Tag Archives: oracle database

OUGN15, The “boat conference” revisited


Jan at shipsport
Reflections on OUGN

Sometimes things in life can change quickly! It is only two years ago that I came to Oslo for the first time to join the Scandinavian Oracle crew on a boat trip to Kiel.
At that time I had never actually participated in this kind of experience and I wasn’t into presenting either. Together with my good friend Philippe Fierens I discovered a whole new world back then. You could have read about these experiences in some blogpost, but this was lost in the move to my own site, sorry!

And this trip couldn’t have been more different though! With three presentations accepted the two days at sea will be a reunion with the friends I made over the last years, as well as a way to contribute to one of the most tight knit tech communities I know. And this will be in a scene that I remember vividly from being a newbie… And this is somewhat strange, believe me

After a quick and pleasant flight I touched down in Oslo, flying from Amsterdam with a decent sized crew of Dutch Oracle enthusiasts, including my good friends Patrick Barel and Alex Nuijten. Waiting in the Oslo airport for Luís Marques, I catches up with Gurcan Orhan, which was a great surprise.
Later that day we found ourselves in the Oslo harbor for the speakers dinner. You can imagine the collective amount of Oracle knowledge packed into that one restaurant!

frits
Enkitek’s Frits Hoogland on Ansible

After a somewhat restless night we arrived, on Thursday morning, at the ship Color Fantasy with the Heli Helskyaho-company, just in time for the keynotes. It was good to see Mark Rittman and James Morle made it on board too. Especially as James was up for the delivery of version 2.0 of his vibrant keynote! Next we proceeded to bring our luggage to our cabins and grab a spot of lunch on the exhibition floor down in the belly of the ship. The setup of the exhibition was quite nice and gave a good opportunity to mix and mingle.
The afternoon was spent on sessions, where I visited Frits Hoogland with the Ansible talk, and preparation for my own session at 18:00. This is the last run of this APEX presentation, as I have retired it after OUGN15. The slides will be archived here.
After finalizing the preparation for the third edition of the Standard Edition Round Table (aka “slide polishing”) with the #orclSERT team, comprising of Ann Sjökvist, Philippe and myself, it was time for the souree and for diner in the grand restaurant on board. It has been a good first day!

Diner
Dinner with the international crew on board the Color Fantasy.
Gin-tonic
Warm reception at Kiel port.

The second day of OUGN15 started with a multitude of sessions including the third edition of the Oracle Standard Edition Round Table, which was actually quite busy and interactive. We had some good discussions, and that at 09:00, so thank you, everybody.
Of course, as was declared a tradition, Björn Rost was present in the Kiel harbor. With the famous “Basil smash Gin & tonic” and sandwiches we were welcomed on German soil.
My afternoon comprised 3 sessions, starting with my own called “Okay, and now my database server crashed…” which was quite nicely received. Next Alex Nuijten on 12c new features for developer, topped off with Tim Gorman who taught us to be CSI people, in finding issues in the database.
After an enjoyable evening in the various bars and discotheques of the ship we retired the official part of the Oracle User Group Norway Vårseminar 2015, thanking the board and of course especial Øyvind Isene, for their hard work.

If you want to catch up further on the unconference communications surrounding this event, please do checkout the Twitter hashtag #OUGN15. This will also include a great set of snapshots and pictures taken along the way…

Oslo, until the next time!


Can you boost your Oracle database performance on HP-UX for free?

Database performance, as is true with all performance related matters, has to do with resources.

