Tim Hall

I came across a rather annoying little bug yesterday…

One of the guys was trying to compile an Oracle Form on the app server and got this message.

*** ASSERT at file pdw1.c, line 4061
PSDGON missing. Can't get object number
Source Location = XNSPC0P99_2013_06_12_17_44_38__AB[71, 7]

Uncle Google pointed me in the direction of this MOS Note [ID 1276725.1].

It turns out it is a problem with the 11.1.0.7 client, which happens to be the version that ships with Forms and Reports Services. The Forms compilation fails when the form references a database function that uses the Function Result Cache in 11g.

I didn’t fancy applying the patch last night, so I just commented out the RESULT CACHE clause in the packaged function, compiled the form, then put the RESULT CACHE clause back in. Job’s a good’un!

This morning I’ve followed the MOS note and applied the patch in out Dev environment and it seems to have fixed the issue.

Just so I don’t forget about this, I’ve also added a mention of it in my ever-growing Oracle Forms and Reports Services 11gR2 Configuration Notes article.

Cheers

Tim…

Update: See Gert’s comment below for his post on the subject 2.5 years ago.

Compiling Oracle Forms against functions using the 11g Function Result Cache… was first posted on June 13, 2013 at 10:17 am.
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Just got back from watching After Earth. The cinema was packed. Quite a surprise for a Tuesday evening.

You know pretty much know what to expect once you’ve watched the trailer, although there are a couple of scenes in there that are taken out of context. The premise is, a father and son are brought closer together by adversity. That adversity happens to be crash landing on Earth, the planet they left because we screwed it up.

I’m not really sure what accent Will Smith was trying to do in parts of the film. There were a couple of times when I though he was doing a bad British accent. Then others when it sounded almost like southern USA. Certainly nothing like I’ve heard before and certainly not consistent, unless that’s how they talk on the planet he comes from. Jaden was equally weak in that respect, but if Russell Crowe can’t tell the difference between an Irish and Nottingham accent, what hope does a kid have of getting it right?

It’s a family affair. Staring Jaden Smith and Will Smith. Story by Will Smith. Produced by Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith. Willow and Trey Smith must feel well left out.

If I hadn’t read the credits, I wouldn’t have realised M. Night Shyamalan was involved. It didn’t really feel like one of his films. None of the angles he tends to go for. I guess he had his Stuart Little and The Last Airbender hat on when doing this film. OK, there were a few grisly things that would shock younger kids, but nothing too intense.

At 100 minutes, it’s a pretty short film by today’s standards, but I think it would have been a mistake to stretch it out. It’s a bit cheesey in parts, but on the whole I thought it was OK. I wouldn’t demand you go and see it, but provided you can ignore bad accents, it’s not the worst thing you will ever see. I heard a couple of girls talking on the way out and they said the first 30 minutes was boring, but then is was “all right”. I think that’s a little unfair, but that’s life!

Cheers

Tim…

PS. If you are reading this Mr Crowe, when I watched your Robin Hood remake, the first thing I said was, why the XXXX have they made Robin Hood Irish? Being a Midlander, I can tell you now, the only people who talk like that in the Midlands are Irish people.

After Earth… was first posted on June 11, 2013 at 10:54 pm.
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Hyperion is the first in the Hyperion Cantos series by Dan Simmons.

What a great Sci-Fi book! A group of seven travellers are on a pilgrimage to Hyperion. Six of the seven tell the stories of how they came to be there, with the sixth story kind-of linking things together. There is no real conclusion to the story as the next book carries on the story from the point the first one ends. It was definitely written as a series!

The timeline jumps around quite a bit through the book, but in a good way. It’s not done in a confusing way.

Definitely worth a look for any Sci-Fi readers out there.

Cheers

Tim…

PS. I put the authors name in the title, for fear of confusing people into thinking this was about work.

Hyperion (Dan Simmons)… was first posted on June 8, 2013 at 5:25 pm.
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I’ve just got back from watching Byzantium at the cinema.

