Infrastructure at your Service
Introduction Building an Oracle infrastructure today without thinking about a Disaster Recovery solution (DR) is quite rare. This became obvious that a backup or a dump will not help if you do not know where to restore or import once your production server is down. And restoring a backup is definitely not the fastest way to bring back your database to life. As a consequence, Data Guard or Dbvisit Standby, depending on which edition you’re…
Introduction Starting from version 19.11 of the Oracle Database Appliance software bundle, OLVM will definitely replace OVM server as virtualization engine. This change has quite a big impact as there will be no more virtualized specific deployment. Bare metal will come as a standard for all ODAs, and creating VMs for applications, or even databases, will be possible on top of that, for sure if you need them. And you can decide later to use…
Introduction Modern Oracle Database Appliances still support 11gR2, but there are several drawbacks using this old version: if you want/need support for your databases, you should pay for Market Driven Support (11gR2 is even no more under extended support – it ended at the end of 2020) some ODA features will not work with 11gR2 (odacli Data Guard feature for example) the use of ACFS filesystems is mandatory As I already told you, it’s more…
Introduction 4 months after the 19.9, here comes the 19.10 version of the Oracle Database Appliance patch. Let’s have a look at what’s new. Will my ODA supports this 19.10 patch? The 19.10 release will be the same for all ODAs, as usual. The oldest ODA compatible with this release is the X5-2. Don’t expect to install this version on older models. X4-2 is stuck to 18.8, X3-2 is stuck to 18.5 and V1 is…
Introduction Oracle Database Appliance has quite a lot of nice features, but when looking into the documentation, at least one thing is missing. How to configure multiple listeners? Odacli apparently doesn’t know what’s a listener. Let’s find out how to add new ones. odacli Everything should be done using odacli on ODA, but unfortunately odacli has no commands for configuring listeners: odacli -h | grep listener nothing! The wrong way to configure a listener One…
Introduction ODA started to become popular with X3-2 and X4-2 in 2013/2014. These 2 ODAs were very similar. The X5-2 from 2015 was different with 3.5 inches disks instead of 2.5 inches and additional SSDs for small databases (FLASH diskgroup). All these 3 ODAs were running 11gR2 and 12cR1 databases and were managed by the oakcli binary. If you’re still using these old machines, you should know that there is a lot of differences compared…
Introduction One of the advantage of Oracle Database Appliance is its fast deployment. Most often, the initial setup of a lite ODA (with a reimaging) only takes half a day, from unboxing until a first test database is available. Trust me, it’s hard to do better. For some reason, for example if you need to patch to the latest release and you have some intermediate patch to apply before, or if you plan to change…
Introduction You can say everything about Oracle infrastructure possibilities but nothing compares to experience based on the realization of real projects. I did quite a lot of ODA projects during the past years (on other platforms too), and I would like to tell you why I trust this solution. And for that, I will tell you the story of one of my latest ODA project. Before choosing ODAs A serious audit of the current infrastructure…
Introduction On ODA, you create your databases with odacli create-database. You can create a complete database, and it takes about 10 minutes, and you can also create an instance-only database. It will simply and quickly create a record in the ODA registry, start the instance with a basic pfile, and that’s it. Then you’re supposed to do the next step: feed up the database with a manual restore or an RMAN duplicate. Create a 12.2…
