IOUG SELECT Journal Q3 2015

This is the cover of the January 1999 issue of IOUG SELECT Journal.  This is the oldest issue I could find in my collection, and is probably close to when I joined IOUG as a paid member.  At the time I would never have dreamed that I would become the Executive Editor for the magazine or get to work with some of the largest names in Oracle technology. 

Times have changed, and how we get our information has also changed.  For me one thing has not changed.  The IOUG has always been a critical part of my career.  Every paid member, and volunteer I have meet over the past 16 years is interested in the same thing. 

How can I get the best non-biased information on Oracle Technology? 

That might mean getting independent reviews, internal workings on Oracle technology, or even mentoring on technical writing, and presenting.  As much as I have become dependent on the Internet for quick answers, only though the IOUG have I been able to advance my technical communication skills.  Knowing something is important, but being able to communicate it is business.

With the 87^th issue of SELECT Journal, we are going to do something we have never done before (to my knowledge).  We are giving away this issue to everyone. The Journal is just one of the benefit to paid members.  In this case we hope that by making this issue widely available, everyone can see some of the benefits the IOUG brings to it’s paid members. 

Every author in the Journal was just like you.  At some point they had not presented to a crowed, they had not authored a blog, they had not written an article, they had not worked with editors, and they had not been published.  Growing acumen in technical spaces requires not just detailed knowledge, but the ability to apply it, and therefore communicate it.

I’m lucky enough as Executive Editor to help grow new authors and work with a great set of volunteer editors.  I’m always excited to work with new authors, and I know they are excited to see their work published.

As Alex says in his column on personal resiliency, “get out of your comfort zone.”  Join us at IOUG.

The issue Q3 2015 issue is now available at:
http://www.ioug.org/p/cm/ld/fid=1132 

Have comments, contact me at editor@ioug.org

Or leave your comments bellow.

Oracle VM - SSL server probably obsolete

Users of Oracle Virtual Machine for x86 technology may be encountering a interesting problem.  The issue lies in the management tool OVMM or Oracle Virtual Machine Manager or OVM Manager access.

This affects users of the stand alone Oracle VM for x86, as well as users of the engineered systems Oracle Virtual Compute Appliance (VCA), Oracle Private Cloud Appliance (PCA), Exalogic in virtual configurations, Exadata in virtual configurations, and Oracle Database Appliance (ODA) in a virtual configuration.

When trying to use the latest browsers to navigate to the HTTPS protected version of the OVMM tool you will encounter errors such as:

• SSL server probably obsolete.  (ERR_SSL_FALLBACK_BEYOND_MINIMUM_VERSION)
• Secure Connection Failed (Error code: ssl_error_no_cypher_overlap) 

The issue can occur in Google Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer.  I'm sure Safari won't be far behind.

This is due to changes in how secure socket layer is being communicated and basically de-supporting older versions.  The root of this problem is in the WebLogic layer that is used to host OVMM.

A good place to start is looking for help is at My Oracle Support (MOS) note:

Oracle VM: Connecting to Oracle VM Manager 3.2.x Results in "ssl_error_no_cypher_overlap" Error Message ( Doc ID 1997431.1 )

There may be related issues with older version of Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g, again caused by the configuration of WebLogic.

Initial workarounds include:

• Using a previous version of the browser (such as Google Chrome prior to version 45, we are having good luck with version 41)
• Use the non-secure connection to the tool (use HTTP vs. HTTPS), but be aware that passwords and other data will be transmitted over your network un-encrypted.
• Look for patches / updates from Oracle for your specific tool / product.

I'm sure there will be much more fall out and updates from this.  I'm not a SSL or HTTPS expert, but I think this is affecting or will affect a lot of Oracle customers as we all work through the transition.

If you have other input / suggestions please add comments to the blog.

Gary

Collaborate 15 - IOUG Cloud Track

It's April, and Collaborate 15 is upon us again.  For myself this event has approached at the speed of a bullet train, I'm still trying to get my act together.  For many of you, I'm sure your well prepared with your schedules all figured out, and a clear list of what your hoping to learn and take back to your workplace.

My personal dilemma is how to pick from all the great sessions available, for almost every time slot I have three or more sessions in mind that I must choose only one to attend.  I'm not sure if everyone has that problem, but at least a few people I have spoken to does.