I had never heard of this film until about 20 minutes before the film started. In this age of watered down and twinkly vampires it’s good to see them portrayed with a gritty and raw edge. There are fairly obvious similarities between this story and Interview with the Vampire, though Byzantium is not so epic. It was a rather slow paced film, but I don’t mean that in a bad way. It wasn’t trying to be horror or action, but a story about the characters, told at a steady pace.

Saoirse Ronan is intense and beautiful. I knew I recognized her from somewhere, but it was not until I checked on IMDB that I saw she was the kid from Hanna. I think she was perfect casting to play a 16 year old that has been “alive” for 200 years. I think this was a good role for Gemma Arterton too. I like her in the less-Hollywood stuff. Caleb Landry Jones was so odd, in a good way, in this film. He looked so thin and awkward, compared to his role as Banshee in the X-Men: First Class.

Overall I would have to say I liked it. If you are a fan of the vampire genre and are sick of the current “My Little Pony” vampires on film and TV, you might want to give it a try.

Cheers

Tim…

Byzantium… was first posted on June 2, 2013 at 12:18 am.
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The DBA role can sometimes feel like a mix of detective, crime writer and DBA all thrown together. What do I mean by that? When you hit some problems you have to play detective, trying to find clues to what is going on. Once you’ve started to gather clues, you have to play crime writer and put them together to form a coherent story that explains what is going on. Once you have the outline of your crime story you can start looking at the facts again and see if they fit with your story. If they do, your story may just be correct. If they don’t, you probably need to check the accuracy of the facts and do some rewriting of the story until the two things fit together. Once things seem to fit, you can then get busy trying to arrest the villain, or fix the problem. This process is often necessary as part of root cause analysis.

I’ll use a recent case to highlight what I mean. I’m going to simplify things a little or the post will be too long.

Detective

We recently had some intermittent, but very severe performance problems on a system, resulting in the application effectively hanging for some time. As usual, it’s the DBA job to prove it’s not the fault of the database. A bit of detective work came up with the following facts:

• Moderate CPU usage on the application and DB servers.
• Gradual reduction in free memory on both servers.
• Over time the systems started to swap.
• Gradual increase in number of application processes connecting to the database.
• Lots of I/O waits on the database server.

Crime Writer

So let’s switch to crime writer and think of some stories that could explain this.

Story 1

High load on the application causes lots of database connections, eventually swamping the servers.

Does it fit the facts? The reduction in free memory, eventually leading to swap could be caused by an increase in numbers of processes on the servers. Lots of processes all doing I/O on the server will probably increase the amount of I/O waits as they fight with each other for the disks. That sounds promising.

How do we confirm it? Use the AWR reports to compare the load profiles (amongst other things) of the system compared to other times in the day, days of the week, same time and day last week etc.

Conclusion: The load on the system was not substantially different from other times when the system was running fine. The story doesn’t fit together.

Story 2

Slow I/O is reducing response time. As new requests come in, the backlog of work is getting bigger…

Does it fit the facts? In checking out the AWR reports looking for confirmation of the previous story we noticed the average times of certain physical I/O operations were about 30ms. Normally the average is <1ms. Checking the event histogram section of the AWR report, we could see a very wide spread of timings for physical I/O operations, including some in excess of 1 second. After a few minutes we started to see Warning “aiowait timed out x times” in alert.log [ID 222989.1] messages in the alert log, suggesting some of those I/O events were taking longer than 10 minutes.

Now we have a new fact to add to the previous list:

• Some of the individual I/O waits are extremely long!

We know the application layer of this application is not too clever. If a request comes and there is an idle application process available, it will be reused. If no idle application process is available, a new one is spawned to process the request. The only limit on this is the max number of processes for that user at the OS level.

If the disk I/O is slow, application requests will take a long time to complete. If application requests are taking a long time, the likelihood of new application requests finding an idle application process to reuse is reduced, so the incidence of new processes being spawned increases. As new processes are spawned, we see a gradual increase in memory usage, leading eventually to swap. At the same time, we see an increase in database connections, which require processes, which use memory… You can see where this is going…

Conclusion: This story does seem to fit the facts. Essentially, memory, swap and the number of processes are the symptom, not the cause of the problem. The root cause could be the I/O performance issue.

