When we were planning migration from commodity hardware to Exadata X5-2 one open topic we had was if it makes sense to enable write-back flash cache in Exadata. The default mode is write-through where read operations utilize flash cache but not the write operations. Write-back then uses the flash cache to both read AND write…
Oracle Open World & Intelligent Bot Service
Past week I attended Oracle Open World in San Francisco. I hadn’t been there for last 7 years so it was good to see lot of familiar faces there again. Still what comes to conference itself there are always good presentations but the percentage for hit & miss sessions is a lot higher compared to…
Oracle EBS Output Post Processor hanging after database upgrade to 12.1.0.2
We recently had very challenging issue after we upgraded our EBS 12.1.3 database from 11.2.0.3 to 12.1.0.2. On random occasions threads on output post processor started to hang / wait for something and eventually this caused concurrent managers to get completely stuck without anything being processed anymore. Only way to recover from this was to…
Looking deeper into ChatOps
Wow few upgrades and summer vacation kept me busy past few months. Lately I have been looking on automation and started to look into ChatOps. So what is ChatOps? If you look from various sources you get different explanation but to put it really simple you have a chatroom tailored for specific group, be it…
Passbolt v1.6.0 is out
Since I’ve written earlier about Passbolt as team password manager I thought it would make sense to notify there is new version 1.6.0 out as I installed version 1.4.0 for us. My earlier post about Passbolt is here: https://finnishingthoughts.wordpress.com/2017/03/01/passbolt-for-team-password-management/ The biggest thing we noticed previously was the lack of group management in Passbolt but luckily…
Oracle VM 3.4.x & PVM vs HVM PV
Initially when we started to use Oracle VM we did lot of performance testing and at that point we went with Paravirtualized VM’s (PVM) due to better performance we saw with them. Now with our recent upgrade to Oracle VM 3.4.2 if you are using hugepages (we do!) then hugepages are not supported anymore with…
Oracle VM 3.4.2 CPU pinning & licensing
One of the reasons why we started using Oracle VM was due to Oracle’s licensing policy with their products running on top of Oracle VM. If you “pin” (or hard partition) the virtual machine to specific cores you don’t need to license whole server pool which the virtual machine runs on. Drawback is when you…
Resize backup LVM on Exadata
We were patching Exadata and one of the YUM pre-checks failed due to invalid LVM size. We hadn’t done any resizing lately so I think issue had been there already but for whatever reason it wasn’t noticed. For backing up and rolling back on OS updates Exadata takes snapshot on identical LVM volume as the…
Optimizing performance for Oracle VM when using iSCSI storage
We implemented Oracle VM 3.3.2 around two years ago and biggest issue we had was using iSCSI storage having sub-optimal latency and throughput with parallel sessions and high load in our performance tests. In the end this was resolved by linux disk partition alignment and few iSCSI optimizations. Problem After doing the initial Oracle VM installation we started…
Passbolt for team password management
I was thinking recently that we need some tool where we store our team’s passwords for all the different logins we have. Few requirements what I came up with: The server or the password file needs to be hosted on our network There needs to be mechanism to share passwords within specific persons or groups…