Oracle Weblogic – Setup, Configuration, Tuning, and Considerations
This is a presentation I put together for a presentation to the Dallas Oracle User’s Group (DOUG) on March 24,2011.
It goes over the installation process of a Weblogic instance, the setup of a Nodemanager instance, connecting the two together, and the setup of a cluster. Additionally, it goes into Weblogic tuning tips and considerations for moving to and utilizing Weblogic with new and existing server environments and application developments.
Link to the presentation PDF
Fixed Object Statistics Benefits in 10g
Fixed objects statistics are often overlooked in the scheme of operations in the database. Like any database object in a production environment, these objects undergo changes and need to be analyzed from time to time to ensure that the optimizer has the latest information to be able to access them effectively. The automatic statistics gathering jobs in 10g and 11g do not collect the fixed object statistics by default, but the fact that these jobs exist underscores the importance of optimizer statistics. We are going to see in this scenario that statistics on the often neglected fixed object statistics are important as well.
We will start with a typical query you would execute to find out who is accessing certain objects in the database:
select distinct owner
from v$access;
Our test system: Oracle 10.2.0.4.0 on Sun SPARC Solaris version 10
WebCast: Exadata Storage Layout
Yesterday I gave a web cast for the Oracle Exadata (IOUG SIG) Linked-In group. The presentation was entitled “Exadata Storage Layout” and touched on the components of Exadata, ASM basics, and storage provisioning. The main thrust of the web cast was to discuss configuration options for cell disks and storage cells. Cell disks are carved up into grid disks which are presented to ASM on the database servers where they are used to create disk groups for database storage. Storage cells may also be provisioned to the database servers in such a way as to create multiple storage grids. Finally, we discussed a few options for storage cell and database server provisioning within RAC and Non-RAC configurations.
I hope you found the presentation helpful. My email address is located on the last slide. Feel free to email me with any questions we didn’t have time to cover in the web cast.
Slides from the Enkitec Exadata Storage Layout WebCast
Randy.Johnson@Enkitec.com
Adding Hints to Existing SQL Profiles (10g)
By Jon Adams, Sr. Technical Consultant and Jack Augustin, Sr. Technical Consultant
The SQL Tuning Advisor was introduced in Oracle 10g. Its purpose is to take a poorly-executing SQL statement and perform an examination process looking at object optimizer statistics, index usage, and other aspects of the query to determine how to make it perform more efficiently. The result of executing this tool often results in a SQL profile being recommended on the SQL statement.
Simply put, a SQL Profile is a list of hints that will influence the execution of the SQL statement that it is attached to. Unfortunately, SQL profiles do not prevent the optimizer from choosing a different plan for several reasons including bind variable peeking, out-of-date or insufficient segment statistics or histograms, configuration settings (index cost, optimizer, etc.), or simply that Oracle thinks another plan is better. There is a way to add hints to existing SQL profiles to ignore features like bind variable peeking. Altering an existing SQL Profile is not officially supported by Oracle, as the SQL Profile itself is only supposed to be created by the SQL Tuning Advisor, so caution and testing is highly recommended.
For our test case, I will take a query that had nine different plans associated with it, observed by querying the AWR (the output has been compressed for sanity’s sake):
Exadata Bundle Patch 5 Gotcha's
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.
Creating a concurrent processing expressway in Oracle EBS 11i
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://blog2.enkitec.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/Creating-a-concurrent-processing-expressway-in-Oracle-EBS-11i1.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.
JDBC Connection Pooling for Oracle Databases
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.
Using SQLPlus with rlwrap on MS Windows
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.
Enkitec Presents at April DOUG Meeting
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-Control1.pdf
Oracle Licensing Topics
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