Catching the Criminal

Now I said this was an intermittent problem. The next time it occurred I was prepared and watched events unfold using Luca Canali’s nifty Latency Heat Map Visualization, which prompted this quick post. The result of this was we had pretty solid evidence to suggest the problems we were experiencing were nothing to do with the application or database, but were as a result of poor I/O performance. The baton was passed to the system administrators, network and storage team to try and bottom out the problem. That process is still ongoing, but smoking gun seems to be the storage network layer.

Conclusion

Over time you build up a level of experience that allows you to spot patterns and quickly get to the root of problems. To observers it can seem almost mystical, which is why us grunt DBAs look at those database performance gurus with awe, but it all comes down to root cause analysis. The more you do this stuff, the better you get at it. Stop doing it for a while and you get rusty.

Detective? Crime Writer? DBA? Which are you? You should be all three.

Cheers

Tim…

Detective? Crime Writer? DBA? Which are you? was first posted on June 1, 2013 at 10:12 am.
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The Oracle ACE program recently invited members to a teleconference session about the upcoming launch of Java 7 EE. Arun Gupta took us through a preview of the information that will be available to everyone as part of the launch.

If you are interested in getting the low down on this new release, you can register for the launch events here.

Cheers

Tim…

Java 7 EE Launch : June 12th & 13th was first posted on May 31, 2013 at 8:08 pm.
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I was a little bit rubbish and forgot to get photos of the recent BGOUG event. Fortunately, the conference photos have arrived. You can check them out here.

There are a number of photos of an old fat guy that looks a little like me. I don’t remember meeting him though. Weird… I think he needs the toilet in this shot.

By the way, don’t say stuff like, “Bind variables are a waste of time!”, when you are near to Tom Kyte. He will slap you quicker than Debra Lilley after a negative comment about Fusion Apps.

Cheers

Tim…

BGOUG Spring 2013 : Photos was first posted on May 29, 2013 at 7:55 pm.
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After yesterday’s visit to see Fast & Furious 6, I went this morning to see Star Trek Into Darkness.

The reviews I read about this pretty much slated it as being extremely self indulgent. Being only an observer of the franchise, rather than a rabid fan, I only noticed a few of the main back references and I didn’t really see them as a bad thing. Instead, I thought they added a little extra dimension to the story.

It’s a full-on action flick more than a sci-fi film really, but worth going to see in my opinion. If they do more of them I will probably go to see them. If they don’t I won’t cry myself to sleep.

Accent Alert: Will all Scottish people please cover their ears whenever Simon Pegg speaks. I used to go out with a Scottish girl and she would punch the living crap out of me if I did a Scottish accent that bad! Every time he spoke I felt myself twitch as if ducking for cover!

Cheers

Tim…

Star Trek Into Darkness was first posted on May 27, 2013 at 2:27 pm.
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Similar to the Resident Evil franchise, you know exactly what you are going to get when you go to see one of the Fast & Furious franchise. Fast & Furious 6 does not disappoint. It contains a liberal mix of car porn, car chase porn and disaster porn, with the odd bit of comedy thrown in for good measure. It is totally ridiculous, but totally fantastic at the same time.

Probably the thing that has grated on me the most in this series is Paul Walker. It’s not that I have something against him. I’m sure one of my colleagues would describe him as “very scenic”. It’s just he doesn’t do the whole “bad boy from da street thang!” very well IMHO. It’s about as believable as me trying to claim I’m posh.

That minor gripe aside, it’s great. I think this is the best of the lot so far. I can’t wait for No. 7 due out next summer. Hang around at the end to see who the new villain is.

