Taking a week off while Open World is on might not be such a great idea, but being disconnected from the net for a week was pretty refreshing.

Oracle has decided that Kernel development needs a shove, and has decided to release its own variant of the kernel for Linux. With what I can see there is no real reason to be concerned with what Oracle has done, the API fro the kernel still support the standard glibc for that level of kernel. Oracle says that if an application runs on Oracle Linux without the modified kernel then it will run on a system using it. Seriously from my way of thinking, if I run Oracle Linux, I can always run Centos or Redhat to support my non Oracle software.

I have been working with a site that has been looking at setting up a RAC cluster and the question was asked of me as to what should we do about this event. incorporate the kernel or avoid it. As the project is still in its early phases I have said adopt it and test it. There is always the fall back in the event of real issues being identified that provide a severity one bug case and no timely fix.

I will be doing some testing of the system with some other non oracle products to see if I encounter any difficulties.

I guess from the point of what Oracle does  with this, if they radically alter the kernel and stop other software running then it is always Linus’ choice to look to revoking the Linux License from Oracle on the basis that it is then no longer Linux. I highly doubt that Oracle is really interested in treading that path.

Summing it all up I think this is good for Oracle and good for Linux as sooner or later these enhancements will filter back to Linux

See ya round

Peter

I was  just read again the article at ITNews about how Larry sees the future of Oracle under his stewardship. I can only say that for someone that relies on the Oracle ecosystem for my bread and butter I can’t be happier. The business that will keep me going with employment is in the middle of this and will require myself and many others that want to be involved for some time to come. I must say I am surprised by the Exadata figures, $1billion in the pipeline is pretty impressive and shows how the future of the Sun Oracle relationship might improve the livelihood of those people that relied on the old Sun ecosystem and that there is a lot of life in the old Sun dog yet and that can only be good for them. Interesting the statements about Silicon it makes sense, there is a number of technologies that Oracle has that will excel as embedded technologies in the silicon. These would include database functions for data handling, already doing this in the Exadata, but expect it to become more widespread as time goes on. There is crypto capabilities in some of the inherited hardware for Sun and this will become more tightly coupled for Advanced Security, SSL on the middle tier  and other functionality where crypto is required in some measure. Embedded databases using say Times Ten might become a reality Coherence embedded in the network layer., so caching is very close to the network adaptor.

What else did Larry say of interest EMC is vulnerable, thats interesting they have a great product group and solid products with a strong market share in virtualization and yet Larry has in effect said watch this space. Interesting fight ahead is what I see.

See ya round

Peter

QLD Performance by Design + Optimising Oracle on VMWare, by Guy Harrison (Quest Software): Monday, May 24, 2010 03:00pm Where: Oracle House, Level 14 300 Ann St Brisbane When: Monday, May 24, 2010 03:00pm – 05:30pm RSVP: RSVP to vicepresident.qld@ausoug.org.au to advise your attendance by close of business on 20-MAY-2010. Alternatively, indicate your attendance now: Yes No No, not interested in topic

Guy Harrison, Director of R&D at Quest Software, will be presenting two great topics at our May meeting.

The first topic Guy will be sharing his insights on is Performance by Design and the second is Optimising Oracle on VMWare. We have also invited members of the VM User Group to attend, given the shared interest area.

Agenda:

3:00pm Welcome 3:10pm Performance by Design 4:00pm Tea break 4:15pm Optimizing Oracle on VMWare 5:00pm Questions, networking 5:30pm Finish

Guy Harrison is a director of research and development at Quest Software, and has over twenty years experience in application and database administration, performance tuning, and software development. Guy is the author of Oracle Performance Survival Guide (Prentice Hall, 2009) and MySQL Stored Procedure Programming (O’Reilly with Steven Feuerstein) as well as other books, articles and presentations on database technology. Guy is the architect of Quest’s Spotlight® family of diagnostic products and has contributed to the development of other Quest products such as Toad®

Please use the buttons on this email to RSVP for this event – we appreciate your co-operation and it helps greatly for catering purposes.

