"Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party."

Presumably every (good) student of informatics has learned to know the above phrase as filler text or as exercise on handling multiple editors, fonts etc. just like Cicero's famous Lorem ipsum - nothing more than a typing drill described by Wikipedia.org here -> Filler Text.The real meaning goes back to the American Revolutionary Period, when Patrick Henry stirred the seeds of discord with his famous Give Me Liberty Or Give Me Death speech to the Virginia Assembly in 1775. It is quoted her to explain my long break in writing about databases and programming. Far from Henry's fervent ...

Watch Starwars with Docker

ASCII Version of Starwars

Found in "Orchestrating Docker" by Shrikrishna Holla   - I love this book. Here is the code.

Train Data Guard with Docker 1.10.1 and Docker Compose 1.6.0

Important tech news brought us to  change our Docker Data Guard Project. Please see my posts Start Oracle Data Guard Training with Docker and Docker managed via upstart, too.  The actual Docker release is stable. NOTE: the daemon used to be started with "/usr/bin/docker -d". From now on you start it - manually - like that

root@Thinkpad4:~# docker daemon > docker.session 2>&1 &
[1] 2422
root@Thinkpad4:~# ps -ef | grep docker  | grep -v grep
root      2422 10277  8 14:52 pts/8    00:04:40 docker daemon

Google donates 25.000 laptops to refugees in Germany

Changing the world through the power of technology and collaboration - this  is the way which I admire and support - see Net Hope. One recent project is called Project Reconnect. By now, the description is only in German, an English version does not seem to be available, so translate it with your browser or alike programs.

I am a German IT Consultant and appreciate very, very much what NetHope and Google do for my country. I repeat: they do it for my country. Important German organizations - governamental, technical, social, educational  - have already joined in - see Presentation in Berlin .

Start Oracle Dataguard Training with the most simple Dockerfile

Refers to our Docker-Dataguard-Project

After a long absence I feel obliged to bring this project to an end. Therefore I start my works with the most simple Dockerfile

Click on the picture to enlarge

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

This famous quote of George Santayna's came to my mind when I tried to follow the publications on the inevitable cloud, in particular on Oracle's cloud. "Oracle has more cloud applications than any company. And cloud apps are hard work to build."  - refer to Larry Ellison at OpenWold user conference Undoubtedly the ultimate foundation for Oracle cloud is the database Oracle12c - refer to Andy Mendelsohn at OpenWorld As matters now stand, it is time to remember Santayana's dictum and take a look, how the grandmaster of Oracle database consultants, Donald K. Burleson takes up an inconvenient position.

Tricky: docker, oraclelinux, ubuntu and ulimit -Hn

Virtualization is said to bee good for training and development, but  it should be kept out from productive environments. Some people, to whom I belong, meanwhile changed their minds and are convinced, that e.g. docker containers running ubuntu or oraclelinux, breed85/oracle12c or alike will play an increasing role in data virtualization. See also oaktable-world-agenda-2015/ To get experience and clarify certain questions we have created a Docker Project on github. This story here came up with the number of open files in a system (ulimit -Hn), crucial for productive systems. The issue discussion serves best to  understand the impact and the trickyness of the question. For whom it may concern, it is published here.

Docker & oracle-rdbms-server-12cR1-preinstall

There is an extremely annoying  behavior of oracle-rdbms-server-12cR1-preinstall, when you want to use it in conjunction with docker images like breed85 or oraclelinux: this official package of Oracle's blocks every attempt to switch to the user oracle (su - oracle), which one is forced to do, when he wants to install Oracle SW and create Oracle databases in a Docker container. I have written 2 posts in July about that and none of them was correct. After 2 months I was forced to come back in order to accomplish our Dockerproject . Here is, what I have found out.

How to use AWR and ADDM - very short explanation

In the last post about setting up stress tests on Oracle databases I recommended AWR and ADDM to see the results of your tests. These tools are unique gems of programming. For those who are not familiar with them, here is a very short, but hopefully efficient instruction, how to handle it manually.

How to setup a stress test on Oracle or equivalent databases

In a recent workshop on Oracle12c administration, I noticed that the participants had no idea how to let Oracle create archived redo logfles, i.e. they did not know how to create a relevant workload. In the exercises of the workshops you can find one, which performs some workload on CPU and I/O, but nothing about writing so much to the online redo logs, that the log writer process LGWR needs to copy the contents to the archived redo log files.
In summary, the students - all computer scientists working several years in IT companies - had never seen a stress test before. To solve the issue, I passed an old script of mine to them. To whom it may concern, I will publish it here, because it is really simple.

No bug in oracle-rdbms-server-12cR1-preinstall !

This refers to my last post bug or feature in oracle -rdbms-server-12cR1-preinstall
There is no problem in oracle-rdbms-server-12cR1-preinstall, but rather a little confusion in the docker image breed85/oracle-12:preinstall.

bug or feature in oracle-rdbms-server-12cR1-preinstall?

The latest version of oracle-rdbms-server-12cR1-preinstall introduces an interesting behaviour: it blocks su - oracle with the vacuous message su: could not open session. But we really need to be able to do that, when we want to install Oracle12c.
There are many questions and answers in the net trying to get rid of that extremely annoying issue. Here is the solution.

"Docker is managed via upstart, try using service docker restart" - baffling advice ?

Presumably every docker user has already followed this advice and experienced a baffling message "unkown job docker". There are quite a lot of questions and some bug reports in the net, but seemingly no satisfying answers. The question seems to me: "What is upstart?" Here is my own workaround.

Vagrant vs. VirtualBox ? - A false contradiction

"Why should I use Vagrant instead of just VirtualBox?" - There are quite a lot of questions and answers of that type  in the net. The questioners seem to belong to the group of operations engineers, e.g. application supporters, database administrators, etc. The answerers seem to belong to the group of developers. Hence my first clue on this queer debate is, that it may be a question of conflicting priorities in the field of the Devops movement.

Unix for the DBA: Handling Shared Memory

The Problem

There are some good introductions, but special questions are usually missing, like for instance  handling the Shared Memory and the kernel parameters. A professional DBA cannot rely on system administrators, but should rather advise them in setting up Unix - Systems for Oracle databases. A crucial question is the portion of Shared Memory and how to increase it.

Migrate MySQL to Oracle using multiple virtualboxes

After 10 years I have come back to MySQL and there is quite a lot of things which may concern an Oracle DBA.

MySQL and Oracle live under the same company roof
as I have predicted 12 years ago and the results of the meanwhile peaceful  conjugal live have turned out to be impressing for Oracle DBA's as well.

Vagrant on Windows

Refers to train.oracle12.migration

The Problem

People focussed on Windows have problems in understanding and setting up vagrant projects on their machines. They simply don't like the commandline and insist on "clicking in GUIs". If one pretends to work seriously, he must not be attached to this attitude. Here are the basic steps.

In-Memory Database Columnar Technology in a VirtualBox

Refers to train.oracle12.migration

The Problem
You have imported the user OE into the pluggable database PDB1 inside your guest VM. Now you want to test the In-Memory features of Oracle12c.

Oracle's datapump between host and guestVM

Refers to train.oracle12.migration  

The Problem

You want to load data from your host database into your VM database. Instead of theoretical instruction I will show you an example.

Git & Vagrant for Dummies

Refers to github project train.oracle12.migration

The Shortest Introduction Possible for Oracle IT Crowd

Some friends in the Oracle IT Crowd have problems to understand and setup my project. Here are the basic steps.