« April 2011 | Main | August 2011 »
July 26, 2011
RecTrac Upgrade Scheduled for Wednesday AM
A new version of RecTrac - 10.3(f) is available and has been scheduled for installation Wednesday morning. This newer version promises better performance with the community card encoding, which has not been working too well for us. Hopefully, this will help us move forward in solving that problem. The last upgrade totally wiped out our whole system, so this one has been scheduled during working hours.
Posted by rossm at 8:02 AM | Comments (0)
July 22, 2011
Test Instance of 11gR2 Up and Running
This week I had the opportunity to work on our Oracle production test instance, which is a copy of our production database. I was able to open the test instance, which is version 10gR2. Then an 11g Oracle home was created and the 11gR2 binaries installed. At this point, I was ready to prepare for the upgrade.
There are quite a few steps involved getting ready for the 11g upgrade - I chose the DBUA (Database Upgrade Assistant) path, Oracle article id 870814.1. Oracle strongly suggests that you remove all invalid objects from the db before upgrade. How nice. They obviously haven't seen our production db! The real point here is that there are no invalid objects due to incorrect db setup. Practically all of our invalid objects are abandoned procedures and packages, but there are lots of them scattered throughout the db. There are no invalid objects due to incorrect db setup issues, so I deemed this one "good enough", although I did run utlrp.sql in an attempt to recompile as many invalid objects as possible.
Next issue is TimeZone versions. This is a very confusing area as the main DBUA article says you "MUST" upgrade the TZ files following an upgrade if you have less than version 11 (we have version 4 so you'd think we better be on top of this one). Alas, no. An entirely different Oracle article focusing strictly on time zone versions says that the 11gR2 db comes with about 10 different versions, and will just use the newest one. So, it says, "DO NOT" modify the TimeZone files. I did not. However, the "test" is this select statement: SELECT version FROM v$timezone_file; which still returns version 4 on the test instance. Looks like the DBUA instructions might be the ones to follow here....further study required.
Two more items must be attended to right before running the upgrade. Here are the commands:
EXEC DBMS_STATS.GATHER_DICTIONARY_STATS;
PURGE DBA_RECYCLEBIN;
First, you want to gather stats on all the objects before the upgrade. This saves down time after the upgrade (both of these commands are done with the db open). Second, right before upgrade you need to purge the recycle bin - the upgrade can't deal with any objects being in here.
This next item is where I got stumped upgrading to 11g - trying to move servers and upgrade all at once just is not a good idea. Way too much room for errors, then you would have a heck of a time figuring out what went wrong. Anyway, the 11g move to network acls is one thing I'm having trouble getting going. There are about 45 schemas on our production db that will have issues with these network acls. The pre-upgrade tool I ran identifies the schemas, but not individual objects, so it is unknown exactly how many objects (mostly packages) will break under this new regimen. It is also unknown, as of today anyway, exactly how to fix them. Obviously this must be figured out before attempting the actual upgrade.
Since this is just a test instance, at this point I fired off the DBUA. Other than taking about 5 hours to complete, this part was pretty much "click and wait". It really had no issues to deal with at all during the actual upgrade.
Following the upgrade, upon opening the sqlplus from the 11g directory, voila - 11g db up and running. There are a bunch of post upgrade issues that need to be dealt with. This blog is getting too long - I'll write about those later.
Posted by rossm at 10:14 AM | Comments (0)
July 19, 2011
Bookstore Fix "Unfixed"
OK, so sometimes when you "fix" something, it isn't really fixed, you've just swapped one problem for another. And that's exactly what happened with the Bookstore's server. I turned off the IMM as previously described, which did a marvelous job of stopping the server from continously requesting a new IP address. Unfortunately, that meant that you could no longer connect remotely to the server or the outside world (i.e. where MBS is)....not really an ideal "fix". So, I went back in to the IMM module, reactivated the DHCP, but this time set it to ask for its own IP address - voila, everything is now "fixed"!
Posted by rossm at 8:37 AM | Comments (0)
Astra 7.4 Coming to WOU
Astra is the software used by WOU to schedule all classes and events on campus. It was implemented several years back to replace several separate programs that were then used across campus. The main advantage was to eliminate double bookings of space, which was quite a problem. Astra V6 was implemented across campus.
