AristaDBA's Oracle Blog....

A Better OTN Forum Experience Is On Its Way(Hopefully)….

Aman Sharma — Sat, 07 Apr 2012 14:54:41 +0000

Just read this post from Justin Kestelyn and its certainly a very very good news. OTN Forums is a place where I am always hanging out and I must say, its the best Oracle related forums available on the planet earth where the best of the best Guru’s, both from Oracle Corp and within Oracle community visit and help millions of people by clearing their doubts and solving their issues as much on daily basis. If the OTN forums is going to get a face-lift, that’s certainly going to be a welcome thing to happen for those many forum regulars. So let’s keep the fingers crossed and hope that it happens soon and makes things and experience related to forums even better than present for all of us. And yes, thank you so much Justin for taking the initiative!

OEL6 Is Now Certified For 11.2, Finally….

Aman Sharma — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 06:39:13 +0000

After a long wait, finally Oracle’s Enterprise Linux is now certified for 11.2 Database. To be a little precise, its only the UEK(Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel) that’s supported for now. For Red Hat’s RHEL , there is still going to be a further delay of 90 days. But whatever it is, finally its done and all those people who were itching to install Oracle 11.2 database on EL 6 finally can do it with a little more peace in their mind . For me, its time to download, install and have some fun with the new release .

Join Packt’s Oracle Campaign….

Aman Sharma — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 16:25:54 +0000

Packt publishing has become a very renowned name when it comes to publishing books and within that, Oracle related books. I myself have done reviews of books published by Packt (there is a newer one which I hopefully would talk about soon here). If you haven’t checked already, you should give a look at the listing of the Oracle related books. Sounds good? Wait because it gets even better!

Packt publishing is offering discount on all of its Oracle related books in the month of March, 2012, yeah this very month only! To know more about it, you can have a read of the official announcement. Its an offer not to be missed so do check the catalogue and select the titles that you would like to buy to take advantage of this great offer. So don’t wait and hit the Packtpot right now, time is running away!

Book Review In Progress….

Aman Sharma — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 08:37:41 +0000

I have done couple of book reviews for Packt Publication in the past and so far the experience has been always very good for me. Once again, folks at Packt have contacted me to do a book review for Oracle 11gR2 Performance Tuning cookbook which I have accepted to do. Hopefully, I shall be able to finish the book soon and come up with a review of it. So stay tuned, a review is in progress(soon) and would be coming up in front of you . .

Season’s Greetings….

Aman Sharma — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 14:47:14 +0000

So an another year is on the verge of being over and another new year is knocking on the door. Its that time of the year again to say goodbye to the old one and welcoming the new one with the open arms with a hope that it would bring a lot of happiness, success and good health for all of us.So from me, a very happy and prosperous 2012 to the entire Oracle community . Hope in this year, we shall see a lot of new and exciting stuff ( as like always) from Oracle database side , giving us all new stuff to learn and play with. And how can I skip, Cloud Computing! Now that’s something that would be really interesting to watch out , isn’t it ?

AIOUG’s Sangam 2011 Wrap-up….

Aman Sharma — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 20:59:58 +0000

AIOUG(All India Oracle Users Group) has finished its annual Oracle user group conference Sangam on this Saturday. It was their 3rd annual conference from the time they have started and it was my 2nd year of attending it. Due to some personal issues of mine, I was a little doubtful that whether I shall be able to make for it this time or not and fortunately, I was able to and as expected, it came out to be a great event! Lots of learning, meeting celebrities of Oracle database world along with fellow attendees, out of which some were old faces and some were new, it was an in and out two days completely packed with just Oracle all around which , at least for me is just simply awesome!

Just like the last two years of conference, this year’s also was a having a lot of who’s who of the Oracle world! The keynote was by Arup Nanda who needs no introduction I believe. Arup is a VERY well known expert in the Oracle database world and is a very frequent contributor on various online forums as well as the author of several books. His top 10 new features article series, covering every new release of Oracle database, is among the most popular technical articles for DBA’s. I was very excited to meet him because I have had interaction with him through emails already and this time, I was finally going to meet him in-person. I met him outside the keynote hall and he immediately recognized me too when I told I am Aman . I must say, besides being so good in the oracle database, he is also a very friendly and nice person as well. It was an utmost pleasure to listen to him live for two days and I shall be looking forward to meet him any time soon.

The other very memorable moment(at least for me) was to meet and hear someone who is one of the most well known names in the Oracle database world, Rich Niemiec. I must admit, I never even thought in a dream too that I would be able to meet Rich and not just meet but would be able to see him speaking. And even more, be in a pic with him . He mentioned that his book Performance Tuning Tips and Techniques would be coming soon covering 11.2. He gave two presentations, one on each day of the conference. I must say, his style of presenting and wittiness is just amazing! I really hope and wish that I shall get a chance to meet him soon again sometime.

