Openworld 2009 – Tuesday Summary

Everyone awoke Tuesday to a pretty heavy rainstorm…  The news reported winds strong enough to tip over motorcycles and there were a few reports of trees falling on cars.  It seemed everyone at the conference was trying to get a cab, so after awhile I decided to try and hunt down an umbrella.  I managed to find one at a store close to the hotel and headed towards the Moscone Center.  

Openworld broadcasts the keynotes to various rooms around the conference center, so I decided to go to one of those instead of the keynote hall.  It was pretty empty so I took off my shoes and hoped my feet would dry out before the keynote was over and I had to put them back on.  I missed quite a bit of it, so I would rather wait until I had a chance to watch it via Oracle On Demand before I talk about it.

Sessions I attended during the day:

Making Oracle E-Business Suite Highly Available: What’s the Path? 

This presentation was ok but I would recommend Elke Phelpes session: Implementing an Advanced Architecture for Oracle E-Business Suite for a better overview of HA features for E-Business Suite.  
Some good points were made tho about defining high availability and the importance of an SLA (Service Level Agreement).

Hidden Gems of Oracle Data Pump   

I was hoping for more from this session.. When a title says ‘hidden gems’ i’m expecting to hear something about a feature that isn’t well known or used but the developers think has alot of potential.  I remember a session from many years ago about flashback technology.  At the time people were only using it for certain data related recovery scenarios.  I sat in on a presentation where they described using it for refreshing development environments.    I really like it when I find a presentation that uses a feature in unexpected ways.

Back to this one… It did give a good overview of the new features including Compression and Encryption.  Unfortunately you have to purchase the ASO and compression features in order to take advantage of it.    One item of note is that these features do not work over a network link.   The level of compression is comparable to the unix compress utility but not as good as gzip.

There are multiple ways to encrypt the data.  By specifying a password, transparently by using a wallet to provide the encryption key and a combination of both.

They spent alot of time talking about the Metadata Differ, which is a new feature of the Oracle Data Pump metadata API used to compare 2 objects, show their differences and generate ALTERS (if possible) to modify one object to be identical to the other.  Unfortunately this requires the OEM Change Management Pack license.  If your interested in how this feature works beneath the scenes then take a look at this presentation.

Measure, Interpret, and Analyze Oracle I/O Performance Data    

This session started with a video clip about the company the presenter worked for.  I don’t mind a shameless plug but it was a bit of overkill especially since 90% of the video had nothing to do with the company but technology highlights from the past 30 years.

The line up for this session was insane but luckily it was for people on standby.   There were a number of real life I/O performance examples, useful queries and some excel functions to help interpret the data.
In the ASM presentation I went to yesterday, which was given by the ASM team members from Oracle they mentioned that double stripping (which means that you have been provided LUNS which have been striped over multiple disks and then you use ASM to stripe data across the LUNs) increases performance.  This presenter refers to this as  Plaid Stripe and shows a configuration which could reduce IO performance and another where it is done correctly.  He also mentions that RAID 5 isn’t as bad as it used to be and that it can be used for everything but OLTP systems.  I’m not entirely sure I agree with this statement.  I have systems which have RAID 5 and anytime there is intensive IO performance suffers greatly.  Personally, if I had enough disk to use RAID 10, I would do it.

The top 11 New Features of Oracle Database 11g Release 2     

Even though Tom Kytes presentations are mainly focused towards developers I always try to make it to one.  He’s a great presenter and always has alot of great information.  You can download the presentation from askTom website. 

He discussed many (well, 11 or was that 10 ;) features of 11g but I have to say I enjoyed the execute on a directory, file waiters, flash cache and edition based redefinition the best.  For a much better description than I can do, download the presentation.

Blogger Meetup

After the day was finished I dropped by the blogger meetup.  I was hesitant because I didn’t really know anyone there but I surprised myself by staying almost towards the end.  I introduced myself to a couple of other bloggers and had some interesting discussions on technology, blogging and the conference.

I have to say, that after meeting some of these guys and talking to them I am going to try to blog harder about E-Business Suite. If I look at the content I have posted some of it, I think, is pretty good and seems to help a few people. (Based on the feedback i’ve received.)   Other pieces of content really aren’t that great and its solutions you can easily find on Metalink.

There are a few bloggers, we all know who they are, who post some really great content and I hope someday I can look at my blog and feel the same way.

Openworld 2009 – Monday Summary

Monday started with a keynote by Safra Catz and Charles Phillips.  The main point they drove home was that they have been focusing very hard on integrating the various products they have acquired and engineering them to work together.  The many acquisitions have been so that Oracle has all the parts to offer their customers a complete solution.   They are slavishly devoted to open standards, so that if you wanted, you could buy software from multiple vendors. But they hope that over time many of those pieces will be from Oracle.   Addressing the worries of what will happen to Sun, Mysql,etc, they will do what they have always done, make the products better.

I changed around my schedule for Monday at the last minute.   I had registered for the RAC hands on lab but I was afraid it would be similar to the Weblogic lab I attended yesterday.   A friend of mine was at the Active Data Guard lab and he mentioned that it was following steps in a workbook.   I can do these things at home so I thought my time would be better spent attending sessions.