This story specifically focuses on a real life experience with Oracle database performance on HP Unix running on Intel integrity CPU’s like these:

CPUinfo

The issue with installation is the hyper-threading aka. the use of the logical processors.
When the server is booted and is running, you can do basic performance review with a default tool like top.

lcpu_attr=0

In this exact case the server is running fine and there is no need to investigate further. But, in cases where there were performance issues, it would be a good idea to be aware of the numbering of the CPU’s in this overview (0, 2). This numbering suggests there would also be a ‘1’ and, where there would be a ‘1’ there would probably also be a ‘2’…

Yes there is and it is called ‘lcpu_attr’. A HP Unix kernel parameter which is, to my taste, a bit odd, not well known or well documented…

lcpu_attr (Tunable Kernel Parameter)

When turned on, lcpu_attr activates the logical CPU’s immediately. When you run top again, this is what it’ll look like (immediately)

lcpu_attr=1

Okay! Great… but… there are some catches.
This parameter lcpu_attr is a dynamically tunable kernel parameter but… it’ll crash your databases. So you will need a minimum of planned downtime for this action.

Also, you can set hyper-threading on in the EFI boot-loader.
But then you should be aware of this!

In the end, in this real-life story, we helped the situation advance by just doing:

1. stopping Oracle database(s)
2. kctune lcpu_attr=1
3. starting Oracle databas(s)

All in all, it could be not difficult to boost your Oracle database performance on HP-UX for free!

Thanks to my good friend Gerard van der Kooij for finding the final link!

Okay, and now my database server crashed…

RTO/RPO, who has ever heard of that! That was Star Wars, right?
Storing data and never having to go without or losing any… Yes, that’s more like it.

Server Crashed

Okay, and these two have everything to do with each other!

Talking about these two fancy IT abbreviations I have raised many eyebrows and aided securing businesses!

What is it:
RTO: Recovery Time Objective, or rather, how long should it take before your database is up-and-running again!
RPO: Recovery Point Objective. How much data can you stand to lose?

It is customary to put real amounts of time for these both parameters. This is one of these true points where IT ‘meets’ business, one of those do or die SLA parameters.
How long before you can start working again after something has gone somewhat horribly wrong? Dependent on the business (and for sake of argument), you will get something like; “Oh well, if we are back in business in say an hour, I guess we’ll be fine.” Okay, so we have RTO = 1hr.
And, how much data can you afford to lose? “Losing data, what do you mean?” Well, let’s say you have been on the phone and in the field harvesting order data and putting this in the database… how much of this information can be reproduced when your environment fails? We’ll go with two scenario’s. We will presume “Oh no, NOTHING!” and “Hmmm, well, 10 minutes, if needs be!”, making respectively RPO = 0min. and RPO=10min.

  • RTO = 1 hour
  • RPO = 0 minutes or 10 minutes.

Let us investigate what this means, assuming we have a functional backup running every night and that our drama happens at 15:45 on a working day.

What do we have when we do nothing?
After establishing we have a system crash at hands we need to start working immediately to rebuild something, but do we have something to build upon?
Do we have hardware? And does it somewhat meet specs? Can we run our OS (version) on it? Do we have OS media to install with? Do we have Oracle media to install with? Can we get network, and so on…
And if we have this do we have enough expertise to get it installed?
Well, I guess it’s clear… We need to invest big-time! Few hours getting all the facts straight and getting hardware, a few hours to install and configure the OS, a few more for Oracle, getting it to resemble the former production environment and then restoring the backup!
RTO = starting at 8 hours.
Looking at our RPO? Well, okay, that’s easy! We backup at midnight (0:00) and we crash at 15:45. So we will have lost 15 hours and 3 quarters.
RPO = 15:45 hours.
Acceptable? No, not really!

It’s clear we have to do something.
The first step is to reduce RTO, we need to be able to continue work faster.
We can do this by making sure we have a second server standing by in a different location. Have it installed, have it configured and ready to jump into action. You could call this a Standby Server.
But even now there is no guarantee we make our target since restoring a backup and getting the database up and running could still easily take over 1 hour, when dealing with red-tape and decision levels. To hit the home run we need to add one more feature, we need to have not only a Standby Server, we also need to have a Standby Database. A database that can be “opened” or “activated” in mere minutes.

  • Are you running Enterprise Edition Database then you can use Oracle Data Guard, included in your database license.
  • Are you running Standard Edition Database then you can get the Smart Alternative from Dbvisit.