Again this year I was lucky enough to be on the IOUG conference committee, and helped lead the Cloud Computing track.  In this role we help pick which topics and sessions will be in the track, and narrow down the presenters from those submitted in October of 2014.  I think we have curated a great selection of presenters for 2015, narrowing the 74 submissions down to 21.  As Cloud Computing is a somewhat broad topic, we have tried to cover a wide range of topics from external to internally hosted clouds, virtual computing from multiple vendors, and cloud tools.

I've very excited about all the sessions, but would like to highlight a few here.

• Monday 12:45pm - Reef F - 463 Stack Attack - a hands on lab where you get to install OpenStack and test out automated virtual server build.
• Monday 3:15pm - Banyan D - 598 "What Do You Think Database as a Service Is..." - a roundtable discussion with seasoned industry experts on cloud computing, ?aaS what does it mean, what do you get.  Come ask your questions.
• Tuesday 9:45am and 2:00pm - Reef F - 162 Building DBaaS and 270 Best Practices for Oracle on VMWare - both great sessions covering Oracle database on VMWare automation in the morning, and then tuning and best practices in the afternoon.
• Wednesday - 8:00am, 2:45pm, and 4:00pm - 460 Your own private cloud, 464 Self-service private cloud EM 12c, and 656 Private cloud with Oracle RAC 12c - sessions on three different ways to build out and create your own internal cloud with Oracle products.
• Monday 10:30am - 649 Migrating Enterprise application to the hybrid cloud; Wednesday 9:15am - 530 Oracle Databases on Oracle's public cloud - two great sessions on making the jump to databases in the public cloud.

I can't highlight every session or topic here, but we tried to cover a wide range of topics.  If you are running virtualized systems internal to your company, automating databases deployment with OEM or other tools, or making the jump to public cloud providers I think we have sessions to meet your needs.

Check out the cloud track in the on-line session scheduler http://collaborate.ioug.org/page/scheduler

Just filter on the track "Cloud Computing".

If you have any questions just look for one of the IOUG conference committee members in the black t-shirts with the cards on the back. 

Exalogic Virtual Control Stack Backup and Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM)

So I think our group is a early adopter of the Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud, specifically the virtual edition.  Now I don't believe we are the only ones running this product, not by a long shot.  But I'm not sure there is a large number of big corporations using it yet for critical application workloads.  That being said, it has been working well for us.

Today I'd like to talk about one specific item for the Exalogic.  In a virtual configuration there is a set of virtual servers (or vServers as Oracle calls them), that runs the management interface for the virtualization.  This is called the Control Stack by Oracle.  The Control stack is made up of three vServers that host an install of Oracle Virtual Machine Manager (OVMM), and Oracle Enterprise Manager Operations Center (EMOC).  These systems are critical to operations on your system, they are used to monitor all your hardware and vServers; create and destroy vServers; and most importantly start or stop any vServers.

As you might guess from this description, you need to backup your control stack, as it contains all the information about your virtual infrastructure.  If you were to loose your control stack, you would effectively loose all your vServers.  The data that the vServers contain is somewhere else, but all of the information about your vServers (the names, IP addresses, what drives are attached to what servers, etc...) is in the control stack.  Without this, you would have a hard time finding anything.

Oracle provides a utility to do backups in Exalogic virtual called EXABR.  This is pretty full feature, if young tool.  One of it's options is to backup the control stack.  Now for the backup to work, the control stack has to be shutdown.  This does not impact your running system, all the running vServers will stay running, this only impacts your ability to do management for the duration of the backup.  In our experience this backup is also very fast, maybe a minute or two at most.  There are three main commands to the backup:

exabr stop control-stack -r /backupdir 

exabr backup control-stack -r /backupdir 

exabr start control-stack -r /backupdir 

Pretty straight forward.  Now as the title of this blog shows, we have a second set of software to talk about; Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control (OEMCC).  We (like a lot of customers) use OEMCC to monitor and manage our Oracle landscape, and Exalogic is no different.  So in a normal Exalogic Virtual deployment when you use OEMCC, you will install a OEM Agent on the first server of the Control Stack (generally called the admin server), which hosts the OVMM and EMOC web servers.  This agent monitors all of the Exalogic components.

