Background As many of you may already know, I have been a long time supporter of running Oracle on NFS, having deployed many Oracle E-Business suite, single instance and RAC databases on NFS over years. However, for many Oracle DBAs NFS (Network File Systems) is still something of an unknown entity, in this post I hope to demystify Oracle on NFS. What is NFS (Network File System) NFS is a distributed file system protocol that provides clients access to shared resources like files and directories in file systems located on a server. Clients can remotely read files and write to files on the ..read more

I recently published a blog on restricting Linux block storage IO sizes using Kernel settings, but what if you don’t have root access, or want a more dynamic approach for your Oracle Database. In this blog post I am going to explore the use of multiblock read count (MBRC) on an Oracle 19c Database. Oracle Multi Block Read The Oracle db_file_multiblock_read_count (MBRC) parameter specifies the maximum number of blocks read in one I/O operation during a sequential scan. From the Oracle 19c Database documentation: The default value of this parameter is a value that corresponds to the maximum I/O ..read more

A colleague recently asked me an interesting question, How can I reduce the size of a physical IO on Linux? So here’s a blog that hopefully answers that question. Linux Operating System For this blog I will be using a Linux server with a Kernel that has a default maximum size of 1280KB (if you are running an older Kernel you may still be using 512KB, another reason to upgrade) connected to Pure Storage FlashArray which supports a maximum transfer size of 4MB. The Linux Kernel has 2 parameters in the /sys/block file system used to manage physical block IO sizes: max_hw_sectors_kb  ..read more

I have previously shared how to run the Oracle Database 23c FREE database on an X86 Mac using PodMan, you can find that blog post here. But what about the newer M1/M2 Macs I here you ask ? Well, I have just got myself and new 2023 MacBook Pro with the Apple M2 Pro ARM based chipset, so it’s time to look into running Oracle Database 23c Free on Apple M2. Preparation Start by installing Homebrew package manager. brew update % brew --version Homebrew 4.1.17 Now, install Colima container runtime and Docker if not already installed on your Mac. brew install colima docker % colima --versio ..read more

In Part 1 of this blog series I shared how to create a Pure Storage FlashBlade S3 compliant Object Storage account, user and bucket. I also demonstrated how to download the MySQLairportdb database, and upload objects into the Object Store S3 bucket. In Part 2, I showed how we can use the MySQL Shell to install the aiportdb database dump into a MySQL 8 database using the S3 Object Storage bucket. In this blog post I will show how we can also use the MySQL Shell to dump a MySQL 8 database to an S3 Compatible Object Storage bucket. Create Bucket Let’s start by creating a new Bucket in our previou ..read more

In this short blog post I am going to share how to upload a large file to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Object Storage using the AWS CLI to perform a concurrent multipart upload. For this post I will use a large 4GB file to demonstrate an upload. Let’s start by creating a file called bigfile using the Linux dd command, for example. dd if=/dev/random of=bigfile bs=1024 count=4096000 AWS Configuration Values The AWS CLI documentation details a number of configuration options which can be set for the aws s3 and aws s3api commands. Update AWS S3 multipart_threshold, multipart_chunksize and m ..read more

In my previous blog post I shared how to setup a Pure Storage FlashBlade S3 compliant Object Storage account, user and bucket. I also demonstrated how to download the MySQLairportdb database, and upload objects into the Object Store S3 bucket. If you want to follow along with this post, you can review the setup steps here. In this blog post I will show how we can use the MySQL Shell to install the aiportdb database dump into a MySQL 8 database using the S3 Object Storage bucket previously created. List S3 Bucket Use the s3cmd ls command or aws s3api list-buckets command to confirm the buc ..read more

In this blog post series I and going to share how a MySQL 8 DBA can utilise S3 Object Storage for common database admin activities. If you don’t already have an up and running MySQL 8 database and want to follow this blog, you could check out my post How to Install MySQL 8 on Oracle Linux 8, In this post I walkthrough how to install and configure MySQL 8 Community Server on Oracle Linux 8. Environment For this post I will be using S3 Object Storage provided by an on-premises Pure Storage FlashBlade which I have available to me in a lab. To demonstrate the use of S3 Object Storage we will need ..read more

In this post I am going to share how to install the MySQL 8 Community Edition on Oracle Linux 8. Before you download the RPM, confirm which version of Linux you are using, by checking /etc/redhat-release or /etc/oracle-release, for example. # cat /etc/redhat-release; cat /etc/oracle-release Red Hat Enterprise Linux release 8.8 (Ootpa) Oracle Linux Server release 8.8 I have confirmed I am running Oracle Linux 8 and can therefore proceed to the MySQL Community Download site. Adding the MySQL Yum Repository The MySQL Yum repository is the place to go for Oracle Linux / Red Hat Enterpr ..read more

In this blog series I set out to share how to deploy the Oracle Database 23c Free Developer Release on an Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes (OKE) Cluster with Portworx storage. In Part 1 of this series I shared how to create an OKE Kubernetes Cluster. In part 2 I shared how to install and configure Portworx Essentials Forever Free edition into an Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Kubernetes Cluster on Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes (OKE). This post will look at deploying an Oracle 23c database on OKE using Portwo ..read more