With Standby Database in place:
RTO = 5 minutes!!

Now we need to tackle RPO!
Or… do we still?
RPO = 10 minutes, actually is tackled by the Standby Database implementation.
Because of the characteristics of Standby Database, we do not only have an RTO of mere minutes, we also have an RPO of a configurable duration.
Data is transferred to the Standby Database environment by means of archived Redo Log files and this mechanism is influenced by manual switching of log files and if you do this with small enough intervals (less than our target of 10 minutes) we make sure that age of the data in the Standby Database meets the target “Recovery Point Objective”!
RPO = 0 minutes
Well, okay, this is something else. And if we think about this a little, it’s something completely different!
Recovery Point Objective, the amount of data we can stand to lose, is 0 (nothing!). Actually meaning we have to create a Standby database setup which is kept up to date with the primary environment. This kind of Standby Database environment allows you to switch to this second environment within seconds and continue your business operation without delay!

And, with your Active-Active Standby Database solutions in place:
RPO = 0 minutes!

So, now you know about RTO/RPO to secure your data and know this guy is something else.

r2-d2

Increasing the reach of your SE database license

Imagine the following situation…

Since a few years your business has been investing in centralizing valuable business information. After some research in the market you have found the Oracle database to be the best fit for your requirements.
Using the free Oracle Application Express (APEX) framework, helping you to rapidly develop the web-applications needed to support both internal and external users, was a premium. Making this installation available based on the Oracle Standard Edition One database, you have created this solution against the lowest possible investment!

As many great projects go, the use and the number of APEX applications is growing. With the addition of ready to use applications to inspire you, many cool plug-ins to ever increase the usability and integration possibilities you get caught up in the data growth dogma!
With an ever increasing user population and expansion of data-reporting for ever faster business reporting your initial system is starting to fail, showing ever more frequent performance lags or system unavailability. These problems form a risk for your business, a risk you need to eliminate as soon as possible!
The standard advise here would be to upgrade your environment, the standard advise here would be to upgrade to a bigger machine and to an Enterprise Edition database. This is what your investment would be then…

  • Medium Oracle Sun Server X2-4 with 4 x 10 core CPU’s at € 42,500
  • (40 cores x 0,5 core-factor **) 20 Oracle Database Enterprise Edition licenses               at € 914,800

Without rendering your application infrastructure worthless by the required investment, a more reasonable step would be to migrate to Oracle Database Standard Edition.

  • Medium Oracle Sun Server X2-4 with 4 x 10 core CPU’s at € 42,500
  • 4 Oracle Database Standard Edition licenses at € 67,400

Still requiring a total investment of more than a hundred thousand Euro and leaving you with the old server and licenses to be decommissioned.

In many implementations, not data entry but data-mining or information aggregation are the costly processes. So probably this will be true in this situation too. With a little investigation it is possible to separate a number of functions that will only query data and not necessarily modify data. Especially in this situation you can also increase your application performance by moving these specific processes to a new environment.

But… how…

The information in the new environment needs to be real-time consistent with the “production” or primary environment. Here we introduce a real-time data replication solution like Dbvisit Replicate which will create just this real-time consistent query environment for you! This makes for the following investment:

  • Medium Oracle Sun Server X4-2 with 2 x 8 core CPU’s at € 19,500
  • 2 Oracle Database Standard Edition One licenses at € 11,200
  • 4 Dbvisit Replicate XTD at € 16,180

With this installation you add another € 50 k. of licensing in stead of € 100 k. with the Standard Edition migration. With this choice, you separate your time-critical data-entry process from the query environment, making sure a mis-fired query will not influence the availability of your data-entry process environment, which is a cool extra advantage!

* All prices are based on list-prices, excluding VAT and including 1 year of support.
** Based on the Oracle Processor Core Factor Table.

Cloud Database Offers On-premise Advantages

These are times when there are technologies abundantly available to help you make the very best of the data you gather from your business processes.

