Software

Efficiently synchronize copies of a large sparse file locally. I deal with a large amount of large sparse files because of virtualization and other technologies. Because of their size, often a small number of blocks have data and, of these, a small number of blocks are changed and need to be backed up. Using a log-based (snapshotting) file system on USB 2 as a backup device, I only want to write blocks if absolutely necessary.

So what's the solution?  Some simple custom code that

1. checks that both file sizes are identical;
2. verifies that some metadata has changed (i.e time stamp, permissions or owner/group);
3. reads both files block-by-block;
4. writes only changed blocks to the destination file, and
5. updates any changed metadata.

How to recreate a lost OCR ASM disk group from scratch.  This HowTo applies to Database 12c RAC.  We will rebuild the disk group, restore the OCR, replace the voting disks, and recreate the ASM parameter and password files.

Oracle Database 12c Release 1 fully supports IPv6. Here is how to add IPv6 support to VIPs and SCANs in a 12c RAC cluster. The VIPs, SCANs and their listeners will support both IPv4 and IPv6 and addresses from both families will relocate between RAC nodes as normal. It is only assumed that the servers already have a host IPv6 address assigned via auto-configuration.

Below I will annotate an example using SQL to extract and chart some tablespace trending data using GNU Plot.

Oracle's Grid Control collects, stores, and manages historical metric data for hosts, databases, and all sorts of targets. This data is difficult to retrieve, especially the historical data. Creating a report in Grid Control results in a small bitmapped image. If you need, say, a year of CPU data, this small bitmap is difficult to interpret.

If the data is extracted from Grid Control's Oracle Management Service (OMS) then graphically representing the data can also be performed externally. One such tool that can be used to graph the data is GNU Plot.