Infrastructure at your Service
Introduction Oracle Database Appliances rely on ASM to manage disk redundancy. And ASM is brilliant. Compared to RAID, redundancy is managed at the block level. For NORMAL redundancy, which is similar to RAID1, you need at least 2 disks, but it can also work with 3 disks, 4 disks, 5 disks and so on. There is no need for parity at the disk level. HIGH redundancy, which does not exist in RAID technology, is basically…
Introduction Oracle Database Appliances are very popular these days. And not only among new customers for this kind of engineered systems. Almost all customers already using old generation ODAs are renewing their infrastructure by choosing again ODAs, meaning that the solution is good enough and probably better than anything else. But now, public clouds are a real alternative to on-premise servers, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is a solid competitor vs Amazon and Azure public clouds….
Recently I was deploying some ODA X8-2M. To install the 19.8 software, I decide to reimage the server with the 19.8 image. In this blog I describe the main steps I did. First, we will need to download following patches from Oracle support website -Patch 30403643: Oracle Database Appliance 19.8.0.0.0 OS ISO IMAGE for all platforms -Patch 30403673: Oracle Database Appliance GI Clone for ODACLI/DCS stack (and -Patch 30403662: Oracle Database Appliance RDBMS Clone for…
Introduction There is no need to decrease the number of cores on your ODA when using Standard Edition 2, because your license is based on the number of physical CPU. So why would you do that? Obviously, the more cores you have, the more performance you should get. But that simply isn’t always true. Base CPU speed and Turbo Boost If you didn’t read my previous blog, please do so to understand how Xeon processors…
Introduction A complaint I heard from customers about ODA is the low core speed of the Intel Xeon processor embedded in the X8-2 servers: Intel(R) Xeon(R) Gold 5218 CPU @ 2.30GHz. 2.30GHz only? Because of its comfortable number of cores (16 per processor), the cruise speed of each core is limited. Is it a problem compared to a home made server with less cores? Why clock speed is important? As you may now, the faster…
Introduction With the latest ODA X8 range, at least 80% of the customers could find an ODA configuration that fits their needs. For the others, either they can’t afford it, either they are already in the Cloud, or they need extremely large storage or EXADATA performance. Among these 80% of customers, only a few choose ODA. Let’s see how Oracle could improve the ODA to make it a must. 1) Make robust and reliable releases…
Introduction If you’re considering ODA for your next platform, you surely already appreciate the simplicity of the offer. 3 models with few options, this is definitely easy to choose from. One of the other benefit is also the hardware support of 5 years, and combined with software updates generally available for up to 7 years old ODAs, you can keep your ODA running even longer for non-critical databases and/or if you have a strong Disaster…
Introduction It’s been 1 year now that 19c is available on-premise. Finally, 19c is now available today on ODA too, in a real production release. Let’s have a glance of what’s inside. Is 19.6 available for my old ODA? The 19.6 release, like most recent releases, is the same for all ODAs. But oldest ODAs will not support it. First-gen ODA (now 8 years old), X3-2 (7yo) and X4-2 (6yo) won’t support this very latest…
Introduction 19c will soon be available for your ODAs. But you may not be ready. Here is how to patch your ODA from 18.3 to 18.8, the very latest 18c release. This patch has here been applied on X7-2M hardware. Download the patch files Patch number is 30518425. This patch is composed of 2 zipfiles you will copy on your ODA. Check free space on disk Applying a patch requires several GB, please check free…
Introduction ODA X8-2, in the S, M or HA flavour, is the new database appliance from Oracle. But as a brand new product, you can experience troubles due to the lack of maturity. This time, it concerns database creation that can be extremely slow on these servers if you are using ODA 19.5. Edit (April 2020): actually this bug is related to the Linux kernel. There will not be a patch to solve the problem….
