This Document will graphically explain the Installation Process for Oracle 11.2.0.2 Grid Infrastructure on a single instance systems . Oracle 11.2.0.2 Grid infrastructure is ASM/CRS bundled all together and is a requirement if you need to upgrade/Install ASM based system.

Please note Starting 11.2.0.2 all Oracle Patches are full installs.

The Images/Installation were performed on a system running AIX 6.1 with Oracle 10.2.0.4 and ASM 11.1.0.7.

If the Goal is to Upgrade ASM as part of the install.  you need to shutdown all databases and ASM and ensure CSS is down.

CSS can be shutdown sudo /etc/init.cssd stop

After everything is down . Please run rootpre.sh  as root

and then  execute ./runInstaller

After you pass the initial screen. Select do not install updates and do not type in your Oracle Support ID and password. I’ve found it to be very buggy to go to Oracle support for install updates

The Second Screen Will provide you the following options. You can select Software only if you intend to do a  software install for upgrade later.

Our tutorial will focus on Installing and Upgrading ASM. Please note Grid Infrastructure will be referred to GI at this point.  GI is a required component for ASM upgrades or installs.

Once you Select  Upgrade you will get the prompt below . This is a redundant prompt and Yes should be selected.

ASM in 11.2.0.2 reguires a new lower privleged user called asmsnmp. Type the password for that user below.

Select the Roles.  For the example below all of the roles are sleected as DBA . Oracle will see that and warn you.

The Warning Message shown after select dba group for all is below.

Next Step is to enter Base . Please note User Home Directory  can not be selected as base anymore

A successful entry above will lead to Oracle checking for Requirements

You will need to look at all the parameter since this might be misleading . In somecases we had higher values but oracle failed becuase it was looking for lower values.

you can definitely review the fixup.sh with your sysadmin and have them resolve it . After it is resolved press Fix and check again  or based on your situation Check Ignore Now.

Oracle will tell you where the fixup scripts are and what to do

You will now be shown a summary of the install.

Oracle will tell you where the fixup scripts are and what to do

And now you get to run rootupgrade.sh

The rooupgrade will create new OCR keys and register the CSSD daemon, add it to iniittab as well as start the ASM instance.

You Have Grid Infrastructure installed and ASM Upgraded to 11.2.0.2.

If you have grid Control here is how it will look in GC 10.2.0.5

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New year New interesting issues.

This time we had a fellow DBA come to discuss  why this one particular database keeps  moving bad to metric collection error with database not configured anymore.

The Agent logs $AGENT_HOME/sysman/log/emagent.trc showed for this target

011-01-03 02:36:38,423 Thread-3643 WARN  vpxoci: OCI Error — ErrorCode(1008): ORA-01008: not all variables bound

On doing some more  debugging. this issue  showed up to be a specific issue  with Oracle 10.2.0.3 and cursor_sharing as  described in  ID 422118.1.

The Workaround is to change the cursor sharing from similar to exact and flushing the shared pool.

Please also Note in Oracle 11 Cursor_sharing=similar has already been deprecated per Note # 1169017.1

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I spend the holidays reading a very interesting book, The Myths of Innovation by Scott Berkun. The Books walks us through Some of the Common Myths and why they exist.  This books walks you thru a variety of myths and explains what is behind some of the most common innovations to date.

I will start my  thoughts with a Brilliant Observation in the Book

“Myths are more satisfying to us than the truth”.

This statement resonated very deeply  with me . It is true that  excitement is much more  accepted than the mundane and boring, and this book provides excitement while dispelling the myths.  The Author makes a point to bring in the simple questions that are to date unanswered with the complex one and makes the reader ponder. Do we actually have a solution?.

Berkun very brilliantly goes over events like the Newton Apple & even about mythology of various commonly used words today.  The Process of gradual addition is what has lead to a lot of major events but are these  events actually innovations or the events leading to the  final product is the actual innovation. The Author wants us to think about the difference between an innovation and just progress as usual. This is very hard in my mind but  the author does do a good of explaining the concept. The Author  wants the audience and the readers to understand clearly that innovation is not a eureka moment but rather very hard work and involves many many people and many many prior events.

This book can be bought here

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Although the check for updates didnt work . Virtual Box 4.0

http://www.virtualbox.org

Change log is here

http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Changelog

Enjoy the upgrade

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If you are using Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control. Please be  aware of a security certificate expiring on Dec 31. This is critical since your agents will not communicate to the OMS thus causing issues in your monitoring infrastructure.

From the Oracle Note

“What is the Issue?

Enterprise Manager Grid Control installations configured to use the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol utilize a self-signed Certificate Authority (CA) which is stored in the Oracle Management Repository.

For the 10.2.0.5 release of Grid Control on AIX 5L, this Certificate Authority will expire on 31-Dec-2010 00:00:00, which will cause SSL authentication to fail.. This issue affects Oracle Management Service (OMS) 10.2.0.5 on AIX 5L, as well as SSL communication from all new 10.2.0.5 Management Agents on AIX 5L (regardless of OMS platform/release) added after 31-Dec-2010 00:00:00.

Note that this communication issue is specific to Enterprise Manager Grid Control release 10.2.0.5 on the AIX 5L platform only.”

Please refer to MOS Note Note 1171558.1 for more info.

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SQL Pocket Guide by Jonathan Gennick is book that addresses SQL across multiple platforms. The Book tries to talk about SQL syntax across the major databases, which include Oracle 11Gr2, DB2 9.7, Postgres SQL and SQL Server.  Not All SQL is standard and variations of SQL in terms of Syntax are clearly highlighted and explained. The Book is written by Jonathan Gennick whose previous titles include SQL* Plus a definitive guide, Books on SQL Loader & regular expressions.

