Hi Arjen,
As I mentioned a few weeks ago, we lost our production database and had to failover to our standby using Dbvisit.
I thought you would appreciate some technical details. Feel free to share our experience if you feel it would be helpful to others.

OS version: Linux OEL5
Oracle version: 10.2.0.4 Standard Edition.
Storage: Lefthand Networks (now HP) iscsi SAN, mounted as ext3
Cause of crash: I suspected our mounted volume had a corruption as we were seeing a significant degradation in I/O performance. After many database checks, we decided to run Iometer to check if the disk speeds were below par.

I ran Iometer on the volume that held the database files.

We think Iometer may have hit some corruption because this caused us to lose the whole file partition. Even after rebooting, the system could not find that partition to mount. It had simply disappeared. The SAN partition was still there and available.

Using Dbvisit, we were able to switch over to the standby database in a few minutes. The switch was simple and with no errors. The only problems we encountered after that were network issues on our side.
1. We had tested with one subnet (subnet2) but as an oversight, computers on subnet3 could not see the database. This was rectified by some network configuration changes (by the network admin).
2. The firewall had the default timeout setting of 2 hours. We have some long running jobs that process mostly in Java with occasional Oracle calls. These jobs would fail with the “Connection reset by peer” error message. We set this timeout to the max of 12 hours which seemed to fix the problem.

When we first installed Dbvisit, it did not include the option to create a standby using the Dbvisit software. In a crisis situation, it was a very helpful option and once again it worked without errors. Using the menu I was able to recreate the standby by navigating a few menus. The final switch back to our production server worked seamlessly as well. It did take a couple of hours due to our large and numerous redo logs (write intensive database) but there were no problems.

Thanks again for a superb product. It keeps getting better and has once again saved the day!

Sincerely,

Jill Salo
Oracle DBA
Westpeak Global Advisors

• Catching up with many of our key resellers and customers based in the US & South America and getting a better understanding of their business environments  and the issues they face;
• Introducing Dbman – the Hero of DBAs everywhere – to the world;
• Reconnecting and meeting  with new Oracle Aces and Ace directors;
• Presenting at the “Five Minutes of Fame” at Oracle Closed World;
• Connecting with potential customers and distributors.

Gaining insight into Oracle’s vision for the future was also invaluable. Understanding that they too are heading into the cloud, creating their own Linux platform to enhance the performance of their products and investing in new features for Data Guard which will feed into our product development plans for Dbvisit.

It was a hectic schedule to say the least but I thoroughly enjoyed meeting all the people I did, listening to the speakers I wanted to see, connecting with the market and getting positive feedback about the new Dbman T-shirts.

On Tuesday morning I had breakfast with Daniel Morgan (http://www.morganslibrary.org), an Oracle Ace director. Daniel always has a lot of interesting ideas and feedback on the Oracle community and knows a lot of people in the industry.

On Tuesday I also did the Five Minutes of Fame presentation at the Oracle Closed World to promote Dbvisit to an audience who mostly consists of members of the Oak Table. Elias Terman was kind enough to organize a spot for me, but advised me to expect a grilling as I was presenting a product solution and the preferred presentations were about interesting technical problems and solutions. This made me a little nervous but the guys were great and enjoyed hearing about Dbvisit.

On Wednesday morning I had breakfast with Hans Forbrich (http://hansforbrich.blogspot.com/), also an Oracle Ace director. He teaches a lot of Oracle classes and his knowledge of Oracle and Linux is very broad and makes for interesting discussions.

That evening saw me at the Blogger’s Meet Up where I caught up with a few familiar faces before heading off to the Black Eyed Peas concert. They put on a great show with amazing lighting, choreography and excellent music. To give you an idea of scale of the event, 300 buses were hired to take people to the concert and they were driving backwards and forwards all night long.

On Thursday I gave my presentation “All about Standby Databases”. Although it went well and there were good questions asked I will be changing the title to the Basics of Standby Databases for next time. Feedback by individuals on the day suggested that they expected me to go into depths of Data Guard. Two people came up to me afterwards and said that they were Dbvisit customers. It was great to put a face to the familiar names at Fiserv and RNSolutions, Inc.

In the afternoon I attended the “It’s a Wrap Concert” and saw fellow Kiwis Melissa Francis, who is a DBA from Wellington, and Erica Harris who is on the committee of the Oracle NZ Users Group.

In all an excellent, productive week if a little exhausting, but looking forward to next year’s event already.

–Arjen

I attended Larry Ellison’s keynote speech, but before that we had a presentation from HP executive vice president Ann Livermore. They made a big deal of the America’s Cup and a lot of the sailors were in attendance but I did not see Russell Coutts, the New Zealand member of the Oracle/BMW America’s Cup crew.

Larry’s speech was interesting. He announced some new hardware technology that makes a lot of sense (basically ‘cloud in a box’) called Exalogic. He also announced that Oracle are creating their own version of Linux to run on the Exalogic and Exadata servers and moving away from compatibility with Red Hat. Larry said that Red Hat is based on a four year old kernel and is just too slow to keep up with the changes required of it.

This evening I had dinner with the New Zealand/Australian Oracle network. I saw some familiar faces including Michele Buson from http://www.excel4apps.com/ and one of the first things he asked me was when we are going to reveal our secret new team member. All is being revealed at OOW however if you couldn’t make it you can find out all about him at http://www.dbvisit.com/dbman/. He is now officially revealed.

I’ll keep you posted with things as it comes in the meant time you can follow me on Twitter ….

–Arjen

It is now in Room 300 of the Moscone South venue NOT Room 307 as previously advertised.

I will be presenting 2 papers at Oracle Open World.

This is my first time at OOW and I am very much looking forward to it.
It will be a great chance to meet new people and to catch up with friends and customers.

I will be presenting the following 2 papers:

1) How to Create a Technical Disaster Recovery Implementation Plan.

A technical disaster recovery implementation plan involves the actual implementation of the hardware and software at the disaster recovery location. It ensures that there are no surprises when building the disaster recovery servers and that all critical systems and their components have been accounted for. This session focuses on Oracle-centric applications in the UNIX/Linux environment.
When: Monday Oct 12 16:00 – 17:00, Moscone South, Room 270

2) Perl:DBA’s and Developers best (forgotten) friend.

This session reintroduces Perl as a language of choice for DBAs and developers for developing a range of programs and scripts. Discover what makes Perl so successful and why it is so versatile. Perl can automate all those manual tasks, and it is truly platform-independent. It may not be in the limelight like other languages, but it is a remarkable language for development and is still very current with ongoing development. Oracle and VMware still use it as part of their latest software releases.
When: Tuesday Oct 13 16:00 – 17:00, Moscone South, Room 270

If you are attending OOW and are interested in these topics, please come along.

If you are one of our Dbvisit customers or just want catch up with me during OOW – please tweet me @dbvisit or send me an email. I am looking forward to meeting with you.

Dbvice audits the database based on the recommended security checks published by Oracle to ensure a database is secure. Dbvice does not alter the database or implement any changes, it only reports on recommended security settings.
Dbvice performs the following checks:

• Listener secure
• User privileges
• Database options
• Sample schemas
• Remote Authentication
• Oracle file security
• Public Privileges

Dbvice can be run against any Oracle version, and on most platforms.

Update: 5/11/2011, Dbvice is no longer available publicly. Please contact Dbvisit Software if you are interested in Dbvice.

To view our Dbvisit power point presentation (in English) please see Dbvisit presentation.