Oracle released Enterprise Linux as part of "Oracle Unbreakable Linux" program. In fact Enterprise Linux is based on RedHat Enterprise Linux distribution. There are two versions to download x86 (32 bit) and x86_64 (64 bit) and download is free. The interesting fact is Oracle is also providing technical support to this distribution - Network, Basic and Premier support. Enterprise Linux could be downloaded at http://edelivery.oracle.com/linux. More informations about Enteprise Linux and Oracle Unbreakable Linux program you can find at: http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/linux/. I'll try install it soon and post the first feelings here. Stay tuned! :-)

Update: You can read the response from Redhat aka "Unfakeable Linux" :-) http://www.redhat.com/promo/unfakeable/

Fedora Core 6 was released yesterday. Whats new in FC6: 1. Xorg 7.1.3 with support of automatical configuration of resulution and refresh rate 2. 3D desktop based on AIGLX project 3. New KDE (3.5.4) and Gnome (2.16) 4. Changed default font to DejaVu 5. Anaconda installer now can point to extras and updates repositories. 6. Graphical manager for XEN 7. Support for authentication via Smartcards 8. Kernel 2.6.18 with couple of interesting features 9. ...aaaand this: http://sources.redhat.com/ml/binutils/2006-06/msg00418.html Of course my first step was installation of Oracle database on new FC6. Installation went fine and errors that occured during installation on FC5 (buggy bash for example) were fixed. Also FC6 is not shipped with glibc-kerneheaders package so you don't looking for it. HOWTO for 9i was updated and for 10gR2 will be updated soon.

Datacenter built into shipping container? What a hell...?

• A single Project Blackbox could accommodate 250 Sun Fire T1000 servers with the CoolThreads technology with 2000 cores and 8000 simultaneous threads.
• A single Project Blackbox could accommodate 250 x64-based servers with 1000 cores.
• A single Project Blackbox could provide as much as 1.5 petabytes of disk storage or 2 petabytes of energy-efficient tape storage.
• A single Project Blackbox could provide 7 terabytes of memory.
• A single Project Blackbox could handle up to 10,000 simultaneous desktop users.
• A single Project Blackbox currently has sufficient power and cooling to support 200 kilowatts of rackmounted equipment.

Check this... http://www.sun.com/emrkt/blackbox/story.jsp http://www.sun.com/emrkt/blackbox/scenarios.jsp

As I promised two weeks ago, I prepared HOWTO for installation of Oracle 10g R2 on Sun Solaris 10 x86 and also write my feelings from install process here. I prepared fresh installation of Solaris (Core & network) on my test machine plus installed some additional packages (such as SUNWbash) from Solaris media. There are couple of new features and changes since Solaris 10. For example kernel settings in /etc/system are obsolete for most parameters and you need to create and use "project" for that purpose. When the OS was configured I downloaded the DB installation archive and begun the installation process. There are some differences which are not included in official guide. For successfull launch of OUI you need to install some additional packages such as X libraries, Motif runtime, and UTF-8 Iconv modules. Also official guide contains informations for Solaris 8,9 and 10 versions which could be leading to confusion. I can say that whole installation went fine and I wasn't facing to any problem. Of course during this occasion I prepared rlwrap package for Solaris 10 . As rlwrap depends on readline library I prepared also the readline package. download readline package for Solaris 10 x86. (md5 checksum: 1c7d64ef4bd1438b557f6aee60bbfe32) download rlwrap package for Solaris 10 x86. (md5 checksum: 796b77359a5e01fa27072ec0fbf85c66) To install packages execute following commands:

gunzip readline-5.1-solaris-x86.gz
gunzip rlwrap-solaris-x86.gz
pkgadd -d readline-5.1-solaris-x86 rlwrap-solaris-x86

As readline library is located in /usr/local/lib don't forget to add that line to LD_LIBRARY_PATH. Also put following line to your .bash_profile:

alias sqplus='/usr/local/bin/rlwrap sqlplus'

Enjoy it...

What is the best drink for the planned night outages of Oracle DB? 

My colleague was shutting down RAC instances because some important HW maintenance on servers which Oracle instances are running on. He issued as usually "shutdown immediate" command and database was closed and dismounted correctly and also the instances had stopped. Quite normal... But during start of instance at the mount phase there was following error occured:

ORA-201 controlfile version incompatible with ORACLE version

Ok, never faced this error in the past so I checked the oerr and the output was:

00201, 00000, "controlfile version %s incompatible with ORACLE version %s"
// *Cause:  The controlfile was created by incompatible software.
// *Action: Either restart with a compatible software release or use
//          CREATE CONTROLFILE to create a new controlfile that is
//          compatible with this release.

Hmmm... that's very interesting, the error message said that "controlfile was created by incompatible software" but we didn't change anything... Also as you can see in the message that I got there is missing the arguments (compare the message with oerr output). OK, what about messages in alert.log? I can say that only alert.log gave to me the real picture about problem...

***
Corrupt block relative dba: 0x00000001 (file 0, block 1)
Fractured block found during control file header read
Data in bad block -
 type: 0 format: 0 rdba: 0x00000000
 last change scn: 0x0000.00000000 seq: 0x0 flg: 0x00
 consistency value in tail: 0x00000000
 check value in block header: 0x0, block checksum disabled
 spare1: 0x0, spare2: 0x0, spare3: 0x0
***
ORA-201 signalled during: ALTER DATABASE   MOUNT...

As we are using multiplexing controlfiles (of course) the solution was quick. Just to be sure I used the md5sum command and checked all three controlfiles and only the first had different checksum. Since I work with Oracle I saw lot of situations when controlfile was corrupted but usualy the error messages were ORA-00227, ORA-00202 but for first time with ORA-201 which is IMHO misleading in this case... Question is why one of control files become corrupted when DB was closed and unmounted clearly and without any problem and why we got ORA-201 (instead of ORA-00227, ORA-00202) which is misleading (IMHO) in this case. Also it is very strange when the error message is missing additional parameters. So trust to your alert log and of course use the multiplexing of control files (I hope that actually you are)...

Finally! Oracle Database 10g R2 for Solaris x86 was released on monday (18 September 2006). You can download it from Downloads section (as usual) on Oracle website. I will be install it during the weekend and my first feelings from installation will be posted here (maybe along with link to installation paper).