ODI: When to use RDA and RCC ?

For Oracle Data Integrator there are two troubleshooting tools available, RDA (Remote Diagnostics Agent like for most other Oracle products) and RCC (Repository Consistency Checker). So which do I use and when? 

  • RDA can be used to help diagnose issues in an ODI 11g environment and with other integrated (more...)

Extending the PeopleSoft 9.2 virtual machine with GUI and Guest Additions

In my previous post I described the steps for getting started with the PeopleSoft 9.2 virtual machine. Although I am still thrilled that Oracle has made this generally available, I am of the opinion that it would have even been

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Installing PeopleSoft 9.2 pre-build virtual machine

The past years I have seen a lot of people on OTN forum struggling with PeopleSoft installations. Installing PeopleSoft on uncertified OS, mismatch between versions and releases, 32 vs 64 bit, etc, etc. Well those days are over. As of March

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Switching from VMWare to VirtualBox

Ever since I discovered virtualization, I have been creating and using dedicated virtual machines for all my PeopleSoft sandboxes and Fusion MiddleWare components. This allowed me to run multiple releases of OS and PeopleSoft on my own laptop. Until recently I was

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About Java class, HTTP POST and viewContentURL

As of PeopleTools 8.52 it is possible to use REST services for POST/GET functionality. However what do you do if you are on an older PeopleTools version, but still need to make a HTTP POST and then GET the response?

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Video Demo: Hybrid Cloud Integrations using Oracle SOA Suite

The blog post "Cloud Integration in Minutes" - True or False? highlighted the challenges faced by integration projects, beyond just simple web service connectivity. However, as stated in that article, it is possible to implement SaaS API connectivity in minutes, and this post is going to show you how! We (more...)

Using Gmail as SMTP server for PeopleSoft

A lot of us developers use local PeopleSoft sandboxes for (self)training and R&D. One of the biggest issues we usually encounter on local sandboxes is the lack of a SMTP server for testing workflow mail. Until today I used PostcastServer

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Upgrade to PeopleTools 8.53: What you need to know

It has been a couple of weeks now that PeopleTools 8.53 has been released. Soon customers will upgrade or are even already upgrading to the new PeopleTools release. To help customers and partner to streamline this process, an Advisor Webcast

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Integration Broker basics for the PeopleSoft developer

In the past year we have answered a lot of questions on OTN Forum on the Integration Broker and how to work with web services in PeopleSoft. We have decided to share with you a training that we have written

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Lessons from Africa, Part 2

Last week was busy… making travel arrangements for this week’s trip to New York (technically Jersey) and some light analysis of AWR reports from exadata RAT runs and some heavy troubleshooting of a Solaris x86 RAC cluster with random node reboots. (I think I finally traced the node reboots to a kernel CPU/scheduling problem). I really did thoroughly enjoy my time in Africa despite being nowhere near Oracle software – but it feels good to be working on challenging cluster problems again!

Before I completely forget the details from my work in Africa I want to wrap up my article (more...)

Lessons From Rural Africa

It has been nine months since I’ve written here. Needless to say, a lot has happened!

First, my family was living in Africa for three months earlier this year while I did some tech work at an NGO hospital. Second, upon our return I decided to join the good people at Pythian. I’m not moving to Canada, although I will travel a decent bit as part of the company’s consulting group.

If you’re interested in the Africa trip, look at the Africa page. I wasn’t working with Oracle technology but it was still a very interesting, challenging and engaging project.

(more...)

Making Simple Performance Charts

Before I dive into this blog post, quick heads up for anyone attending UKOUG: on Tuesday only, I’ll be hanging out with some very smart people from the IOUG RAC Special Interest Group in the “gallery” above the exhibition hall. We’re ready to help anyone run a RAC cluster in a virtual environment on their own laptop. And if your laptop doesn’t meet the minimum requirements then you can try with one of our demo workstations. Come find us!!

Why Make Charts

I’ve heard Kyle Hailey speak on a few different occasions, and more than once he’s talked about (more...)

RAC Attack in OTN Lounge at OOW11

Want to get your hands on a key technology in both the Exadata Database Machine and the newly announced Oracle Database Appliance?

