Welcome to the Blog of Mike Ross

My Blog Has Been Broken

2011-09-29T15:28:45Z

It's true, I lost a couple entries due to some file permission problems, then tried to repost them, then the whole thing went South. I'm hoping this will show up where it's supposed to.

Dewey and 11g Update

2011-09-20T22:17:52Z

The other day I got a bit of time and decided to create the DAD necessary to test PL/SQL from the 11g test database on Dewey. This required getting up early and restarting the webserver, but all went well and now I've got a Dewey DAD to use for testing PL/SQL.

So far, it does appear that the fine grained access control is not active on the 11g upgraded database. This is really good news as it allows for "only" the upgrade to be done at one time, then we can apply the fine grained access control at a separate time. The upgrade process itself will require most of a night to complete.

We need further testing on the FGA control, then I need to get my notes together and document all the things that require special attention before and after the upgrade. Things such as .dbf file location, Mike Huber's "special" items in the listener - and in the old Oracle Home, backup folder locations, database links, directory objects, and so on. The upgrade process tends to leave a lot of things in the 10g Oracle Home, so I want them all moved over under the 11g Oracle Home to keep it all nice and neat.

Astra 7.4 Ready for Testing

2011-09-20T21:47:27Z

After many hours on the phone with Astra support, we have finally gotten the 7.4 test verion operational. And, it will import Banner section data. The next step is to connect the accounting software (nightmare) ObjAcct to the test instance so that the WUC events folks can begin working with it.

Also, the Library folks have been looking over the 7.4 version, and like some of its new features. So, we will be scheduling an upgrade of our 7.3 production instance once they become a bit more familiar with the new version.

100 X 60 - Completed!

2011-08-24T18:43:41Z

You probably know about my electric bike, and the fact that I ride it to work nearly every day of the year. I've done this for about the past 8 years or so. A few months ago I "built" a new ebike with a 36v 10ah lithium LiFePO4 battery - a very nice commuter bike.

Upon completing the new ebike, I decided to set a life goal for myself to ride this bike 100 miles (a Century ride) in one day. To this end I have been making quite a few 20-30 mile rides to learn about the battery performance, and how much of my own energy is required.

Well, last Saturday beginning at 6:00 am, ending at 4:30 pm, I did manage to ride the 100 miles. The 100 x 60 means 100 miles by age 60 (coming up shortly for me). That is a looooooooooong way to ride a bike in one day.

But now it is done!

Solaris Parameters Set, More Juice for Aero

2011-08-24T18:38:38Z

Last night Dave and I increased the RAM on our Solaris LDOM which serves Aero to 32G. Dave had previously upped the CPUs to 32 as well. We configured a project to allow the Oracle user no more than 20G of ram. At this level we were able to open the database with a max SGA setting of 12G and 250 processes. Anything higher would result in a memory error as Oracle was trying to grab more than its allotted 20G.

All in all a successful upgrade of LDOM resources and increase of Aero's SGA.

10.3g Upgrade Completed + A Few Other Things

2011-08-18T17:06:47Z

I came in early this morning to perform the RecTrac upgrade from10.3f to 10.3g with assistance from RT support - Zach. Everything seems to have completed normally, so we are now on the latest greatest RT version - at least for this week. Seems like they are pushing out a lot of upgrades. Maggi informed me that this upgrade did fix some issues we were having with our access control.

Tomorrow afternoon Gabe and I are scheduled to take down all the front desk workstations and other equipment. The front desk is being fixed over the weekend. First thing Monday morning we'll be putting it all back together again. I am also hoping to uninstall/reinstall the RT clients on all those workstations, which might clear up an issue we've been having where the wrong image is displayed for a person going through the access control points.

Final thing - Christina is preparing for the big Fall student import - sync'ing up Banner and RT is no easy thing. We're also looking to put more images onto the RT server, but not until the new student id cards have been created.

There are still some things about RT that aren't quite right, however, it seems to me that with each upgrade we have fixed more outstanding issues. It is getting better and better.

V7.4 Moves Ahead

2011-08-17T22:18:36Z

The installed test version of 7.4 still will not load any Banner section data. I have sent off some log files to their support, but we haven't yet pinned down the problem. My guess is it has something to do with our test user setup on the database and/or the database link we created. I am waiting to hear from Astra support on that one.

Also, we are considering putting the Hamersly Library onto the newer version as well. They have been live with 7.3 for quite some time. One of the main improvements in 7.4 is more flexibility in your form display - you can customize the data that is displayed in quite a few ways.

Right now we have our production V7 at 7.3 and our test V7 at 7.4, so it seems to make sense to move production up to 7.4.

A Couple Oracle Things: Tnsnames.ora rewrite, Solaris OS

2011-08-17T22:10:18Z

A couple Oracle things came up this week. From somewhere, a massively ugly tnsnames.ora file was put into place on ts4. After an hour or so of fiddling around we got all the connection issues fixed, but that file needed some attention. Michael asked me to clean it up, and I enlisted Mike Soukup to help with the Banner connections. There are quite a few outdated connection entries, and there were a ton of connections for other campuses - from the new data warehouse models, I think. Anyway, these files are so touchy - I could see not one thing wrong with the ora.wou.edu entry, but it would not work. I cut and pasted it in again and it worked. Such has been my experience with the tnsnames entries in the past. Once they work, then you are golden, but they can sometimes be a real pain.