Random thoughts:

• The Rock (you will forever be The Rock, because you real name reminds me of Dwayne Dibbley) is MASSIVE! You could feed a family for a week on one of his arms. He’s built like a barn door now. I know he’s done some film about bodybuilding with Mark Wahlberg. I think he may have taken that role a bit too seriously.
• Vin Diesel is looking a lot smaller and a lot chubbier than before. I guess things look more exaggerated because of The Rock looking so massive.
• Michelle Rodrigues is hot. I love it when female characters look like they could kick your ass.

Cheers

Tim…

Fast & Furious 6… was first posted on May 27, 2013 at 8:40 am.
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As seems to be the norm for me, the weather has taken a turn for the better and I’ve got a cold.

I’d like to say a quick sorry to a couple of people from the BGOUG conference who are waiting for feedback from me about some questions. I will get round to it, but the return to work and this blasted cold have made life complicated.

I spent Friday at work with my face buried in tissues, between necking Covonia. I spent Friday evening until this morning asleep in bed, with occasional periods of sleep in the bath. It’s amazing what 30+ hours in bed can do to a cold and how much damage it can do to your back!

Today I am being sponsored by Lemsip Max All In ON Cold and Flu Capsules. I must be feeling better as I’m bored and hungry, neither of which I have felt for the last 30+ hours. A couple more days and normal service will be resumed.

Cheers

Tim…

Summer Cold… Again… was first posted on May 26, 2013 at 10:21 am.
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I recently wrote about installing SSDs in my Laptop and Desktop. I thought I would write a quick follow up post to mention how things are going.

I’m really happy with the changes to the performance of the desktop. As mentioned previously, it is now much quieter and really fast. A lot of my VMs run from the 1TB internal data drive, but the things I use most frequently are now sitting on the SSD. I’m starting to forget what life was like before SSD, except when I go to work and use the slowest PC that was ever built.

The laptop upgrade was a really good move. Just before my first BGOUG presentation the projector seemed to freak out my MacBook and I was forced to reboot. With the old hard drive I would have been filling while waiting for the thing to start up. As it was, it restarted in a similar time it used to take to come out of hibernation and I was moving.

Having done the disk swap in the laptop so close to a conference I was a little bit nervous, so in addition to the laptop I had my old 500G external drive, my new 1TB external drive and the oringial internal hard drive in my bag. Unpacking all that, along with my Nexus 7, Nexus 4 and Kindle was very time consuming and a little embarrassing.

If you were at all in doubt about making the move to SSD, I can definitely recommend it.

Cheers

Tim…

PS. I reserve the right to start moaning about it when it wears out after a few weeks.

Laptop and Desktop SSD Update… was first posted on May 22, 2013 at 8:26 pm.
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We’ve had a couple of short lived, but very inconvenient I/O latency issues recently. I’ve been using the awesome Latency Heat Map Visualization by Luca Canali as one of the tools to investigate this.

I’m guessing this isn’t the type of I/O latency heat map most people would want to see from a production system.

 

This is the same system that has been reporting Warning “aiowait timed out x times” in alert.log [ID 222989.1], which only appears if an asynchronous I/O takes longer than 10 minutes…

The pictures look much nicer when things are going wrong!

Cheers

Tim…

The sort of latency heat map you don’t want to see! was first posted on May 20, 2013 at 6:13 pm.
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Chapterhouse Dune is the last in the Dune series by Frank Herbert.

It’s really hard for me to make a judgement about Chapterhouse: Dune. On the one hand there are some excellent characters and the general story line is great. On the other, there are parts I found really boring. I got a bit sick of the teasers without any explanation. At first is was intriguing, but as they continued I just got a bit fed up with them and decided to stop second guessing the outcome and just let it happen. I think there are two ways an author can play this game:

1) Make the outcome fairly obvious from the start, but make the journey to get there exciting. Kind of like The Dresden Files.
2) Make the outcome a mystery, but subtly lead you in the right direction.

I think this book is trying to do the latter, but is quite clumsy about it. Having said all that, I’m glad I read it. The overall outcome is more than satisfactory.

I’m not going to read the books by Frank Herbert’s son. I’ve been told they are not good, and the brief snippets I’ve read seem to reinforce that.

