Monday, June 12, 2006

Blog has moved - please update your feeds

I haven't posted anything for few days as I was actually busy choosing a hosting provider and moving the blog over to my own web site.

After several days of disgusting service from blogger.com, looking at Doug's Oracle Blog hacked and reading Tom's Kidnapped Blog I decided to switch from free service to something more flexible and controllable. Some time ago I read that Doug was experimenting with WordPress and decided to give it a try. I have also done some research (well, just googled a bit) on popularity of blogging engines and WordPress definitely is a mainstream tool which is one of the main criteria I use to choose a piece of software.

Actually, everything went quite well. I was able to Import all entries from Blogger and even "hack" Blogger's template in such way that all old links on oracloid.blogspot.com are automatically redirected to my new address at blog.oracloid.com. On my new web site I had to play with .htaccess file to make it working. Unfortunately, I don't have access to .htaccess file on Blogger - this was I had to use standard redirect meta tag which is not very well percieved by search engines, AFAIK. Using .htaccess search engines are normally update their links pretty well.

Thursday, June 08, 2006

Don't you hate blogger.com today?

I've been struggling for a while to post anything or comment on any blog on blogger.com today. Redirected to http://www.blogger.com/sorry.html with message:
Down for Maintenance
Blogger is temporarily unavailable due to an unexpected problem.
We will be back up as soon as possible.

Update (2:20 pm PDT): We are fixing a database issue. We hope to be back up in a couple of hours.


It's interesting what kind of database they use and what was the problem?

Cloning Oracle Home

Cloning ORACLE_HOME...

At the company I work for now, we used to simply copy oracle homes over another machine and/or path, recreate some links and relink. Works very well for 9i including RAC. With 10g and CRS it stopped working - it was a mess registering CRS resources afterwards. Another disadvantage was that Oracle inventory wasn't maintained so it was not possible to easily identify which one-offs are installed where unless followed some naming guidelines. Of course, Oracle EM agents were not able to discover databases automatically. And in the end this wasn't really a supported way even though Oracle never refused to support our environment with those oracle homes.

With 10g Grid Control there is a feature to clone Oracle homes but it's still far from reliable tool that I personally would consider to be used anywhere near production boxes and I don't remember if I need change management pack for that licensed separately.

So with 10g we were preparing to end up installing oracle homes manually on every box but today my new colleague, Luis Rigaud, has pointed out an interesting way of cloning oracle homes. It's described in Metalink Note 300062.1 showing how to use OUI (oh well, actually perl script) to clone any oracle home starting from 9iR2.

Plus: documented and supported, works with 10g RAC/CRS, keeps inventory in sync.
Minus: it requires a bit more involvement and different procedures to follow for different releases.

I should note that I haven't tried it yet but Luis said it always worked like a charm for him.

I have also come across James Koopmann's post Oracle Cloning, Putting the Pieces in Place. This XClone tool does look interesting and it seems it should be able to clone Oracle homes as well. However, I bet Oracle won't support this cloning method. Thanks for James for replying to me on XClone.

Munich's Lions

Doug Burns posted a long awaited Cow today. This is quite different from what I see here in Munich. :-)
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PS: Others on the pix are my son, wife and sister.
PPS: To many TARs updated last days - I just realized that I put dots on empty line just like on Metalink to avoid it eating up my empty formatting lines. :)

Sunday, June 04, 2006

Snails

I took these shots couple weeks ago on the way to work. These snails are quite cute.
I try to post pics first time directly from Picasa - let's see how it works. Posted by Picasa