A second Oracle item is Dave and I are working on fixing the Solaris setup on ora. Somehow it isn't set up quite right, and is causing problems under heavy loading. We are working on testing Dewey's setup, then we'll put a good fix onto ora. Also, Dave is going to give us some more RAM so that we can increase the SGA on Aero. We'll do everything at once.

Montana Vacation Coming Up - WooHoo!

2011-08-12T18:03:51Z

Bill OK'ed my vacation request for the week following Labor Day. So, the annual Montana fishing trip is being planned. This year it is a lot different since neither my Dad nor my son are going to make the trip. Our fishing buddy Mark has moved to the Missoula area and built a beautiful house near the Bitterroot, so that is new, too. We have always gone to Rock Creek and camped in the woods, but this year it looks like we're taking Mark's 5th wheel and doing some "gentleman" camping! Whatever, I'm thankful to have the chance to go again this year!

Database 11g Update and a Few Other Things

2011-08-12T17:49:13Z

The 11g updated version of our production database is running on our test server now. I did discover one interesting thing - the fine grained access control does not kick in upon upgrade. By this I mean, it is something that can be implemented after the upgrade process. This is pretty significant - it is always better to divide a large project into as many smaller steps as possible. I need to test this further, but if this is indeed the case, we are pretty close to upgrading the production db. However, I'm waiting until next week when Dave is back before rocking the boat - just in case! When he gets back I'm going to install the 11g binaries on our production server and get that all patched up and ready. Oh yes, first we have to fix the OS kernel parameters and make sure that box is ready for any load we can throw at it.

A couple other items - Michael has suggested we look at an Oracle install on the "unbreakable" unix platform - rather than the SPARC Solaris platform. I think there are a lot of good reasons to move in this direction, so am very excited to pursue this option. The Solaris platform is good, but it feels like it is losing ground to the vanilla unix OS'es, and who knows what plans Oracle has for Solaris in the future, if any.

The other database issue is that Aero is once again calling for increased SGA size. Currently, it is set at 8 GB, which is quite a bit larger than it was on our previous server. OEM is recommending an increase to 14 G, which would require the addition of some more RAM on the LDOM to make this work. Not sure why it's wanting so darn much more RAM, over our previous production db. We do run a lot of large, repeating jobs pretty much all day long - way more than we used to. But I don't think that alone accounts for the need for more SGA space.

New Battery for My Electric Bike

2011-08-02T22:55:42Z

Just today a new 48v 10ah lithium LiFePO4 battery came in the mail. Oh boy, I can't wait to get it charged up and give it a try on the bike. It is a bit heavier than my existing battery, but has a BMS which will help to monitor the individual cells' health much better. Of course I'm expecting it to push the bike along "with alacrity"!

So now I've got this battery and my 36v 10ah battery. These two together should give me about 50 miles of range. I'm running out of time to get my 100 X 60 ride done (yup, that's 100 miles by age 60!). Time to git 'er done......

OEM Restarted on Aero

2011-08-02T22:40:36Z

Well, last week was not fun in the database world of WOU. At first great progress was being made, and a running copy of Aero was actually upgraded to 11gR2. That part was good. However, after doing the upgrade to the Aero copy a lot of "fixing" had to be done. So, of course I started up OEM to help me see how the database was doing. It was here where disaster struck. I shut down the database using OEM on the copy. Unfortunately, the real database got shut down as well. This is bad, but not terrible. I logged on to the server, opened sqlplus, and restarted the production database. It started just fine, so after some testing and watching, I left for lunch - no problem, right? Wrong! Michael called me at lunch - the production server was "hung". After much searching and grunting we concluded that the production server could not handle the backlog caused from the earlier shutdown. All of the OS processes were being used, then the server would hang, then it would work fine for 20 minutes, then it would hang again. After trying everything we could think of Dave added some more processors to the LDOM and the problem went away.

It now looks like the underlying problem is incorrectly set OS parameters. Dave is on vacation until the 12th, so when he gets back we will see if those parameters can be improved upon.

Not a happy situation. However, I just now restarted OEM on the production db and that is working again (too chicken to try it earlier!) - so much easier than monitoring by hand!

Astra Version 7.4 Installed

2011-08-02T22:31:31Z

Our campus has long awaited the release of Astra Version 7.4. Most of the campus is presently using version 6. Version 7 is a complete re-write of the software, and takes Astra up a notch to a web-based application. Previous versions of Astra have been installed on campus, and the Hamersly Library is the sole user of version 7.3 (our production version). This is because the HL has no need for the financial package or the final exam module.

We have a long history of trying to grasp the financial piece of Version 7. It is a "bolt on" to the main application called Object Accounting (ObjAcct), and is not well integrated. It is also just a financial package - similar to QuickBooks. It is not tailored to the needs of a campus. At one point we were making headway with understanding how we can use ObjAcct, but that fell by the wayside when we realized that the 7.3 version did not have a final exam module.

So, now we have it all here - in a test version. It is my hope that we can now move forward and get all of campus on the new 7.4 version of Astra.

RecTrac Upgrade Scheduled for Wednesday AM

2011-07-26T15:02:14Z

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.

Test Instance of 11gR2 Up and Running

2011-07-22T17:14:21Z

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.