Author Archives: alesk
Three Great Ways to Get OOW 2008 content – LOL :)
Apparently someone at Oracle thinks, it’s the perfect time (at the doom of worldwide economy recession) to squeeze some extra money from customer pockets and charge for OOW presentation material. I found their offer one of the most ridiculous (stupid) one that I encountered in the last 10 years. Let’s see what they offer:
- if you’re lucky that you could attend OOW 2008, then you can access pdf’s for free. Big deal, because they’re really not free, considering overpriced registration fee.
- if you attended OOW 2008, but want to get multimedia content (or whatever “On Demand” means), you’ll have to shell out 400$
- of course, you can also get DVD Kit for a mere 200$. (Imho, that’s close to the robbery.)
- anyone who was not a full conference attendee must shell out 700$ to get “On Demand” access. (Yeah right, suckers who missed — or could not afford — OOW will rush and order On Demand access.[grin])
I have a strange filling that Oracle is digging it’s own hole in which it’ll end. If I can hold up with Oracle greedy attempt to charge for multimedia content access, I think it’s unfair to charge 400$ to those who already paid full OOW registration fee. For the first time, OOW pdf’s are not going to be available for free to Oracle community at large. Personally, I think this is not a big deal for us after all, because I’m sure all big names will publish their presentations on blogs. On the other hand it’s certainly a headache for Oracle public affairs department – with such cheap moves they’re casually gambling with their reputation. Nothing new in the West.
Regards,
AlesK
p.s. Next week I’ll attend Microsoft event related to Windows SQL Server 2008 and I certainly don’t expect to be ripped off by them.
Oracle10g Transparent Gateway for MS SQL – sample config.
A short memo about Oracle TG installation with sample configuration.
DirectoryPaths, hostnames, sid and account names are not real and as such do not reflect real production environment!
#########################################
MS SQL Server: MSSQLHOST
MS SQL Database: MSSQLPROD
Oracle Transparent Gateway for 10g was installed on MSSQLHOST in
home E:\ORACLE\ORA10TG and patched to 10.2.0.4.
#########################################
#########################################
Listener.ora configuration on MSSQLHOST:
#########################################
SID_LIST_LISTENER =
(SID_LIST =
(SID_DESC =
(SID_NAME = ORATG)
(ORACLE_HOME = E:\ORACLE\ORA10TG)
(PROGRAM = tg4msql)
)
)
LISTENER =
(DESCRIPTION_LIST =
(DESCRIPTION =
(ADDRESS = (PROTOCOL = TCP)(HOST = MSSQLHOST)(PORT = 1521))
(ADDRESS = (PROTOCOL = IPC)(KEY = EXTPROC0))
)
)
##############################################
C:\ORACLE\ORA10TG\tg4msql\admin\initORATG.ora
##############################################
# This is a sample agent init file that contains the HS parameters that are
# needed for the Transparent Gateway for SQL Server
#
#
# HS init parameters
#
HS_FDS_CONNECT_INFO=MSSQLHOST.MSSQLPROD <- MS SQL Database
#HS_FDS_TRACE_LEVEL=DEBUG
HS_FDS_TRACE_LEVEL=OFF
HS_FDS_RECOVERY_ACCOUNT=MSSQLPROD_RECOVERY <- OracleTG Recovery account
HS_FDS_RECOVERY_PWD=pwdpwd
HS_FDS_TRANSACTION_LOG=PROD_TRANSACTION_LOG
HS_FDS_TRANSACTION_MODEL=COMMIT_CONFIRM
# HS_FDS_TRANSACTION_MODEL=READ_ONLY
# HS_FDS_TRANSACTION_MODEL=TWO_PHASE_COMMIT
# HS_FDS_TRANSACTION_MODEL=SINGLE_SITE
HS_COMMIT_POINT_STRENGTH=0
###############################################
##################################
TNSNAMES.ORA entry at Oracle side:
##################################
MSSQLPROD =
(DESCRIPTION =
(ADDRESS_LIST =
(ADDRESS =
(PROTOCOL = TCP)
(HOST = mssqlhost)
(PORT = 1521)
)
)
(CONNECT_DATA =
(SID = oratg)
)
(HS = OK)
)
##################################
Purging dba_2pc_pending
Years ago, when I worked more with Oracle Replication than I do now, I knew more or less every command I needed to handle in-doubt transactions (as a result of failed two phase commit). On one of our development server something went wrong with distributed transactions between Oracle10g and Transparent Gateway for MS SQL Server.
First, I tried to force rollback of transaction listed in dba_2pc_pending:
SQL> rollback force '19.27.91915'; where 19.27.91915 is LOCAL_TRAN_ID from dba_2pc_pending.