I skipped my first session because it was at the Hilton and my second was back at Moscone.  With only 15 minutes between them it would have been tight to make it back and I really wanted to attend the second one.   The exhibition center opened at 10:30 so I spent 45 minutes or so in there exploring.

Real-Life Tuning and Monitoring of Your Oracle Weblogic Server and Oracle Database

This presentation by Doron Lev-Ari was pretty good.  It started with an review of how Oracle handles sql statements and transitioned to how Weblogic manages them.   He offered some tips on using prepared statements, caching within the weblogic server, performance and troubleshooting tips.

Based on the description of this session I was hoping for more tuning from a system administration standpoint but it was mainly focused at developers.

Introducing Oracle Identity Management 11g: Key New Features and Product Directions

I’ve only been using OID for the past 6 months, so i’m not very familiar with it yet.  We primarily use it for authentication so this session provided a good overview of the product in general.  It showed me that I have alot left to learn about this particular product.

Oracle E-Business Suite Technology Road Map and Vision: Release 12.1 and Beyond

There was alot of information in this presentation and if you are an EBS dba I would highly recommend reviewing the presentation.   The presenters covered the various management packs which provide you with centralized management, pro-active monitoring and automated cloning.  You can also scramble sensitive data during cloning with the Application Management Pack, which you cannot do manually.

End to end tracing so that you can trace a session from the midTier down to the database tier and back.  I haven’t looked into this yet but I can attest to the difficulty in doing this without tools, although over time I figured out how to do it.

Oracle Database 11g: Performance Innovations 

We have just started a project in which we will be using the 11g database, so I thought this session would provide a good overview of some of the performance enhancements and I wasn’t wrong.  Features discussed included SQL Results Cache, In-memory Parallel Execution, Database Smart Flash, OCI Consistent Client Cache, Times Ten In Memory Database Cache Grid, Active Dataguard Query Offload and storing all types of files within the database.

Slash Storage Costs with Oracle Automatic Storage Management 

I’ll admit that up until now I have been very hesitant to use ASM outside of a RAC environment.  The reason is that up until recently I have worked for big companies with dedicated storage teams and large SANS.  It made sense to rely on their expertise to manage storage and work with them to tune it for database performance.

Early this year I joined a small company, one which I wear multiple hats, including system administration.  Now I am responsible for everything from bare metal to the applications that reside on them.  After seeing this presentation I think its time for another look at this product.

The key features of ASM were discussed such as automatic I/O load balancing, automatic mirroring and automatic re-balancing when storage changes.  New features such as the Dynamic Volume manager which allows you to create ACFS and 3rd party file systems such as ext3 on top of volumes.   ACFS snapshots which are used to aid in recoverability.

Another nice feature is Intelligent Data Placement which puts frequently accessed data on the outside of a disk platter.  One thing to note is that ASM doesn’t know if it sees a physical disk or LUN and bases the fast/slow parts of the disk on sector numbers.  You can still see a performance benefit tho by grouping hot data together.

In the future they are planning on implementing ACFS Replication for disaster recovery, similar to SRDF.

After a busy day of sessions I skipped the OTN party and went to supper with some colleagues.  Our first stop was the Crab House on Pier 39, followed by a Ghirardelli Hot Fudge Brownie Sunday an a trolly ride back to our hotels.  

After a 17hr day I was pretty drained and feel asleep pretty quickly.

Openworld 2009 - Day 1 Summary

With a reported 37,000 attendees this year one assumption you could make would be that registration would be a long process.  I registered Saturday afternoon and there wasn’t even a line up at Moscone West.  As you ride the long escalators you get a birds eye view of the registration and over my multiple trips today the lineups were at a minimum.   A number of twitter updates have also mentioned how seamless registration was.

My first session of the day was OUG: Demystifying Oracle Real Application Clusters Workload Management with Alex Gorbachev of The Pythian Group.  Its pretty easy to determine he knows his stuff and has really taken the time to understand how everything works beneath the surface.   I briefly supported a RAC environment but most my my experience with it is experimenting in a VM environment.  This session provided an excellent overview of how workload is distributed in a RAC environment.

Another session I attended was Oracle Database 11g Best Practices for Using Partitioning in HA Environments and VLDBs by Ami Aharonovich.  If you missed this presentation, download the materials and demo source.   It was an excellent overview of the new features and effective demos which solidified the concepts.

At the OAUG Database SIG Meeting there was mention of a utility called Trace File Event Timeline which analyzes a trace file and creates a graphical event timeline. There are a number of blog posts which provide more information about the utility, why it was created and how the script itself works.

The next session I visited was the OAUG E-Business Suite Applications Technology SIG.   Steven Chan, Senior Director in the Oracle Applications Technology Integration group at Oracle, posted a summary of his presentation (and the slides) on his blog.  Using his words, “summarizes our latest techstack certifications, desupport notices, support policy updates, and other important topics from the last year in a single, cohesive presentation”.    Very useful to have all of this information consolidated into a single presentation.   If your an E-Business Suite admin, I highly recommend you review it.