Now comes the rub, as they say.  When you start your control stack backup, the exabr stop contorl-stack command will shutdown this server, and therefore the agent for OEMCC.  This will then generate alerts for your entire Exalogic cloud.  As you might guess in a large cloud you will get 100's of alerts.  So the answer of course is to create a blackout in OEMCC.  Here is our method of doing this.  We added two lines to the above code:

ssh oracle@scand01adm01 /u01/app/EMbase/core/12.1.0.3.0/bin/emctl start blackout \"ExaBR stop control stack for backup\" -nodelevel 

exabr stop control-stack -r /backupdir 

exabr backup control-stack -r /backupdir 

exabr start control-stack -r /backupdir 

ssh oracle@scand01adm01 /u01/app/EMbase/core/12.1.0.3.0/bin/emctl stop blackout \"ExaBR stop control stack for backup\" -nodelevel

So basically this is all scripted up so that whenever we call a backup we get the blackout and the backup.  We had to setup SSH keys for the user that runs the OEMCC agent (probably oracle user in most installations) to allow the SSH to work from the compute node where exabr runs.

This has saved us a lot of headaches from the daily operations of Exalogic, and by doing the nodelevel blackout on OEMCC it blackouts all the vServers and related infrastructure for that agent.  Luckily the backups generally only runs for one or two minutes at most so this does not put us at a very high risk right now.

Learning Oracle PL/SQL

I'm pretty behind on my blog, and even worse I'm behind on a promise.  So I'll try to catch up on my blog, but first my promise.

I've been lucky enough to work with Oracle products since Oracle database version 6 and Oracle e-Business suite version 7.  Working with Oracle I also got to work with just about every related technology from hardware to software, from network to disk, and from SQL to PL/SQL.

I think learning technology comes down to three basic methods.

1. Lean by doing, sometimes people are just very good at a topic or area.  They try it, they do well right away.
2. Learn by learning, reading books, blogs, manuals, also learning from others.  This is probably how most of my skills were gotten, learning from classes, reading, and most of all from other people that had the skill already.
3. Learn by failing, attempting but failing.  I think this is the strongest way to learn, but that being said there are generally two possible outcomes.  Taking away what went wrong, and what should be done different next time.  Or just staying away from the topic all together forever.

Now imagine you were someone trying to learn PL/SQL, a standard programing language for Oracle.  Maybe you are just a natural at PL1 type programming syntax and ideas of record set based processing seem easy.  Or perhaps you tried some PL/SQL, it didn't work, the error messages were cryptic and you decided to just go use Java.

But what if you really want to learn PL/SQL?  What if you have done some basics but really want to be good at it?  Well then you will probably have to lean on learning from other people or things other people have written (books, blogs, etc...).  It seems everyone I meet is into the Google method of learning.  I try something (1), I fail (3), I then search for something in Google to find out why (2).  Based on this model I should move items 2 and 3 around in my list.

The problem with this model is that you only search for help when you fail.  This assumes that everything I tired (1) that does not fail (3) is good.   People who have inherited systems or programs that fail only on month end know all to well the fact that just because something works, does not mean it works well.

So when you want to learn a broad subject like PL/SQL well you have to learn from the ground up. Not just what has failed, but also how to get better at what you already know.  This also means learning broad interconnected topics such as writing, testing, and tuning code together.  Not as three separate subjects and not attempting to do this in 100's of bitesize bits of information through google searches for blogs.

Recently, some people I know put out a very good book to try and accomplish just this.  "Oracle PL/SQL Performance Tuning Tips & Techniques" by Michael Rosenblum and Paul Dorsey (technical editor Arup Nanda).  This is not a "stereo instructions" manual with diagrams of syntax, and descriptions of what things do.  Instead it is a very well thought out and put together set of learnings on how to take the basics of PL/SQL and make them extraordinary.  As I have surmised this is not done by reading one or two topics, or finding quick solutions by keywords in the index.  Instead it's a chapter by chapter discussion on how to learn what you need to know.

Spending a few hours of reading this book, can replace days of Google searches, perhaps even a lifetime.

Very worth while, and very high on my very short list of recommended programming books.