Tag Archives: ThanksOTN

ODC Appreciation Day : Oracle dcli Utility

Posted on by Standard 2

What is ODC Appreciation Day?

The Oracle Developer Community (ODC) Appreciation Day formally known as OTN Appreciation Day, is a great initiative by Tim Hall aka Oracle-Base.com.  Where we take the opportunity to say thanks to the Oracle Developer Community #ThanksODC.

More info on Oracle Developer Community can be found here:
About Oracle Developer Community

When is it?

This year, it is on Thursday 11th October 2018.

You can see my previous post here:
2017 – ODC Appreciation Day : Oracle Exadata Database Machine

You can see a summary of previous years blog posts here:
2016 – OTN Appreciation Day : Summary
2017 – ODC Appreciation Day 2017 : It’s a Wrap (#ThanksODC)

My Contribution : Oracle dcli Utility

When thinking of a subject, Oracle’s dcli Utility on Oracle Exadata Database Machine came to mind due to the frequent use 🙂

What is dcli Utility?

Distributed Command Line Interface (dcli), which it’s main purpose is to execute commands on storage cells on Exadata in parallel.  Which actually is just a Python script.  Those who don’t know Exadata, it’s an Engineered Systems which includes storage in the form of storage cells i.e. servers that have multiple disks utilised by Automatic Storage Management (ASM).  However, the smaller of offer still has 3 storage cells that can go up to 18 storage cells in a rack (elastic configuration).  More info on Exadata can be found here on the latest datasheet (at time of writing):
Exadata X7-2 Datasheet

So as you can imagine, executing commands on 3 servers is tidiuos enough, let alone 18, hence the power and usefulness of dcli!  I don’t just use it for storage cells but compute nodes (database servers), as well as the InfiniBand switches 🙂

More info on dcli can be found in the Exadata Documentation:
Exadata System Software User’s Guide -> 9 Using the dcli Utility

Example usage

Quickly see the version of Exadata Software on your Exadata Machine:

Storage Cells:

[root@v1ex1dbadm01 ~]# dcli -g /opt/oracle.SupportTools/onecommand/cell_group -l root imageinfo | grep "Kernel version\|Active image version"
v1ex1celadm01: Kernel version: 4.1.12-94.8.4.el6uek.x86_64 #2 SMP Sat May 5 16:14:51 PDT 2018 x86_64
v1ex1celadm01: Active image version: 18.1.7.0.0.180821
v1ex1celadm02: Kernel version: 4.1.12-94.8.4.el6uek.x86_64 #2 SMP Sat May 5 16:14:51 PDT 2018 x86_64
v1ex1celadm02: Active image version: 18.1.7.0.0.180821
v1ex1celadm03: Kernel version: 4.1.12-94.8.4.el6uek.x86_64 #2 SMP Sat May 5 16:14:51 PDT 2018 x86_64
v1ex1celadm03: Active image version: 18.1.7.0.0.180821
[root@v1ex1dbadm01 ~]#

Compute Nodes:

[root@v1ex1dbadm01 ~]# dcli -g /opt/oracle.SupportTools/onecommand/dbs_group -l root imageinfo | grep "Kernel version\|Image version"
v1ex1dbadm01: Kernel version: 4.1.12-94.8.4.el6uek.x86_64 #2 SMP Sat May 5 16:14:51 PDT 2018 x86_64
v1ex1dbadm01: Image version: 18.1.7.0.0.180821
v1ex1dbadm02: Kernel version: 4.1.12-94.8.4.el6uek.x86_64 #2 SMP Sat May 5 16:14:51 PDT 2018 x86_64
v1ex1dbadm02: Image version: 18.1.7.0.0.180821
[root@v1ex1dbadm01 ~]#

InfiniBands:

[root@v1ex1dbadm01 ~]# dcli -g /opt/oracle.SupportTools/onecommand/ib_group -l root version | grep "version"
v1ex1sw-iba01: SUN DCS 36p version: 2.2.9-3
v1ex1sw-iba01: BIOS version: SUN0R100
v1ex1sw-ibb01: SUN DCS 36p version: 2.2.9-3
v1ex1sw-ibb01: BIOS version: SUN0R100
[root@v1ex1dbadm01 ~]#

The usage are endless 🙂

When I get a chance, I will create a more in depth blog post about dcli including, how to setup, etc.  I will add the link here, for ease of reference.

Finally Happy ODC Appreciation Day! #ThanksODC #ThanksOTN 🙂

If you found this blog post useful, please like as well as follow me through my various Social Media avenues available on the sidebar and/or subscribe to this oracle blog via WordPress/e-mail.

Thanks

Zed DBA (Zahid Anwar)

ODC Appreciation Day : Oracle Exadata Database Machine

Posted on by Standard 2

Those that know me well, will know about my “appreciation” of the “Oracle Exadata Database Machine“, more commonly known as “Exadata” 🙂

So this will be my contribution to ODC Appreciation Day formally known as OTN Appreciation Day, a great initiative by Tim Hall aka Oracle-Base.com.

You can see a summary of last year’s blog post here:
OTN Appreciation Day : Summary

The very first Exadata, was the V1 model, the hardware by HP and the software by Oracle.  I still remember being very excited by this in my previous employment at Auto Trader and trying very hard to convince them to get one 🙂

I, of course, became an instant fan of the brawn hardware with smart software, Oracle labelling as “Hardware and Software optimised together“.

Oracle’s partnership with HP only lasted a year with Oracle switching to Sun on the V2 model, when shortly after Oracle then brought Sun in 2010.  This is when Oracle switched from the V models to X models, with the initial models being the X2-2 (2 socket) and X2-8 (8 sockets).

I still remember this old video “Oracle Exadata. Are You Ready?” that I played at an internal Auto Trader conference which was about sharing knowledge, interesting new things, etc:

Exadata has come a long way since the initial release that was aimed at being a Data Warehouse to a Full On OLTP, Data Warehouse, mixed load, consolidation platform, etc with “record-breaking” IOPS and scan rate!

My favourite feature is the smart scan, the ability to off load data intensive SQL operations from the database servers directly into the storage servers, mitigating the need to pull lots of data from storage to database server.  Yes you can have very fast All Flash Storage, but the network to ship all this to the database server becomes the bottleneck and the compute to filter the data on the database server.  Exadata does this at the storage server meaning only the rows and columns that are directly relevant to a query are sent to the database servers.

Another one is storage indexes where the min and max values are stored of a column in 1Mb chunk in memory to allow for unnecessary I/O to be avoided when it’s known that block of data doesn’t meet the predicate condition.

I didn’t manage to convince Auto Trader, however I have since been very fortunate in my current employment at Version 1 to have worked on Exadata since 2014 from the Exadata X2-2 through to X5-2.  I do really appreciate these “Engineered Systems” for the Extreme Performance, Reliability and Availability.  The whole concept of being “Engineered” and the whole stack optimised, really works and the fact that all Exadatas are the same hardware makes you appreciate their supportability.  Even patching them with patchmgr is pretty much a doddle these days! 🙂

For more info, visit the following site:
www.Oracle.com/Exadata
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Exadata

Tuesday 10th October 2017

Happy ODC Appreciation Day! #ThanksODC #ThanksOTN 🙂

If you found this blog post useful, please like as well as follow me through my various Social Media avenues available on the sidebar and/or subscribe to this oracle blog via WordPress/e-mail.

Thanks

Zed DBA (Zahid Anwar)