My last session of the day was a hands-on lab, Oracle Weblogic Suite 11g for System Administrators.  I have to say I was disappointed by this session…  I followed the steps listed in the guide but being new to Weblogic I really didn’t have any idea of what or why I was doing them.

Finally the day ended with a keynote by Scott McNealy of Sun and Larry Ellision.  Scott started the evening with an entertaining top 10 list developers out of control, which included the gas mask bra, windows and the Java ring.  On a more serious note he also talked about the top 10 innovations from Sun including NFS, Solaris, Java, ZFS and their Open Source contributions.
Each time a company is purchased, its competitors launch an aggressive marketing campaign trying to exploit the air of uncertainty around the merger.  In this case, what will happen to Sparc, Solaris, Java and MySql?     In short, Oracle promises to spend more money on these products than Sun did.

Before he left the stage there was one new product announcement, the Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array which as its name states is a 2 TB array of flash storage.  The benefits compared to disk were discussed such as performance and energy savings.   As Scott said at one point of the presentation, “I think Larry is going to enjoy playing with his new toy.”

Larry took the stage and the first item on his agenda was to reinforce their commitment to SUN Customers.  They promise to spend more money developing SPARC, Solaris and MySQL than Sun did. 


To improve the performance of Oracle products on Sun hardware and to have twice as many hardware specialists selling and servicing Sparc/Solaris systems.

Larry transitioned from his commitment, to how together Sun and Oracle will outperform anything on the market today, primarily focusing on IBM.   In addition to the performance gains of 25% more throughput and 16X better responsive time, he also talked about how much greener their product was.  IBM’s offering requires 6X more power 8X more floor space and on top of that isn’t even fault tolerant.   He finished with a challenge for anyone to prove that their database application doesn’t run twice as fast on Sun hardware as it does IBM, with the winner receiving 10M$.

Agent Configuration Assistant Failed

Today I hit the following error while trying to perform a standalone Grid Control Agent install:




There could be a number of reasons as to why the agent configuration assistant would fail while you are trying to install the Grid Control Agent.   The commands which failed are listed in the $AGENT_HOME/cfgtoollogs/configToolsFailedCommands file.


[oracle@myserver agent10g] cat cfgtoollogs/configToolFailedCommands
# Copyright © 1999, 2009, Oracle. All rights reserved.
oracle.sysman.emcp.agent.AgentPlugIn


If you search metalink with “oracle.sysman.emcp.agent.AgentPlugIn”  you will get a number of hits but the 2 most useful ones I have looked at are:

Subject:
Troubleshooting the error oracle.sysman.emcp.agent.AgentPlugIn raised by the Agent Configuration Assistant (AgentCA)
Doc ID:
740628.1


Subject:
Troubleshooting the 'oracle.sysman.emcp.agent.AgentPlugIn has failed' error
Doc ID:
734981.1


In my particular case, the agent failed because I entered an incorrect agent password during the install.   Unfortunately there is no way to re-enter the password within OUI at this point so login to your server and  follow the steps below:

1. cd $AGENT_HOME/bin
2. ./emctl stop agent
3. ./emctl unsecure agent
4. ./emctl secure agent 
   
   • At this point you will be prompted for the agent registration password.  If you input the incorrect password it will fail.   Run this again until you enter the correct password.
   
   
5. ./emctl start agent

Now you should be able to login to your Grid Control console and see this target.

T-5 Days

Until I depart for OpenWorld!   The last time I was there was 2006 and i’m looking forward to it again this year.   I guess it would be appropriate for me, given i’ll be posting from the conference, to state that I will be attending under the Blogger program.  I submitted an application over the summer and was pleasantly surprised to be accepted.   I don’t know what requirements are that your blog has to fulfill so I wasn’t sure how it would play out.

This year I will be attending a couple of the Hands-on Labs.  On Monday I will be at the Oracle Real Application Clusters 11g Release 2, Part I/II labs and on Friday the Oracle Active Data Guard, Part I/II labs.   The rest of the sessions are a mix between E-Business Suite, Fusion Middleware and some database sessions.

Of course on Sunday I will be attending the SIG meetings.  OAUG Database SIG, Fusion Middleware SIG and the E-Business Applications Technology SIG..  In the past I have found they have provided alot of useful information.

I don’t normally attend many of the keynotes, especially if there are some interesting sessions at the same time.   I don’t spend a tremendous amount of time in the tradeshow area either but somehow I always manage to get a fair bit of swag.

Outside of the conference I can’t wait to visit the Cheesecake Factory in Union Square.   Walking through China town and Fisherman’s Wharf is always a must.  I’ve been to Alcatraz before so I probably won’t go this time.  I’ll also try to check out a few of the places listed in Part 1 and Part 2  of things to do around the Moscone Center.  There is also a blogger meetup scheduled for Tuesday but i’m not 100% sure i’ll be able to attend yet.

The rest of this week will be spent finishing some tasks, knowledge transfer to a colleague and finalizing my OpenWorld schedule.