If you’ll be at OpenWorld – in just 11 days – then the IOUG RAC SIG is putting together a special event for you!  (You might have already heard about this on Twitter or from Justin at the OTN Blog.)

Every day from 9am to 1pm, find our table in the OTN Lounge (on Howard Street) and we’ll help you get an 11gR2 RAC cluster database running inside virtual machines on your own windows-based laptop. (more...)

Performance Tuning for Oracle Developers

One of my recent customers was a company with a somewhat large warehouse (around 60TB) on Oracle 10gR2.  The system was using RAC, though it was a fairly simple setup: two nodes, very large AIX LPARs, workload manually partitioned between them and somewhat evenly balanced.  The most important demand of their business is a large number of reports that must be generated every day from the warehouse.  These reports were beginning to take most of the day and consume a large amount of resources… and the current forecast is for dramatic data growth later this year.  (more...)

Developer Access To 10046 Trace Files

Lets suppose you are a DBA at a large company. You have some great developers, and they’re learning all about how to turn on full logging of their code through the 10046 database trace. They just learned how to use this data in summary form to find out – at a very detailed level – what’s REALLY taking up all the time during their big batch program which runs too long. They’re salivating over this trace data – but you work for a big company with security policies that can’t be easily changed, where developers rarely get any kind of (more...)

Finally on Twitter

Overheard in an IRC chat room (Freenode#oracle) this morning…

[24 May 11 09:30] * cheboygan: glad to see that someone read the
  blog post though.  at least i know one person read it.
[24 May 11 09:30] * rizzo: it got re-tweeted a lot last week
[24 May 11 09:30] * rizzo: get yourself on twitter, man
[24 May 11 09:30] * cheboygan: i've been resisting...
[24 May 11 09:30] * rizzo: give in
[24 May 11 09:30] * rizzo: it calls to you
[24 May 11 09:31] * cheboygan is still fighting it
[24 May 11 09:31] *  (more...)

RAC Attack – Oracle Cluster Database at Home

First of all, the RAC Attack deep dive at Collaborate went great – thanks to everyone who participated! The room was full (20 participants) and I got evaluations from about half of them. Here’s a summary of the eval results:

  • 100% class met expectations, would recommend to others
  • 66% easy to follow, could use skills in working environment
  • 100% already familiar with oracle, 90% use oracle daily
  • 0 negative reviews of instructor (phew!)
  • 1 negative review of curriculum: said practice exercises weren’t relevant but training manual was still above average.
  • 0 negative “comments”

There were several positive comments such (more...)

BYO Oracle RAC on EC2

Over the past year or so I’ve had a number of conversations about running Oracle RAC on Amazon’s EC2 cloud platform. Chet Justice had suggested a long time ago that I try it, but I never quite found the time. Last fall at the Oak Table Symposium in Michigan, Jeremiah Wilton told me he hadn’t yet done it and I spent the last night scheming with Charles Schultz about getting started. But it wasn’t until this week that I finally found the time to try. (To be fair, I’ve been quite busy lately — our first kid was born on (more...)

Binding DBLINK to a Network Interface

Just thought I’d do a quick post on this one; came out of a conversation about a month or two ago.

We had a single-instance database running on a failover cluster (RHCS). A database link existed for a related database and the connection had to pass through a firewall. The problem was the firewall: it had a rule which only allowed connections from the VIP.

The database server has two IP addresses – a system IP and a VIP. Is there any way to bind the dblink to one specific interface? (Note: we would still like the system IP to (more...)

unplumb (or unbinding) NICs on Linux

I’ve been quiet for a long time now, but this entry hopefully will shake the cobwebs off and get me back into the habit.

I recently had a need to “unplumb” (from Solaris fame) or make interfaces on Linux “disappear” from the ifconfig list. It could be that I don’t know how to completely deconfigure an interface, but I didn’t find any methods to unassign an IP address from a Linux Ethernet interface after it was assigned. You can take interfaces down (ifconfig eth3 down) and reconfigure them to assign different addresses, but not remove the address completely.

After many (more...)