Oracle Cloud Machine ; Your Own Cloud Under Your Own Control

Yes, every company wants to be on cloud but not everyone wants that cloud to be out there in wild no matter how secure it is. Some want their cloud to be trapped within their own premise, under their own control.

Oracle GoldenGate Cloud Service

Even on Amazon AWS, for the migration of Oracle databases from on-prem to Cloud, my tool of choice is GoldenGate. The general steps I took for this migration was to create extract on source in on-prem, which sent data to replicat running in AWS Cloud in EC2 server, which in turn applied data to cloud database in RDS.

Steps for Moving ASM Disk from FRA to DATA

Due to some unexpected data load, the space in DATA diskgroup became critically low on one of the production systems during middle of night on the weekend. There was no time to get a new disk and we needed the space to make room for new data load scheduled to be run after 3 hours.

12c Patching Resume with Nonrolling Option While Analyze - JSON Magic

I was engaged in an interesting Oracle 12c patching today.  Patch applicability was checked by using:

"$GRID_HOME/OPatch/opatchauto apply /u01/app/oracle/software/24436306 -analyze"

and it failed because its a non-rolling patch:

Love Your Data Conference in NYC on 31st May

In this InfoEra, its all about data.Whether its in the cloud or on-premises everything is truly revolving around and is for data. Pythian understood that decades ago and loving the data of their customers since day one. They are showcasing this love on 31st May in NYC.

To help you turn your organization into a truly data-driven business, this interactive 1-day event in New York City on May 31, 2017, combines presentations, practical interactive panel sessions and open discussions across business and technical tracks.

This event is for CIO’s and IT Business leaders interested in learning how to better empower their company to drive business outcomes with analytics. Pythian’s Love Your Data Conference will focus on practical ways to:

• Transform your organization using data and self-service analytics
• Align IT to the business by giving all users access to data
• Add data intelligence and automation to business decisions
• Get a 360-degree view of your customer and promote innovation 

If you want to attend only one event this year then this must be the one.

Google Big Querry and Oracle Smart Scan

Marveling at the technology is my pastime and lately there are 2 technologies which truly have made me say ' Simply Wow.' One is Google's Big Query and the other one is Oracle's Exadata Smart Scan.

I have been managing data in different databases for a long time to appreciate how critical it is for the client to get the results out of their data as fast as possible. It's all about the returning results at the end after issuing a query or clicking a button.

End user or developer don't really care as how many terabytes of data is there. DBAs and data architects might love to boast about the humongous volumes of data they store and support but there is nothing to write home about, if that data cannot be retrieved as quickly as possible.

When I first migrated a 9TB database to Oracle Exadata few years back and ran a heavy report first time, it returned results in a jiffy, while my jaws dropped. This report used to take at least 70 minutes before without smart scan. I had to bring the developer to double check whether the results were correct or not . Oracle's Exadata smart scan is phenomenal.

I got similar jaw-dropping experience yesterday when I saw Google Cloud Platform's product Big Query in action during an Onboard session Sydney. A SQL with regex was run on multi terabyte of dataset with lots of sorting and it returned the results from the cloud in few seconds. Best thing about Big Query is that the all-familiar SQL is used and nothing fancy is needed. You get your petabytes of data warehouse in Google's cloud and then use your SQL to analyze that dataset. Sweet part is the agility and transparency with which that data is returned.

Simply beautiful.

What Oracle DBAs Need to Learn in Oracle Cloud Platform?

The transition from Oracle on-premises DBA to Oracle Cloud DBA is imminent for many of us. In fact, IMHO; the existing Oracle DBAs would have to manage database both on-premises and in cloud for a long time.

So what Oracle DBA needs to learn in Oracle Cloud Platform? If you visit the Oracle Cloud website, it's a mouthful and more. Its very easy to get bogged down as there are lots of things to learn it seems at first.

The good news is that as an experienced Oracle DBA you know most of things already. So just brush up your basic concept of cloud computing and then start from the following cloud offerings from Oracle Cloud Platform:

• Database Cloud Schema Service
• Database Cloud Database as a Service
• Database Backup Cloud Service

Read about above as much as possible, and if you get a chance play with them. You would be surprised to find out that you know almost everything about these things as they are built upon the existing Oracle technologies.

One thing which is a must for this brave new world of Oracle Cloud DBA (OCDBA) in Oracle Cloud Platform or in any other cloud platform is to know how to migrate an Oracle database to Oracle Cloud (or any other cloud for that matter.) For this purpose, make sure you understand the following concepts:

• Oracle Goldengate
• Oracle Datapump
• Oracle Secure External Password Store
• Oracle Connection Manager
• RMAN
• Oracle Cloud Control

If all of above is ready, you are all good to go! :)

Is Oracle Database in Cloud PaaS, IaaS, SaaS, or DBaaS?

Question: Is Oracle Database in Cloud PaaS, IaaS, SaaS, or DBaaS?
Answer:

• If you install and manage Oracle database in cloud by yourself, then you are using it on IaaS.
• If you are just using it in cloud without installing or managing it, then it's PaaS.
• If you are configuring the database instance and have access to it through SQL*Net, then its DBaaS. 
• SaaS not really relevant when it comes to Oracle database in cloud as database mostly reside at the backend of applications whereas Saas is primarily all about applications.

Upgrade of Oracle GI 11.2.0.3 to Oracle 12.1.0.2 Steps

Just noting down the high level steps which were performed for the Upgrade of Oracle GI 11.2.0.3 to Oracle 12.1.0.2 on RHEL 64bit Linux.

Create a backup of 11G GI HOME as root user:

. oraenv <<< +ASM
 sudo su -
cd /oracle/backup
tar -cvf backup_GI.tar /u01/grid/product/11.2.0.3
tar -cvf backup_inventory.tar  /var/opt/ora/oraInventory/



Stop all DB instances and listener

run the GI 12c runInstaller in silent mode using UPGRADE option in the response file.

Run the rootupgrade.sh script as root user.

check the HAS version and oratab

crsctl query has releaseversion
cat /etc/oratab





Start the listener and DB instances

Cleanup Backup files (can be executed few days later)

Hope that helps.

Google Cloud Platform Fundamentals in Sydney

Just finished up one day training at Google's Sydney office in Google Cloud Platform Fundamentals. GCP is pretty cool and I think I like it.

Lots of our customers at Pythian are already hosting, migrating and thinking of doing so on cloud. Pythian already has a huge presence in cloud using various technologies.

So it was good to learn something about the Google's cloud offering. It was a pleasant surprise as it all made sense. From App engine to compute engine and from big table to big query, the features are sound, mature and ready to use.

The dashboard is simple too. I will be blogging more about it as I play with it in coming days.