Author: Marc Fielding

Since Oracle 11.2.0.3 came out last September, there have been questions about Exadata availability. As of today, the patchset is now available.
Reviewing the upgrade document (MOS note 1373255.1) a few things that jumped out at me, here they are.

For the final day of UKOUG there are quite a few Pythian presentations. Unfortunately a lot of them happen at the same time, so it won’t be possible to attend them all live.

On tap for Tuesday is a 2-hour master class from Michael Abbey, along with an all-day drop-in RAC attack workshop with Alex Gorbachev and the RAC SIG.

For those of you attending UKOUG today, there is a healthy dose of Pythian presentations on tap this afternoon. Actually, you can do it wall to wall 2:30pm to 6:30pm if you like.

I was just looking at an Exadata X2-2 ordering document and noticed that it included 144GB of RAM. The sales rep pointed at the Exadata X2-2 datasheet and showed the 96GB to 144GB memory expansion option.

The website for Oracle Database Cloud Services is now online. It’s a hosted database service running Oracle 11gR2. The database can be accessed using a hosted Oracle application server, via JDBC across the Internet, or their own RESTful API a la Amazon. Notably lacking is Oracle’s own TNS network protocol. A lot of the feature set seems to be oriented toward data warehousing applications, including the aforementioned partitioning, bitmap indexes, query rewrite, and star transformations. A few other interesting features

If you’re using the cellmonitor OS user run commands other than a plain cellcli, this may stop working on upgrade. This would happen if custom scripts were built to do additional monitoring that’s not part of cellcli.

Oracle Database Appliance (ODA) is in many ways similar to an Exadata quarter rack: they both use two similar compute servers in an engineered system configuration, with shared storage and flash storage. But in other ways, especially networking and storage, they differ significantly.

I’ve started putting together some information about the Oracle Database Appliance in question-and-answer form. If you have an unanswered question, ask away in the comment section in this post.

Greg Rahn of Oracle’s real-world performance group posted a technical review of an article I wrote last summer, entitled Making the Most of Oracle Exadata. I have a few comments on the technical concerns Greg raised.