Books

Book review of Oracle Information Integration, Migration, and Consolidation.

This book is published by PACKT Publishing and written by Jason Williamson, Tom Laszewski and Prakash Nauduri.

This book is a guide how to deal with the growing volume of data and how to migrate, consolidate and integrate this data from (non-)Oracle platforms to Oracle. Should not only be readed by IT-architects but also DBA’s may benefit from this book.

Chapter 1 Getting Started with Information Integration.
Intro why to consolidate, migrate and integrate data explained with a few case studies.

Chapter 2 Oracle Tools and Products.
Tools to migrate from (non-)Oracle to Oracle starting with the free SQLLOADER feature till GoldenGate which offers heterogeneous replication (zero downtime). Exadata, Exalogic, Timesten are also mentioned to complete the data migration matrix.

Chapter 3 Application and Data Integration Case Study
Case study about an US-based insurance company which still uses a mainframe for its core data whilst batch processing will be transferred to new technologies, in this case Oracle BPEL Process Manager. A detailed description about this application integration process is covered in this chapter.

Chapter 4 Oracle Database Migrations
Database Migrations because of consolidation of database platforms, change in hardware and os, virtualization, Grid, etc. Several scenarios are described and which tools could be useful. It depends if one migrates from Oracle to Oracle or from non-Oracle to oracle. Because of its easy access to non-Oracle and Oracle databases a migration is described via SQL Developer. Also a GoldenGate approach is described.

Chapter 5 Database Migration Challenges and Solutions
If you are known with SQL Server a lot of tables may begin with a pound (#) sign. This means that the table is a temporary table. In Oracle tables (object_names) cannot begin with a pound sign. So the challenge has began and this is just one of the many examples which are mentioned by the authors. Think also about date, number and varchar data types. NLS (National Language Support) settings are used for sorting data but also think of (multibyte) (Unicode) character sets which makes the puzzle complete.

Chapter 6 Data Consolidation and Management.
Transactional data (OLTP) and analytical data (DSS) is used throughout companies but which data is correct and the most current. To achieve this you can build a MDM (Master Data Management) process which can automatically standardize this through cleansing, deduplication, and transformation. This is how a unified view of data is created across the enterprise. When you are at that point that your data is MDM managed think about ILM (Information Lifecycle Management). This tool archives online data in such a way that recently moved data is quickly available (almost real-time) and older data is stored at another storage (or remote location).

Chapter 7 Database-centric Data Integration.
This chapter describes with examples (GoldenGate, Oracle Database Gateways and Oracle Data Integrator) the continuous stream of data between databases (Oracle tot non-Oracle and vice versa).

Chapter 8 Application and Process Integration describes the history of application and process integration starting with RPC (point-to-point), EDI (business-to-business) and later Tibco’s Information bus. IBM’s message queuing to send and receive data between applications or database systems (for example Oracle started with Oracle Interconnect which used AQ (Advanced Queuing)). Throughout the time Oracle acquired BEA, Java came in, workflow, Oracle BPM (Business Process Management), Oracle OSB (Oracle Ser-vice Bus, a messaging platform), AIA (framework), SOA Suite, APEX, etc.

Chapter 9 Information Lifecycle Management for Transactional Applications.
The lifecycle between historical data and frequently used data based on policies which depends on industry, regulations and organization with the purpose to have a positive impact on performance, reduce high capacity storage costs and place the archived data on cheaper storage (compressed and deduplicated).

This book is very useful to figure out what Oracle component would be suitable for your data migration path because most DBA’s just think about Data Pump or SQLLoader to migrate and consolidate data. Oracle has so many products to achieve the same result and fortunately in the book is a matrix to decide what option is best suitable for your purpose.

Book review of Oracle 11g R1/R2 Real Application Clusters Essentials.

This book is published by PACKT Publishing and written by Ben Prusinski and Syed Jaffer Hussain.

Short before my vacation I was asked by PACKT Publishing to write a review about this book. On a Greek island I read the book in a relaxing way and I became more familiar with the ins and outs of 11g RAC. You do need basic Oracle knowledge but the authors wrote the book in such a way that the book is readable for every techy. Even if you do not use RAC some information in the book is very useful for single instance environments. Also the Metalink notes are a welcome addition to the book. I like the differences between 11g R1 RAC and 11g R2 RAC. Also the GUI screenshots and the command line utilities are described side by side which give an nice overview of all the possibilities.

The book starts (Chapters 1 and 2) with an overview of several High Available concepts like Interconnect (Infiniband) choices, storage architecture (SAN/NAS/RAID) and Fibre or SCSI channels. Check the certification matrix on Metalink to build a supported RAC environment before you start with RAC.

In chapter 3 you will be guided through the cluster installation (screenshots) and the preparations of the server like kernel parameters, OS packages, users and groups, setting up SSH and check those settings with Cluvfy.

ASM in chapter 4 will be discussed from the basics of setting-up an ASM instance till the use of ACFS, creating snapshots and using IDB (Intelligent Data Placement) to move frequently accessed files to the outermost part of a disk/track to improve performance.

A very useful guide to keep in mind is chapter 5 which describes the cluster tools for setting up, verifying, troubleshooting and debugging RAC Clusterware parts like Cluster processes, Voting disk and eliminating SPOF (Single Point of Failure), recover from a corrupted OCR and so on. Every RAC DBA should use these guidelines and tools to resolve and prevent errors in the future.

Creating a RAC database using DBCA is described in chapter 6. The screenshots are clear enough to understand what happens. Background processes are described for both 11gR1 and 2 releases. Workload Management concepts to optimize the application workload is an undervalued paragraph. The basics are explained (TAF, Load Balancing, FCF) but I would like to see more real life examples.

RMAN Backup and Recovery (chapter 7), must be known by every DBA! The cluster backup utilities (ocrconfig) is described in detail to backup and restore the OCR and Voting disks.

Performance Tuning (chapter 8 ) starts with a description of several tools available in 11g. From the rather well-known RAT (Real Application Testing) and SPA (SQL Performance Analyzer) some new 11Gr2 performance features are discussed. The various wait events are described and where to find them (which views).

Chapter 9 is about upgrading Clusterware and all the steps you have to go through.

The Real World Scenarios in chapter 10 is about the commonly used scenarios for managing a RAC cluster. It shows for example how to add a node in GUI as well as how to do that from the command line. Very useful!

Chapter 11 is about RAC for EBS.

At last chapter 12 is about Maximum Availability (MAA) and will discuss the use of Streams and (Active) Data Guard. Unfortunately GoldenGate is out of scope in this book.

The Additional section is full of tips, tools and resources which every DBA will be using one day.

After reading the book I want to compliment the writers Ben and Syed for creating such a detailed reference. It sure is a must have even if you do not use RAC Clustering. Unfortunately, I miss some information about “RAC One Node”, VMware/Oracle VM and Cloud related stuff but maybe the book would be too heavy then!