the author of the tool will (more...)

Getting tired of typing and setting your ORACLE_HOME, ORACLE_SID and troubleshooting your . oraenv ?
going/connecting to different client sites with different platforms and server environments sometimes it is frustrating just how long it takes to get a proper SQL*Plus environment

So I always make use of this script
http://karlarao.tiddlyspot.com/#%5B%5Bstep%20by%20step%20environment%5D%5D

and for every server that I access I just have to do three bits of typing:

. ~oracle/.karlenv <<– set the environment
2 <<– choose an instance
s <<– rlwrap'd sqlplus alias

see example usage below:

[root@desktopserver ~]# su - oracle
[oracle@desktopserver ~]$
[oracle@desktopserver ~]$ vi .karlenv      <-- copy  (more...)

The past few days, I’ve been troubleshooting an email alerting problem on an EMGC 11.1 install on a client site.
But this troubleshooting also includes setting up my own email server and reproducing the problem http://karlarao.tiddlyspot.com/#EmailNotificationsNotSending
Watching/digging on the EM web based interface is tedious so I devised a way to just mine on the MGMT views… thanks to the MOS 421499.1 EMDIAG REPVFY Kit – which is a good source for mining the EMGC repository.

This simple query from the MGMT views will output something like this

SELECT t.target_name, t.target_type,
       substr(s.message,1,50) ,  (more...)

Earlier Oracle announced the Oracle Database Appliance which is a really cool RAC-in-a-box. And here at Enkitec office we are very lucky to get our hands dirty and play with this new beast On the photo below you will see the Oracle Database Appliance.

Andy Colvin has some detailed reviews about the Oracle Database Appliance.. check out these links if you want to see the internals of the machine
http://blog.oracle-ninja.com/2011/09/inside-the-oracle-database-appliance-part-1/
http://blog.oracle-ninja.com/2011/09/oracle-announces-oracle-database-appliance/

But this post will walk you through the installation and configuration of the Oracle Database Appliance.. well all I can say.. at the end of (more...)

Earlier I did a presentation at VirtaThon which is the same topic that I presented at Hotsos 2011.. Mining the AWR and Capacity Planning are very dear to my heart and up until now I’m using every research I did on that presentation to work on an “Exadata Provisioning Tool” which I’m planning to present at the next Hotsos 2012… well, the only thing that’s different this time is.. my attendees are virtual geeks all over the world

I was at the Virtual Room #100, and the staff earlier were really helpful and most of all I had fun (more...)

It’s been a long time since my last blog and ever since I joined Enkitec I’ve been busy immersing myself in Exadata stuff. So most of the time I’m just posting my brain dumps on my wiki although I know there’s a lot of blog worthy scenarios and projects that I have worked on just like last week when we did an Exadata Half Rack X2-2 Split Configuration from the factory image without the use of Oracle’s ACS. We did all of the pre-config and config tasks like the onecommand, patched the database to 11.2.0.2 BP8, patched (more...)

Dave Abercrombie mailed me earlier that the May 2011 NoCOUG Journal is already out and can be viewed online at http://www.nocoug.org/Journal/NoCOUG_Journal_201105.pdf.

I met Dave at Hotsos 2011 when he attended my presentation.. apparently we have the same interest about Statistics, Linear Regression, AWR, AAS and he’s got awesome blogs about it at http://aberdave.blogspot.com. Also being the Journal Editor at Northern California Oracle Users’s Group, he invited me to write a short article about the question:

Why is my database slow?

The NoCOUG Journal having a very wide readership with the last issue being downloaded around 6000 times from (more...)

A quick post… which is a bit interesting…

As I was searching for Exadata viewlets in Oracle By Example portal (http://goo.gl/HjshR) I clicked on the “Advanced Search”

and then filtered by Product Family (Database) and then by Product…

to my surprise there was an option for “Database 12g”….

oh well.. I checked on the Lifetime Support Policy (http://www.oracle.com/us/support/library/lifetime-support-technology-069183.pdf) and looking at the release dates
it could be possible that they will release the new version anytime this year..

could be in Oracle Open World 2011? hmmm…

For all that loves Oracle performance.. Hotsos is truly the best conference, all the speakers are performance geeks, all the attendees talks about performance. Everything is about performance! There are lot more stuff that I like about my first Hotsos experience, the following are some of them..

I like that presenters and attendees are curious about what each performance geek has to say..

I like that whenever their brains are already fried. They consume as much coffee/soda as they can.. and just lay their butts on this couch.. and still.. talk about performance.

I like that after all the sessions, (more...)

A couple of weeks ago, RedHat announced the general availability of RHEL6… also effective on this release is the change on their certification offering. RHCT will now be replaced by RHCSA (Red Hat Certified System Administrator), and if you would like to be RHCE on RHEL6 regardless of your certification on RHEL5 you still have to go through the RHCSA exam.. and then once you pass.. you are then allowed to take RHCE exam for RHEL6. More details here: RHCSA, RHCE

Since my self study modules/materials are on RHEL5, and it would take a while for the RHEL6 exam (more...)

Hotsos is an annual conference that is devoted on Oracle system performance and the people presenting there are really passionate about their research and highly specialized about their subject area. Kinda geeky, but hey, performance is never boring.. and for me there’s still a lot of things to learn on each of the areas of performance and these are as follows:  Application Testing Benchmark Capacity Planning Database Tuning Hardware and OS Performance Tools SQL Tuning Troubleshooting & Internals

Yesterday, I received an email that I have been accepted as a presenter for Hotsos 2011 this is really cool .. !

My presentation (more...)