Pro Oracle Database 11g RAC on Linux

This is not intended as a complete book review, but a warm recommendation of a book I've found very useful the last couple of months. That is, highly recommended if you are working with RAC or going to start with a RAC project soon.

I have been working on and off with RAC for several years, but I don't take any new RAC project lightly. Starting in November I was involved with a proof of concept for a large public customer. Before and during this project I have relied a lot on this book: Pro Oracle Database 11g RAC on Linux written by Steve Shaw and Martin Bach.

True, installation of RAC has become much easier on 11gR2, but the planning part is as important as ever. If you jump into the project without proper planning you are likely to encounter problems later on after the system is installed and running (more or less). Changing network layout or mostly anything else is a hassle later on, though this has also become easier with the added functionality to the commands crsctl and srvctl in 11gR2.

One reason I like this book as an important addition to the Oracle documentation is that it is very logical written from a project point of view. It starts out with a good introduction and then explains the important concepts and the arcitechture. This is stuff you need to get right before you start. There are also many decisions you have to make before you start. The book builds a solid ground under your cluster with a good focus on the OS (Linux in this case, but I think I will recommend  it for a similar project on Windows as well due to the book's structure). In other words, if you don't have time to read the necessary chapters in this book you will not have time to fix the errors later on either.

We're not exactly masters of logistics in this country, and I came in late for this project. I started the preparation for the project by reading this book, when I had read enough and felt prepared for the next day I could put the book aside and get some rest. The next day I would continue by reading and planning. Well, that might read as if this was my first RAC project, it was not, but again I don't imagine I remember every detail, the book serves as a checklist.

The project gave us several challenges due to a rather big database that we created from an unconventional RMAN backup,  Real Application Testing (RAT), super fast hardware that still needed tweaking on OS level. But not once did I run into problems due to wrong configuration of RAC or errors we could blame the RAC software.

Have a nice 2013! Go to conferences, user group meetings, and meet all the nice people in the community. Our conference, OUGN 2013, will be better than ever; we will have Oracle experts from Australia, USA and Europe.

OOW 2011 Day 5

OOW has been great and I'm reaching the limit of how much information I can consume for a while. I'll probably spend some weeks or months reading and understanding presentations. Time to go home and practice what I've learned. I'm not even going to try to report dutifully on every session today. Just say that I've been to Real-World Performance Questions and Answers, Oracle Database Optimizer: Tips for Preventing Suboptimal Execution Plans, Looking Under the Hood at Oracle Clusterware 11g Release 2, and Under the Hood of Oracle Automatic Storage Management: Fault Tolerance. The first one was great fun, 3 of 4 had more than 20 years experience in this field. The youngest "only" 8. Greg Rahn revealed they have a "secret": they try to solve complex problems with simple solutions. Graham Woods advised people to ask Why? and understand what you are doing before you actually change anything in production. Simple guidelines, but since many are not following them it needs to be repeated.

I'm not going to say much about the two following, again useful content and I have to look again at the mysteries of Clusterware. Also Maria Colgan showed as she did yesterday she is an excellent speaker. She is invited to next year's OUGN conference, which according to Bryn is the world's best user group conference. Looking forward to it.

Back at home I've had many discussions regarding ASM, it is surprising what people can get religious about. One former coworker stated that Oracle has no right to implement a volume manager... I've never had any good arguments for migrating to ASM. If the DBAs at the site like it, I chime in with things I like, simplicity to name one. If not, because "any datafile should be verifiable with ls or dir", then I usually back off from any discussion. In the last presentation of the conference by Alex Gorbatchev from Pythian I learned quite a few reasons to go for ASM, like you have more integrity checks and efficiency if you use ASM. I'll probably stay away from heated discussion until I've read everyting from James Morle, baarf.org, ASM-gurus like Alex; SAN- and Unix-admins don't give up easily.

This was first time at OOW. Was it worth it ? Absolutely. I got served more than I could eat, met a lot of smart people whose blog posts and tweets I've been reading for years; i.e. great networking opportunity, and had great fun. Learned a lot, now I know what other SSF-travelers are talking about.

Thanks to everybody who stopped for a talk or sent a smile in my general direction. Going home looking forward to see wife & jr.