Ronny Egners Blog

As of April 5th Oracle released Oracle 11g Release 2 for Windows 32-bit and 64-bit. The software can be donwloaded from OTN.

Update: I just noticed neither Clusterware (aka “RAC”) nor ASM are available for 32-bit Windows.

When installing a RAC clusterware is responsible for starting and stopping required resources automatically and in required order. Under normal circumstances every resource is integrated with one exception: EM Control.

So this is a short guide on how to integrate EM Console startup/shutdown into Clusterware resource control.

First of all you need a startup/shutdown script:

#!/bin/sh
 case $1 in
 'start')
 /u01/app/oracle/product/11.2.0/db_1/bin/emctl start dbconsole
 RET=$?
 ;;
 'stop')
 /u01/app/oracle/product/11.2.0/db_1/bin/emctl stop dbconsole
 RET=$?
 ;;
 'check')
 /u01/app/oracle/product/11.2.0/db_1/bin/emctl status dbconsole
 RET=$?
 ;;
 esac
 exit $RET

After creating the script and placing is under /scripts you need to add the resource:

#crsctl add resource crs_dbconsole type cluster_resource -attr " ACTION SCRIPT= '/scripts/crs_dbconsole.sh' ,
PLACEMENT= 'restricted' , HOSTING_MEMBERS= 'node1' , CHECK_INTERVAL='30' , 
START_DEPENDENICES= 'hard(appsvip)' ,STOP_DEPENDENCIES= 'hard(appsvip)' , RESTART_ATTEMPTS='2' "

Today i installed a Oracle 11g Release 2 cluster on Solaris SPARC. Installation went smooth – except installation was not able to set up SSH equivalency automatically so i had to configure it myself.

After installing Oracle 11g R2 grid infrastructure i installed a Oracle 10g Release 2 database binary. Went perfectly fine.

After that i tried to create a database but dbca was unable to recognize the RAC cluster; instead dbca wanted to create a single node database.

This issue can be observed when running a 10.2.0.4.0 or 11.1.0.6.0 or 11.1.0.7.0 database with 11g R2 clusterware. The configuration itself IS supported; but it does not work “out-of-the-box”. This post is about how to fix this error.

Continue reading →

Tracing DBCA can be useful. Starting with 10g onwards this can be achieved by:

1. Copy dbca to dbca_debug

cp dbca dbca_debug

2. Edit dbca_debug file, fine the last line and add “-DDEBUG” before the “-classpath” argument. The edited line looks like:

# Run DBCA
$JRE_DIR/bin/java -Dsun.java2d.font.DisableAlgorithmicStyles=true -DORACLE_HOME=$OH
-DDISPLAY=$DISPLAY -DJDBC_PROTOCOL=thin -mx128m -DDEBUG
-classpath $CLASSPATH oracle.sysman.assistants.dbca.Dbca $ARGUMENTS

Starting dbca_debug now will produce debug messages on console:

-bash-3.00$ ./dbca_debug
Warning: Cannot convert string "-monotype-arial-regular-r-normal--*-140-*-*-p-*-iso8859-1" to type FontStruct
[main] [14:59:30:465] [CommandLineArguments.process:563]  CommandLineArguments->process: number of arguments = 0
[main] [14:59:31:49] [Host.checkOPS:2055]  Inside checkOPS
[main] [14:59:31:49] [Host.checkOPS:2067]  Trying to check cluster existence
[main] [14:59:31:99] [Library.getInstance:97]  Created instance of Library.
[main] [14:59:31:99] [Version.isPre10i:189]  isPre10i.java: Returning FALSE
[main] [14:59:31:99] [UnixSystem.getCSSConfigType:2080]  configFile=/var/opt/oracle/ocr.loc
[main] [14:59:31:101] [Utils.getPropertyValue:292]  propName=local_only propValue=FALSE
[main] [14:59:31:101] [UnixSystem.getCSSConfigType:2124]  configType=false
[main] [14:59:31:101] [Version.isPre10i:189]  isPre10i.java: Returning FALSE
[main] [14:59:31:108] [OCRTree.init:202]  calling OCRTree.init
[main] [14:59:31:108] [Version.isPre10i:189]  isPre10i.java: Returning FALSE
[main] [14:59:31:113] [OCRTree.<init>:158]  calling OCR.init at level 7
[main] [14:59:31:115] [OCR.init:279]  OCR instance is not present
[main] [14:59:31:117] [OCR.<init>:230]  Called into OCR.java Constructor: level =7
[main] [14:59:31:117] [OCR.loadLibrary:301]  
 Inside constructor of OCR
[main] [14:59:31:117] [OCR.loadLibrary:309]  Going to load the ocr library
[...]
[...]

While working on my most recent project i tested an interesting ZFS feature: writeable snapshots aka “clones”.

While testing i came to the conclusion that with the help of clones oracle databases (and, of course – other databases as well) can be clones extremely fast with almost no disk space required. So i tested it.

Read on for the results…

Continue reading →

Just a short note from myself:

Last week i successfully completed all requirements to become an

Oracle Certified Trainer

Preparing for the course took all my time so there was little time left to write in my blog. Beside preparing for the trainer tests i worked a lot on my other project: building a cheap custom storage yourself.

When checking OTN today i noticed the release of Oracle 11g Release 2 (11.2.0.1.0) for

• HP-UX (Itanium) and
• AIX (PPC64)

I am surprised 11g R2 for Itanium was released prior 11g Release 2 for Windows…..