See ya round

Peter

I have finally gotten around to getting a small but decent Server set up to build a set of Oracle servers on to create some testing environments. To do this I have a with box with an Asus P5KPL-CM motherboard with a Intel E2200 CPU and 4Gb RAM, probably sort of small but this is a start to being able to do some half decent testing of new products.  For reasons not quite clear I tried to do this on Citrix Xen Server. No great drama, download the CD and the Linux Pack and get to installing this was around 300gb in total.

Next was to install Oracle Linux and I also have a Centos Server on this configuration to build non Oracle products Download a few ISO’s and there in is my problem. I should have installed and got Xen working first.  The problem I encountered is that Xen has types of templates it uses to create a build environment for installing various Linuxes and Windows.  I had in my wisdom downloaded Centos 5 Update 3 and Oracle EL 5 update 4. Xen is not able to install either. So two more Downloads and I had the appropriate version of each 5.2 for Centos and Update 2 of OEL.  I am not sure what is involved with the bits required to support newer versions but it is a bug bear when there is nothing obvious about this.

While that was happening I had tried to install Xen on the host in question, cannot recognize the Atheros drivers used on many mother boards.  Most Linux has problems with those. I went back to the computer shop I use FTC in Sunnybank and obtained a network card for it. this time a TP-link with Realtek chipset on board. Xen could see it, it could use it but the driver made this about as flaky as it could be.  So download the driver development kit try and install it to build a better driver. Installation of the VM into the server kept failing due to the flakiness of the river being used. Just to clarify that is probably a fine driver with the correct chipset, I think mine was a borderline case of a match. After a few days of trying out went the TP-link for an alternative. I finally settled on a D-Link 503 which is on the HCL and can be obtained for around $50. Using the Xensource HCL is a must it seems for some of your kit to get this working. In the end it is just plain easier..

So I have succeeded to get 5 update 2 of Centos and OEL installed and have yum updating the installation of OEL as I write this. Should have a 5upd4 install after this is finished, might yet bump that to update 5, but can do that later some time

To get the update to happen you need to link back to the public repository using the following

# cd /etc/yum.repos.d# wget http://public-yum.oracle.com/public-yum-el5.repo

Activate the repositories you want as per the instructions on Public YUM server

Information available from Public YUM Server

Certainly a challenge without a bit of foresight and knowledge learned

 

See ya round

 

Peter

 

 

 

Sun Is Said to Cancel Big Chip Project – Bits Blog – NYTimes.com So I wonder what Larry thinks of this, is it part of his plans or has Sun pulled to pin too early or is it a smokescreen that Oracle is putting about to take attention away and allow the team to do what it needs to do whilst sorting it out. I am not sure Larry would be too happy writing off the effort unless it really is so bad that they cant possibly produce a working reliable unit. Maybe this is what is needed to shake Sun up when Oracle does come on board. If this baby isn’t too bad, I wou

Image via CrunchBase

ld say to Larry to make it happen as it would be a major coup and show the Sun hardware business isn’t dead yet. It just needed better funding to light its way.

I am certain this will be one of Oracle biggest hurdles when it finally takes over Sun. It is going to have to fine tune the existing hardware lines and add to the future. If Rock isn’t all bad then maybe it is something Oracle needs to drop a wad of cash into so that Rock gets the life it was to have had. I am sure there is a lot of Oracle customers that would like to see those ships go.

On another note the Niagara based servers CMT  are screamers and perhaps Larry will have them optimize them as Grid is the future and potentially they are the basis of the Grid. A Quad CPU Niagara 2 has enormous thread processing power and if your application is based around short sharp bursts of processing, with very short transactions and the ability to run them in parallel when suitable then they will fly on a low speed CPU, only 1.2GHz. It is the threads that give these boxes there enormous throughput, but from my experience older applications are less likely to show these servers in their best light and bad queries in an application, basically if you serialize things you are shot on performance, else stand back. Another interesting feature of these servers is they seems to have a very flat and stable performance characteristic as you load the system with processing requirements. The overall time for tasks when plotted shows that the time ramps up a little then it is constant event though the usage is increased say tenfold and finally you get to flood it out and the response times rapidly deteriorate, unlike older CPU architectures which exhibit a fairly consistent exponential graph for users to degrading performance.

Image via CrunchBase

Anyway it will be interesting what Oracle makes of it all once the deal is done and they have had time to get a real good look at what they bought. I am expecting some interesting stuff,  that is Oracles way.

See ya round

Peter