Enkitec Blog

A couple of months ago we became proud parents of a bouncing baby Exadata V2, (1/4 rack). I had about two weeks to configure it and get up to speed on the high points before we were to begin work on our first proof of concept (POC) for a local client. I had just enough time to patch the storage cells up to version 11.2.1.2.6 configure storage and create the databases. Well we’ve been working it pretty hard for the last couple of months with customer POC’s and our own testing but today I finally got a chance to get caught up on our patchsets for Exadata. The most current bundle patch releases are 4 and 5. After hearing about widespread problems with bundle patch 4 I decided BP5 was probably the best fit for us. I did a few searches and didn’t find any serious complications from BP5. However during the installation I did come across a couple of issues I thought I’d share here.

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Enkitec presented at the June 2010 Dallas Oracle User Group meeting.  Below is a summary of the topics and links to the presentations.

The first presentation was delivered by Brian Hill, Senior Developer at Enkitec, on a very important topic for both DBAs and Oracle Developers, Connection Pooling.  Connection and Session Management is one of the most misunderstood aspects of the Oracle Database, but is also one of the most important mechanisms controlling performance and stability of the Oracle Database environment.  In his presentation, Brian discusses managing the connection pools, dead connection detection, connection storms, and other issues that need to be addressed jointly by the DBA and App Developer in order to maintain a consistent, stable Oracle Application.  Brian’s presentation can be found here: http://blog.enkitec.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/JDBC-Connection-Pooling.pdf

For more info on Connection Pooling, here’s another blog by Tim Fox: http://blog.enkitec.com/2010/04/29/jdbc-connection-pooling-for-oracle-databases/

David Little, Senior Developer at Enkitec, delivered the second presentation on Advanced APEX Development Using JQuery.  Application Express (aka APEX) has historically been used as a Rapid Application Development tool, and is now widely used as a full blown Application Development framework.  David discusses the newest features of APEX including J2EE and AJAX support, JQuery/APEX integration, advanced Report Wizards, and other highend features of APEX.  David’s presentation can be found here: http://blog.enkitec.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/DOUG_17jun_2010_apex1.pdf

The Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) is a complex Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) program that consists of many components. The primary components that comprise the E-Business Suite are the Client, Forms Server, Web Server, Concurrent Processor, and Oracle Database.  For a more detailed description (with screenshots), download the document at http://blog.enkitec.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/Creating-a-concurrent-processing-expressway-in-Oracle-EBS-11i.pdf.

User interactions with Oracle Applications data are conducted via HTML-based Applications or the more traditional Forms-based Applications. However, there are also reporting programs and data updating programs that need to run either periodically, or on an ad hoc basis. These programs may contain a very large number of data-intensive computations, and are run using the concurrent processing architecture. To ensure that resource-intensive concurrent processing operations do not interfere with interactive operations, they are run on a specialized server, the Concurrent Processing server.  Processes that run on the concurrent processing server are called concurrent requests. When you submit such a request a row is inserted into a database table specifying the program to be run. A concurrent manager then reads the applicable requests in the table, and starts the associated concurrent program. The Internal Concurrent Manager controls the other concurrent managers, and determines when a request should be processed and which concurrent manager should carry it out.

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While Database Connection Pooling is not a new concept, it is becoming increasingly more important with the proliferation of both public and private web-based applications.  This post will cover using a JDBC connection pool against an Oracle database.  The general idea of Database Connection Pooling is universal and these concepts can be used with any app server / database combination.  If you have never used a database connection pool before, Apache has an open source product called DBCP which is fairly well documented for use with the Tomcat app server. 

What is Database Connection Pooling

Database Connection Pooling involves creating a persistent group of Oracle sessions, all waiting to fulfill database requests.  When a pooled connection is used, it is not destroyed like a regular database session.  It is returned to the pool so that it can be used to fulfill another request.  The reason for the existence of Database Connection Pools is to eliminate the process (and time required) to create and destroy database connections.  Because Oracle is a multi-process server, establishing a database session is considered expensive as it involves creating an operating system process and allocation of server memory.  A busy web-based applicaiton with a few hundred users can easily generate thousands of logins per minute (we’ve seen this situation more than once).  Although logins look like they happen pretty fast, the time spent waiting adds up very quickly.  The bottom line is that logins just burn CPU.

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At this year’s HOTSOS Symposium Tanel Poder presented a training day that really highlighted some very practical ways to tailor your environment so that common tasks will be easier. One tip that I have really appreciated is how to use the Unix/Linux package rlwrap (readline wrapper). Using this with a few parameters and in conjunction with SQL*Plus makes a huge difference. It is now possible to have a command history and tab-enabled auto-completion of keywords available in SQL*Plus.

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At the April 15th DOUG meeting, Michael Paddock and Andy Colvin delivered a presentation called "Grid Control in the Wild", aka "How Customers are using Oracle Enterprise Manager and Grid Control in the Real World".  A copy of the presentation is available on our website at http://blog.enkitec.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/Grid-Control.pdf

Here’s some links for common Oracle licensing topics like:

• "Do I need to license my standby server?"
• "How do I count Processors vs Cores vs Socket?"
• "What are the Minimum Number of Named Users that I need to buy?"
  

http://www.oracle.com/corporate/pricing/sig.html

http://www.oracle.com/corporate/pricing/specialtopics.html

http://www.oracle.com/corporate/contracts/library/processor-core-factor-table.pdf

http://www.orafaq.com/wiki/Oracle_licensing

Feel free to contact me for an Oracle Licensing Guide or further questions on Oracle licensing and pricing.  rhardee@enkitec.com