I guess the end of a series of books like this needs a bit of a summary. I think the first book is a total classic. The rest you can take or leave. There are definitely interesting elements to all of them, but they are not nearly as accomplished as the first.

Cheers

Tim…

Chapterhouse: Dune was first posted on May 19, 2013 at 3:15 pm.
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How do you want to start the day? I’m guessing it’s not to be called out to the front of the room by a speaker and used as a guinea pig, while they ask you trick questions to make you look stupid. Tom Kyte, you will pay. Oh yes! You will pay!!!

The sessions I attended on day 2 were:

• Tom Kyte : What’s new in Oracle database application development
• Tim Hall (me) : A cure for Virtual Insanity : A vendor-neutral introduction to virtualization without the hype
• Georgi Kodinov : Quick Dive into MySQL
• Tim Hall (me) : From Zero to Hero : Using an assortment of caching techniques to improve performance of SQL containing PL/SQL calls
• Husnu Sensoy : ZFS Storage can backup your Exadata
• Tom Kyte : 5 SQL and PL/SQL things in the Latest Generation of Database Technology

Another very useful day indeed. I had some good feedback and interesting questions about my talks. This sort of feedback is really important when you are presenting regularly as it allows you to continuously refine your material and presenting skills. It can sometimes give you a fresh perspective on a subject, that inspires you to alter the focus of your presentations entirely. I’m very grateful to anyone who takes the time to provide this sort of feedback. Big thanks to Tom Kyte, who has given me some very useful advice over the last couple of days, but then he owes me for making me look stupid in his first session of the day!

In the evening we went out for dinner at a restaurant just down the road from the hotel. I ate plenty of cheese, so I was in heaven. Not surprisingly, much of the talk ended up being about Oracle. It may seem a little sad to some people, but when I’m surrounded by people with brains the size of a planet, I can’t help myself quizzing them about this stuff. I love it!

Great big thanks go out to Milena and her gang for organizing this event and inviting me. Thanks also to Stoyan for being my driver again. No offence to other user groups, but BGOUG conferences are my favorite events of the year. I will keep coming back as long as you will have me! Also, a big thank you to the Oracle ACE program for making this possible.

Cheers

Tim…

BGOUG Spring 2013 : Day 2… was first posted on May 19, 2013 at 3:10 pm.
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So Day 1 (part 2) didn’t go to plan because I forgot to take my camera or my phone to the party.

Suffice to say, lots of food, lots of drink (for those that do) and most importantly lots of dancing. Yes, I once again murdered the traditional dances of Bulgaria, but it’s the takling part that counts right?

I had good intentions of leaving early, but I ended up chatting about Oracle until about 02:00. Day 2 is going to be tough…

Cheers

Tim…

BGOUG Spring 2013 : Day 1 (part 2)… was first posted on May 19, 2013 at 3:05 pm.
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Last night we all got together to eat some food and chat. Julian Dontcheff is practically a savant where Bulgarian Poetry, World Cup match results and random Oracle facts are concerned. Although Christian Antognini was pretty impressive on the random Oracle facts too.

I didn’t have any presentations today, so I got to sit and watch. I’ve done loads of typing, mostly of syntax for 12c features, but it’s not really stuff that is worth posting, because I have no way to validate it out, so I’m just going to keep it as a reminder for when I get hold of 12c and can try it out.

The sessions I went to included:

• Joze Senegacnik : Is my SQL Statement Using Exadata Features
• Christian Antognini : SQL New Features in the latest generation of Oracle Database
• Julian Dontcheff : Upgrading to the latest generation of database technology
• Christian Antognini : How the Query Optimizer Learns from its Mistakes
• Clive King : Solaris 11u1 performance and stability : features and frameworks
• Tom Kyte : Tom’s Top 12 Things about the Latest Generation of Database Technology

There was a lot of material I had seen at OOW2012 and UKOUG2012, but also a lot I had not, so I’m glad I went to them. The smaller setting also made it easier to ask questions, which can be quite daunting at the big events.

Tom gave me a couple of tips that have gone straight into one of my talks for tomorrow. I’m gonna have to name check him for it, or I’ll feel like I’m passing it off as my own.