Increasing numbers of businesses choose the option to host their production database environment in one of the many cloud forms that are available these days. This example of a smart alternative discusses an additional service you could implement or request when you are dealing with cloud based databases.

In many organizations there is a BI-team responsible for the development of company specific KPIs or compose competitively strategic information based on the information that is gathered during day-to-day business. There often are key management positions that have a need for ad hoc queries to live data. In recent years the grave importance of this intelligence has been recognized as being of the greatest importance for decision support, and giving your organization the biggest competitive advantage possible.

Developing or even running these activities on live data gives the sharpest edge. Doing this on a production environment, nevertheless, is out of the question. Uninterrupted availability and maximum responsiveness for regular activities of these databases are unquestionably important. How can you combine these factors with the proposition of running your database in the cloud while staying smart?

The smart alternatives of Dbvisit enable you to do just this! By leveraging Dbvisit Replicate in a hosted environment you can create one or many local copies of live production data with specific local database settings to do precisely what you need, be it running or developing heavy BI queries or having departmental management looking at or analyzing data as it is recorded. Having (a subset of) the live data uni-directionally delivered from the cloud to your local (desktop) database creates a safe environment to analyze and enable knowledge workers to do the their job without any holds barred!

Retail Innovation with Dbvisit Replicate

In these current times it’s a “dog-eat-dog” world like it has never been. We are fighting over every bit of margin and trying to create value without increasing cost. The following example from a retail background shows an innovative way you could accomplish this, leveraging the #1 database at the lowest thinkable investment combined with the smart alternative from the makers of Dbvisit Software.

In this example we are following a supermarket in their quest to “do business a little different” and they are thinking of combining ‘shopping audience attitude’ in an interactive way with a time specific advertisement technique.
The idea is to look at what people are checking out at the cash register and combining this, in real-time, with both amounts of items in stock and possible specific business rules applicable to any discounts to be given.

By gathering information at the counters, information about what kind of groceries people are actually buying at that specific moment, you get an insight in the natural fluctuation of buyers behavior during the day. With this information you can do stuff, like figure out how much of what articles you need in stock or direct resupplies in the store during the day, getting the maximum revenue out of the employees responsible for making sure everything is plentyfull ready for the taking.
But why not take this one step further they thought. If we can combine this cash-register information with some kind of continuously changing system of discounting, we can create an element of interactivity. By looking at what articles are sold, combining this with remaining stock and using the fact if there already is some regular discount on specific articles, you can make a system where, for instance every 15 minutes, there is another specific item on ‘super special sale’. Delivering this “buy now” message to the actual customer can be done in several ways, either by loading this information in self-checkout bar-code scanners or for instance by label printers offering the specific discount label to be scanned at the checkout counter. After a ‘super special sale’ moment elapses, everything changes and a new article is the hot deal of the moment.

Where in a normal setting the POS entries are fed into the regular business database to be processed in a batch-like fashions you would have no chance of getting this information recycled. This backbone infrastructure cannot be used for the very data intensive activities we would need for our initiative to take shape. Having delays here would inevitably mean delays and errors at the checkout counters with queues and unsatisfied customers as the least of your concerns.

Regular data replication solutions would render any business case useless before somebody even had the heart to dream up such an idea. Today, by leveraging the Oracle database Standard Edition or even Standard Edition One, you have an environment which is capable of handling such information loads. Combine this hyper cost effective installation with a Smart Alternative like Dbvisit Replicate, replicating data away from you core POS infrastructure, delivering this data at a special database for this initiative. Here it is combined with stock information, also delivered by Dbvisit Replicate, to create a system that is real-time, robust and a system that doesn’t interfere with regular business. Moreover it creates a system which does support the business case by requesting up to 80% less investment.
This example shows that many of the smart ideas which were created by the business have stranded in an impossible business case. Today, the Smart Alternatives of Dbvisit create the opportunity for you to rethink these ideas and really start realizing them.

Just because it’s possible now!