January 2012

Database is getting high waits on buffer busy waits. Here is an example period where 5 sessions are completely blocked on buffer busy waits for 4 minutes:

  select
       to_char(min(sample_time),'HH24:MI') maxst,
       to_char(max(sample_time),'HH24:MI') minst,
       count(*),
       session_id,
       ash.p1,
       ash.p2,
       ash.SQL_ID,
       blocking_session bsid
  from DBA_HIST_ACTIVE_SESS_HISTORY ash
  where event='buffer busy waits'
     and session_state='WAITING'
group by
       session_id
       ,sql_id
       ,blocking_session
       ,ash.p1
       ,ash.p2
Order by  1
/

gives

I recently bought myself a Kindle – the keyboard 3G version. Keyboard as I know I will want to add notes to things and the 3G version for no better reason than some vague idea of being able to download things when I am away from my WiFi.

So, how about getting Oracle documentation onto it? You can get the oracle manuals as PDF versions (as opposed to HTML) so I knew it was possible and that others have done so before. A quick web search will show a few people have done this already – one of the best posts is by Robin Moffat.

Anyway, this is my take on it.

I mentioned this when I blogged about my 11gR2 Virtual RAC install on Windows 2008. It came up in a conversation with Niall Litchfield at UKOUG 2011 and I’m reminded of it again today, after doing an 11gR2 install on Windows XP to double-check my answer to a question. Oracle database installs on Windows are so incredibly easy!

Now I’m not saying I would want to run Oracle on Windows out of choice. I’m a Linux fanboy, as you probably know, but even the most staunch Linux fan would have to agree that Oracle installs on Linux require quite a few prerequisite steps, even with the oracle-validated package. There is just nothing to do on Windows except put in the CD (iso image) and go…

One of the promises from Oracle for OEM 12c was improved support for Oracle RAC One Node. I have spent quite a bit of time researching RON, and wrote a little article in 2 parts about it which you can find here:

• http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/articles/oem/raconenode-dataguard-435121.html
• http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/articles/oem/raconenode-dataguard-2-435128.html

One of my complaints with it was the limited support in OEM 11.1. At the time I was on a major consolidation project, which would have used OEM for management of the database.

OEM 11.1