I said this after OOW2013 and I’m sure I will say it again, but the number of changes in 12c is pretty daunting. I guess the fact it’s been about a 3 year wait, rather than the normal 18 months adds to that. In many cases (but not all) it’s not the scope of the individual changes that are the issue, but the sheer volume of them. I think people are going to be blogging for a long time before they’ve got through them. It will be interesting to see what gets selected for inclusion in the OCP DBA upgrade exam.

I’m off to dinner now. I will try to get some photos and post them in “Day 1 (part 2)@ tomorrow.

Cheers

Tim…

BGOUG Spring 2013 : Day 1 (part 1)… was first posted on May 17, 2013 at 6:41 pm.
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It’s stupid o’clock in the morning and I’m waiting for my taxi to arrive. Considering how close Bulgaria is, it takes me a very long time to get there.

I am a mix of excited and nervous. This is my first conference this year, so all the usual insecurities are in full effect, from fear of flying to the constant nagging thoughts that perhaps I don’t know anything about Oracle and maybe I shouldn’t be on stage acting like I do.

I’m sure it will go OK and it will be nice to meet up with the gang again.

Cheers

Tim…

BGOUG Spring 2013 : Day -1 was first posted on May 16, 2013 at 4:55 am.
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On Thursday I’ll be flying out to Bulgaria for BGOUG Spring 2013. It’s been about 18 months since I’ve visited the people over there, so I’m really looking forward to getting stuck in.

 

This will be my first conference of the year, so I’m feeling a little nervous at the moment. I’m sure the adrenalin rush will kick in and get me through.

I’m signed up for the southern leg of the OTN Tour of Latin America (Chile, Peru, Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil), but it will be a while before I get any confirmation, so there are no guarantees yet.

Fun, fun, fun…

Cheers

Tim…

BGOUG Spring 2013… was first posted on May 13, 2013 at 8:31 am.
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I wrote a couple of days ago about replacing my MacBook Pro hard drive with SSD. At the same time I bought a little SSD to use as the system drive for my desktop. I fitted that this morning, installed a fresh copy of Fedora 18 and mounted the original 1TB hard drive as a data drive.

Like the MacBook Pro, my desktop is a few years old, but still has plenty of grunt (Quad Core and 8G RAM) for what I need it for. I do run the odd VM on it, but any heavy stuff is run on my server, so there is no incentive to go out an buy the latest kit for what is essentially just a client PC.

The addition of the SSD means the start up time is a much better and it just feels a lot more responsive. Most apps start up almost instantly. Even GIMP, which used to take an age to start, is mega quick. I’ve put a couple of VMs on it and not surprisingly, they are fast to start up too. Overall I’m really pleased with the outcome.

The funny thing is, I never noticed how noisy spinning rust was until I switched to these SSDs. The Mac is silent and runs for a lot longer before the fan kicks in. The desktop is also silent, until I pull something from the data disk, at which point I hear that slight grinding noise.

I don’t think I would invest in large capacity SSDs for home until the prices drop considerably, but having witnessed the before and after results on these two old machines, I can’t imagine ever running without an SSD system disk again.

Cheers

Tim…

PS. While I was reconfiguring my desktop I tried out Dnsmasq. Much simpler than BIND.

Update: I worked through some of the suggestions here to enable TRIM support and reduce wear.

Desktop SSD… was first posted on May 11, 2013 at 8:36 pm.
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A couple of weeks ago I started a competition to win 2 copies of Oracle E-Business Suite R12 Integration and OA Framework Development and Extension Cookbook by Andy Penver. Thanks to Packt for donating the prizes. The competition closed yesterday and the lucky winners are:

• Arun
• Ajay Sharma

I’ve sent your email addresses to my contact at Packt, who will contact you to deliver your e-book.

Cheers

Tim…

Prize Winners : Oracle E-Business Suite R12 Integration and OA Framework Development and Extension Cookbook was first posted on May 11, 2013 at 7:41 pm.
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