Oracloid Blog

Oracle CRS 10.1 didn’t provide any straightforward way to change to change a single property of a resource. Assume you need to change check interval of a VIP resource from standard 60 seconds to 10 seconds. The steps are below.

• Create .cap file with properties – “crs_stat -p ora.node1.vip >/tmp/ora.node1.vip.cap”
• Edit /tmp/ora.node1.vip.cap to change line CHECK_INTERVAL=10
• Load .cap file back into CRS – “crs_register ora.node1.vip -dir /tmp -u”

Well not difficult but I was always wondering why not to provide a simple command-line option to change a single property. Our Oracle-God, probably, heard prays of DBA’s and added one improvement in 10.2 - crs_register has a new option -update to set some of attributes.
The format is -update [options] [-o options]

I am probably not as smart as developer and/or product manager who decided to split options in two groups - I failed to understand the reasoning behind… I guess as usual to make it tough to learn so that it keeps us in the job.

Anyway to change hosting nodes is “-update -h ” and to change check interval is “-update -o ci=10″. So instead of procedure described above you would use:
crs_register ora.node1.vip -update -o ci=10.

RTFM from more details.

“Are you missing your favorite scripts and indicators in Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control? Find out how easy it is to incorporate your own metrics into the Grid Control framework. Do you manage a multiple vendors’ environment and need to monitor many different components? Learn how to create your own completely new target types in Grid Control with rich set of availability and performance metrics.”

SELECT Journal published article “Extending Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g” in Quarter 2, 2006 issue.

Now you can download it on my web site here.

Interesting if Oracle will be able to push adoption of OEM so that it becomes the tool of masses. Perhaps, it’s a pricing model that prevents OEM from being popular.

I was reviewing abstracts for UKOUG conference 2006 and saw a lot of very good ones! I sent couple abstract myself but I am afraid that next to the famous speakers there mines would look faded. At least, I would understand if none of my presentations “make it to the finals”.

Well, Russians didn’t make it to the WM FIFA this year. :,(

I haven’t posted anything for few days as I was actually busy choosing a hosting provider and moving the blog over to my own web site. After several days of disgusting service from blogger.com, looking at Doug’s Oracle Blog hacked and reading Tom’s Kidnapped Blog I decided to switch from free service to something more flexible and controllable. Some time ago I read that Doug was experimenting with WordPress and decided to give it a try. I have also done some research (well, just googled a bit) on popularity of blogging engines and WordPress definitely is a mainstream tool which is one of the main criteria I use to choose a piece of software. Actually, everything went quite well. I was able to Import all entries from Blogger and even “hack” Blogger’s template in such way that all old links on oracloid.blogspot.com are automatically redirected to my new address at blog.oracloid.com. On my new web site I had to play with .htaccess file to make it working. Unfortunately, I don’t have access to .htaccess file on Blogger - this was I had to use standard redirect meta tag which is not very well percieved by search engines, AFAIK. Using .htaccess search engines are normally update their links pretty well.

I’ve been struggling for a while to post anything or comment on any blog on blogger.com today. Redirected to http://www.blogger.com/sorry.html with message:

Down for Maintenance
Blogger is temporarily unavailable due to an unexpected problem.
We will be back up as soon as possible.

Update (2:20 pm PDT): We are fixing a database issue. We hope to be back up in a couple of hours.

It’s interesting what kind of database they use and what was the problem?

Cloning ORACLE_HOME…

At the company I work for now, we used to simply copy oracle homes over another machine and/or path, recreate some links and relink. Works very well for 9i including RAC. With 10g and CRS it stopped working - it was a mess registering CRS resources afterwards. Another disadvantage was that Oracle inventory wasn’t maintained so it was not possible to easily identify which one-offs are installed where unless followed some naming guidelines. Of course, Oracle EM agents were not able to discover databases automatically. And in the end this wasn’t really a supported way even though Oracle never refused to support our environment with those oracle homes.

With 10g Grid Control there is a feature to clone Oracle homes but it’s still far from reliable tool that I personally would consider to be used anywhere near production boxes and I don’t remember if I need change management pack for that licensed separately.

So with 10g we were preparing to end up installing oracle homes manually on every box but today my new colleague, Luis Rigaud, has pointed out an interesting way of cloning oracle homes. It’s described in Metalink Note 300062.1 showing how to use OUI (oh well, actually perl script) to clone any oracle home starting from 9iR2.

Plus: documented and supported, works with 10g RAC/CRS, keeps inventory in sync.
Minus: it requires a bit more involvement and different procedures to follow for different releases.

I should note that I haven’t tried it yet but Luis said it always worked like a charm for him.

I have also come across James Koopmann’s post Oracle Cloning, Putting the Pieces in Place. This XClone tool does look interesting and it seems it should be able to clone Oracle homes as well. However, I bet Oracle won’t support this cloning method. Thanks for James for replying to me on XClone.

Doug Burns posted a long awaited Cow today. This is quite different from what I see here in Munich.
.

.
PS: Others on the pix are my son, wife and sister.
PPS: To many TARs updated last days - I just realized that I put dots on empty line just like on Metalink to avoid it eating up my empty formatting lines.

I took these shots couple weeks ago on the way to work. These snails are quite cute.
I try to post pics first time directly from Picasa - let’s see how it works.