I guess the problem was with TG at MS SQL Server side, because Oracle occasionally tried unsuccessfully to execute rollback on MS SQL Server. At the end, developers simply turned off Oracle TG Listener. As a result I got plenty of error messages in alert.log like this:
Fri Sep 26 12:12:38 2008 Errors in file F:\oracle\admin\oraDB\bdump\orcl_reco_1736.trc: ORA-28545: error diagnosed by Net8 when connecting to an agent Unable to retrieve text of NETWORK/NCR message 65535 ORA-02063: Message 2063 not found; No message file for product=RDBMS, facility=ORA; arguments: [2] [ lines] [TGATEWAY] []
I knew that Oracle has a package procedure that can permanently purge such transactions…., here it is: if you know that database is permanently lost and you can not rollback or commit, then you can use dbms_transaction.purge_lost_db_entry to remove failed transaction.
SQL> select local_tran_id, state, tran_comment from dba_2pc_pending;
LOCAL_TRAN_ID STATE TRAN_COMMENT
---------------------- ---------------- ------------------------------
19.27.91915 forced rollback
SQL> connect / as sysdba
S
QL> execute dbms_transaction.purge_lost_db_entry('19.27.91915');
SQL> select local_tran_id, state, tran_comment from dba_2pc_pending;
no rows selected
VMWare Server 2.0 – Released
I was using VMWare Workstation for years – mostly for OS & RDBMS testing. Nothing at production level. This will soon change. I’ll most likely use recently released VMWare Server 2.0 for some less critical production workload, replacing a couple of physical servers, plus my own workstation. I tested VMWare Server 2 RC2 and was happy with the design and even management console performance (I was expecting much worse performance after reading some feedbak on vmware forums – it’s not that bad). I’m planning Hyper-V evaluation on Windows 2008 as well. I do like both products, but Hyper-V poor performance for Linux guests (and no thanks, I refuse to use Suse, not now not in the future) will at the end most likely result in VMWare Server 2.0 deployment.
tnsManager – look no further, if you’re looking for Oracle Names replacement
A couple of days ago Andrew Barry published a link on dbaVillage that immediately caught my attention. But let’s start at the beginning of this fairy tell. As we all know Oracle obsoleted Oracle Names Server in Oracle10g, replacing it with Oracle Internet Directory (OID). It’s perfectly legal to install Oracle Internet Directory (OID) and use it for tns names resolving (and nothing else!) at no charge. But, do we really need another ton of software to handle something as simple as tns information delivery to the clients?
According to Oracle product managers it’s perfectly normal to expect from Oracle customers (that are already accustomed to deal with multi gigabytes of software and documentation thrown at them) to install, setup and maitain another ton or two, just for the sake of delivering simple TNS information to the clients. Read my lips: installing, setting up and maintaining OID just for the purpose of serving TNS information is in my opinion insane and plain stupid. Just the thought to jump in that boat was disgusting to me, right from the beginning.
I was since looking for a better way to deal with centralized tns management. I believe tnsManager by Andrew Barry is the tool I was looking for. Bravo Andrew!
tnsManager is available for Windows, Linux and Solaris. I tried Windows version; it took me five minutes to download (33Kb), install as a service (with simple command: tnsmanager install) and setup tns manager (by copying tnsnames.ora to tnsManager directory and correcting a line in tnsmanager.conf). Compare that with setup instructions for OID. Compare 90KB disk storage and around 2MB of memory footprint that tnsManager service needs on Windows with resources needed to run OID: first I would need to download around 1.9GB of software, minimal installation would require anything from 1.5 – 2GB of disk storage, at least 1GB of memory on server, all-in-all close to a day to setup everything.
A plead to Oracle product managers and developers: wake up, watch and learn! Oracle is becoming one of the greatest software bloatware producers – long ago surpassing Microsoft. I remember Larry Ellison keynote at EOUG 1996 in Amsterdam, laughing at Microsoft when they announced that they delivered 14 million lines of code with Windows NT 4, commenting that Microsoft should fire people responsible for that “bloat” of code. Well Larry, guess what, it’s time for you to start firing some of your stuff. Especially the ones responsible for middleware. — grin —
Important uppdate [22 October 2009]:
Andrew Barry released beta version of tnsManager 1.8.3 which fixes annoying bug that prevented SQL Developer to use tnsManager as an LDAP server. It’s now possible to create connection in SQL Developer that uses LDAP, sample screen shot from SQL Developer 2.1:
Use “Load” button to refresh the list of tns aliases served by tnsManager.
dbaportal.eu 
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