The SQL Pocket Guide is not a guide that is meant for cover-to-cover reading. This Book is rather a keep for the times when you need to find examples for SQL. Since my work with SQL has been for Oracle based Databases. I was intrigued by how SQL compares between Database vendors. E.g., CAST function was explained and pros and cons explained were brought to light that SQL Server has a better function called CONVERT that does a better job than CASE.

In This Age of Google searches and trying to find solutions in form of a web search, I feel Books Like these still play their part and should be in the arsenal of every Database Professional.  While I did not   read the entire book, the sections I scanned thru and the statements I used were definitely well explained and examples were of good value. The Book provides and easy reference with good online examples that can be downloaded and used to test syntax.

Further Book Details can be found here.

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While upgrading  one of the instances on a server . We hit an error

ORA-00600: internal error code, arguments: [kccgtt_1], [3], [], [], [], [], [],

The Error was interesting and points to an aspect of the prechecks that we hadnt explored before. Differences in PSU Levels between Homes. The Database Home was installed recently and since it was a new Home the latest PSU was applied. What wasnt done was checking the ASM Home for the PSU level. Turns out ASM Home has 11.1.0.7.2 vs Database Home having 11.1.0.7.4. ASM has to follow the rule of Same or Higher patch level the the highest level of Database version.

Once ASM was Patched All was well but it just adds another layer of checking that DBA’s have to do when installing or Upgrading Oracle.

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As part of a routine upgrade to 11.1 we decided to use dbua to complete all the upgrade tasks. Dev  & test were a breeze but the DBUA screens on Production came with a Big OK Sign  with no info whatsoever. It was kind of annoying but after digging into $ORACLE_BASE/cfgtoologs/dbua/logs  was able to Find the error to be

java.util.StringTokenizer.nextToken(StringTokenizer.java:259)
oracle.sysman.assistants.util.attributes.InitParamAttributes.loadInitParams(InitParamAttributes.java
:1763)
oracle.sysman.assistants.dbma.backend.Database.updateNonDefaultInitParams(Database.java:1068)
oracle.sysman.assistants.dbma.backend.CompManager.obtainDatabaseInformation(CompManager.java:2272)

Metalink search came up with a error in the DBUA utility for 10R2 (Oracle Please update that this issue exists in 11 also).   Note id # 444148.1 describes the situation as a parameter that have single quotes.
in our case i had smtp_out_server=’ ‘ . This cause dbua to unable to parse the spfile.
Solution was to create a pfile remove this parameter and proceed. DBUA Proceeded to next step after this

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So this Thursday we were doing some application testing on our physical standby and after the testing was completed, My Backups kicked off while i was flashing back the Database. This caused the Controlfile to have an invalid entry with the ckp_time being null. The problem with an invalid entry int eh control file was that Oracle RMAN was not able to run an implicit resync catalog from the standby. Our Configuration has a primary and a physical standby that is used for backups so the backups were failing which is a problem.
A resync catalog would work for the primary so the issue was isolated to the physical standby. I thought hey that’s simple , just get another copy of the control file from the primary using

SQL>ALTER DATABASE CREATE STANDBY CONTROLFILE AS ‘stdbycontrol.ctl’;
sftp the file
and then run
RMAN> restore controlfile from ‘stdbycontrol.ctl;
and all will be good.
While the assumption was right . I was missing important components . Structure,OMF & ASM.
The Standby was originally created from a Filesystem Based Database which was later converted to ASM. Ths meant the structure of the primary and standby were very different. Even after the primary was converted into ASM OMF and standby_file_management=auto meant that  OMF would kick in and all files created in the primary will not get the same  file name on the standby. This caused loads of headaches for me and i was glad i had a backup.

The Only Good thing was that the File number matched on both primary and standby.  This Help me Build a SQL File to

SQL > alter database rename file  ‘ File name of primary   database’  to ‘ Files Name of Standby database’;

The Way to do this the fastest was to dump the V$datafile from the old controlfile on the standby . Load it into the primary and run a select like this

SQL> select ‘alter database rename file    ‘  chr(39)||a.name ||’ chr(39)’  to    ‘ chr(39)||b.name||chr(39)||’;’ from  v$datafile a stdby_datafile b where a.file#=b.file# order by file#

This generated a quick and dirty  datafile  renaming script to get me up and running as soon as the standby controlfile was restored.

A painful process but definitely faster than restoring the whole database.

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I was looking thru some reports on a time period when we has Database Contention . I noticed something really Odd in the ASH reports

I have one index that was the top DB Object w.r.t to Db sequential file read. I wanted to move that index to  a different tablespace anyway so i rebuilt the table. What i noticed on the ASH report was very interesting

Prior to my Index Rebuild the ASH report

Top DB Objects

• With respect to Application, Cluster, User I/O and buffer busy waits only.

Top DB Files

• With respect to Cluster and User I/O events only.

After the Index Rebuild the ASH Report for the same time period

Top DB Objects

• With respect to Application, Cluster, User I/O and buffer busy waits only.

Top DB Files

• With respect to Cluster and User I/O events only.

While the Top DB Files remains the same the top DB Objects now has a different table space not because the table space was that at the time of the problem but because it seems oracle is performing a real time query to determine what the current table space this. this can be confusing and misleading since the top db files and the top db objects now no longer match.
Anyone seen this or have any explanation of why Oracle would be doing this.

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