This time, the Sangam team had decided to run parallel tracks of Java and application development along with the database track. Since both are not my domain, I didn’t attend any sessions of those tracks except of Bryn Llewellyn, PL/SQL Product Manager which was about the 11g’s enhancements about Pl/Sql. It was a very good presentation. Both, the content and the presenting style of Bryn, made the whole one hour of the presentation filled with lots of goodies related to Pl/Sql introduced in 11g. Another presentation which I attended and didn’t know about the speaker before, was of Kuassi Mensah(blog|Google+|Twitter|Facebook|LinkedIn) who is also a product manager at Oracle corporation. It was my first time to hear him speaking and his presentation was a very deep one, about the tuning of Oracle net services. It was an hour filled with lots of technical content presented in a very good way! I also met Hemant Chitale whom I know from a long time as he is a fellow member and a very active contributor over OTN forums. In addition to this, he is also one of the tech reviewers for my book. Though we have had many discussions over the forum and through the emails, this was the first time when I had a chance to meet him. Hemant is a very knowledgeable yet very down-to-earth and humble person in nature and it was an absolute pleasure to meet him. Last but certainly not the least, I met (again) Murali Vallath(LinkedIn|Twitter|Blog) who is the president of AIOUG. Its always a pleasure to meet him and the amount of efforts that he and his entire team puts in to make the conference a success, are just beyond words and even more, he is a very nice, humble and so down to earth person!

This year’s Sangam was also special for one another reason and that was that my very close friend Neeraj Bhatia(Blog|Google+|Twitter) was presenting his presentation this year which was titled as Did someone say Capacity Planning?(slides are available for the download at his blog). This was the first time that he was presenting and I must say, he did a fantastic job given that it was his very first public speaking. Now, since he has got the ball rolling, its my turn now to do the same.

Besides the great presentations and speakers, the entire conference, in the terms of the logistics and facilities, was also maintained by AIOUG team. The venue chosen this time was very spacious and lavish. It was the Crowne Plaza hotel Banglore which had fantastic arrangements for both conference space and food. The staff was very friendly and the overall appearance of the place was very eye catching. There were demo booths from Oracle support where they demonstrated power of Oracle Exadata live! The goodies offered to the attendees were also very nice.

To sum up, Sangam 2011 was yet another a very exciting,fun-filled and yet a great learning experience packed within 2 days. A big thanks again to Murali and his entire team to pull it through and I am already looking forward for 2012.

Oracle Education’s Training On Demand….

Aman Sharma — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 05:24:11 +0000

I always mention to everyone whoever approaches to me about learning Oracle database(and other technologies from Oracle) that the best place to learn it is from Oracle itself! There is no other place where you would get the 100% student satisfaction guarantee , will you? Besides offering the best of the quality training sessions for a very wide variety of Oracle technologies, Oracle University always brings up new and innovative ways to make the learning process more easier and comfortable for the delegates. The self study cd ROMs, LVC(Live Virtual Class) training format are the best examples of such innovative steps taken already. Continuing the same tradition, Oracle University has unveiled a completely new format of learning, training on demand!

Training on demand offers pre-recorded videos of training sessions of the course which are available to view online. The recordings contain the in-class training sessions delivered by the top instructors of OU. The sessions can be viewed as per your choice, for example, if you want to view the session of day 5 only, you can do so. I think that this is the best of the best out of both self study cd ROMs and LVC since you get to learn on your on pace and also get the instructor lead teaching as well. Now isn’t that just awesome ? Do check out the sample videos from the link posted above to see for yourself!

EM 12c, Control The Cloud….

Aman Sharma — Sat, 08 Oct 2011 05:26:36 +0000

Just a quick post to mention(if you haven’t heard already) that newest release of Enterprise Manager , 12c is officially out now and is available for download(currently, only for Linux platform). C represents Cloud computing and it seems that the next release would be completely about it and its already started with Oracle Public Cloud . Interesting!

I shall be doing the download and installation of the EM 12c when I shall be back at home. Till then, here are the links for the downloading of the software and of its documentation.

Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control Documentation

Oracle Enterprise Manager Download

Happy clouding .

PS: Gokhan Atil has already posted a blog post about the installation of EM, check it out here.

Welcome ODA(Oracle Data Appliance)….

Aman Sharma — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 05:41:26 +0000

So a new cousin has come to Exadata family, Oracle Database Appliance aka ODA. I am traveling overseas at the moment so missed the live webcast but would see it tonight(hopefully) over here. Andy Colvin(oracle-ninja) has already started to play with it as he mentions here and here. It would be interesting to see how this “mini Exadata” picks up and what has it underneath its sleeves! Hope I shall get one to play with soon, anyone wants to gift it to me on my (upcoming) birthday ?

Recovering The OCR When It Is On ASM….

Aman Sharma — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 05:24:07 +0000

A good question came just now in the session from a delegate when we were discussing the restore and recovery of the Oracle Cluster Registry(OCR) . Its a well documented thing how to do it when the OCR is placed on a normal, shared storage, for example like “/dev/sda” . The steps to do so are listed in the documentation. But those steps won’t be working(in the same manner) from 11.2 onwards when the OCR can be placed on ASM. The question was that when the complete disk group is gone which had the OCR stored over it, how it would be possible to do the restore of the OCR backup(still done automatically every 4 hours like the previous releases) since the ASM diskgroup needs to be there to do the restore. Well, that’s a good question and for it, there is a published note on My Oracle Support(MOS) as well which we found out. So in case you get into the same situation, refer to the MOS# 1062983.1 How to restore ASM based OCR after complete loss of the CRS diskgroup.

Learning never stops when it’s something like Oracle you are playing with, isn’t it .