Some months back, Astra came out with a major upgrade from Version 6 to 7. V7 is a total rewrite of their application and takes Astra from the server-client realm to 100% web based. Of course we jumped right on board with this upgrade, and were one of the first Banner-Oracle sites to install it. Unfortunately, V7 wasn't quite ready for prime time. We discovered that the financial package was actually a separate install, and not well integrated with the Astra application. After a lot of back and forth, we did get some training on the new financial module and at one point were beginning to see how it could be used. Then we learned that V7.3 did not have an Exam module, which we use every term for scheduling final exams. We did move the Hamersly Library over to V7 as they had no need for either the financial module or the exam module. But, for the rest of campus, onto the back burner with this project.
Well, V7.4 has now been released by Astra. It contains an Exam module, and is really superior to V6 in many ways. We are scheduled to install a test instance of V7.4 on August 2nd. Hopefully, we can now move the entire campus over to V7.
Posted by rossm at 8:19 AM | Comments (0)
July 13, 2011
Oracle Database Security
Today I had an opportunity to check out some of the Oracle database security products. There are quite a few of them, but these are some of the main applications:
Data Vault: This allows for fine grained control of data access in the database. It's primary function is to protect sensitive data from even high level database administrators with DBA privileges - even SYS and SYSMAN. The idea is that the management of the database is separated from direct access to the sensitive data in the database. Sometimes there have been problems where the high level database managers have abused their position, and accessed sensitive data for their own reasons. This would be a bit of a pain to implement.
Advanced Security - Database Encryption: Oracle 11g database encryption is a definite step up. You can use Enterprise Manager to encrypt table columns, an entire tablespace, and even such things as your daily backups. This protects you from direct OS file stealing, theft of backup tapes, and similar threats. It uses a two layer encryption algorythm which I had not seen before. There is an encryption key stored outside the database (in an Oracle wallet for example), and a second encryption key made randomly by you for each table, which is a series of up to 70 random characters. To decrypt the information, you need both keys. I thought encrypting a whole tablespace might be too much overhead, but that encrypting certain columns containing sensitive data made a lot of sense. Oh, also, you keep one encryption key outside the database so it is not included in any of your daily backups.
Data Masking: This is not too useful for anything I could think of in our situation, but the idea is that sensitive data is converted to irretrievable gibberish. This is used in situations where you might give your data to third parties but they don't need the real values of the sensitive data to do their work.
We will be adding Advanced Security at least to our production databases.
Posted by rossm at 3:36 PM | Comments (0)
Vacation is Over, Time for Summer Projects
Last week I got to take off and head for Iowa and Missouri to visit family. Missouri allows you to buy/shoot off fireworks so of course we had to do that. It was a lot of fun. We also rented a boat for a day on Lake of the Ozarks, and I went golfing for the first time in oh, three years or so. That was also fun. It is hot there!
Following vacation, I'm ready for some new action here at work. This Summer I plan to tackle these projects:
- Write two (2) blogs per week ;-)
- Upgrade production db to 11gR2
- Upgrade Astra 7.3 to 7.4 - move toward implementation of Astra 7 across campus
- Prepare RecTrac for Fall student load
- Assist with AssetWorks implementation - Physical Plant
- Investigate Oracle Data Vault
Should keep me off the streets!
Posted by rossm at 8:49 AM | Comments (0)
Network Weirdness on Bookstore's Server Fixed
It recently came to our attention that the Bookstore's new server was constantly requesting a particular IP address from our DHCP server. After checking, re-checking, and triple-re-checking our network connection setups, nothing could be found that would be making these requests. However, we knew that the requests were coming from this server as Paul could see them coming from the switch port directly linked to this box.
I made an email request for assistance from MBS, and learned from them that there is a thingy called IMM - Integrated Management Module in this (IBM) server's BIOS. Tada - sure enough, it was set to request this particular IP from DHCP. How that ever got set like that remains a mystery, but it isn't set like that any more!
Posted by rossm at 8:41 AM | Comments (0)