when you run

./saturate 4 dbm1 2 exadb1

cat *log | grep benchmark
Sample output below:
 benchmark ,instance       ,start            ,end              ,elapsed   ,MBs
 ----------,---------------,-----------------,-----------------,----------,-------
 benchmark ,dbm1           ,05/13/12 19:18:28,05/13/12 19:19:32,        64,    537
 benchmark ,dbm1           ,05/13/12 19:18:28,05/13/12 19:19:30,        62,    554
 benchmark ,dbm1           ,05/13/12 19:18:28,05/13/12 19:19:32,        63,    545
 benchmark ,dbm1           ,05/13/12 19:18:28,05/13/12 19:19:32,        64,    537
 benchmark ,exadb1         ,05/13/12 19:18:28,05/13/12 19:19:32,        64,    539
 benchmark ,exadb1         ,05/13/12 19:18:28,05/13/12 19:19:32,        64,    539

This AWESOME text graph is similar to what you see in the Enterprise Manager performance page IO tab. Note that you’ll be seeing higher numbers of MB/s on the smartscanloop compared to EM because of a more fine grained interval (2secs) which is also the same behavior when you measure the IO latency as I explained here (avg latency issue)

then I’ve modified the script to have the advanced output that shows the Hierarchy of Exadata IO. See the updated README for more details on how to use it. Below is the output

What’s good about this is the numbers are about the same when you do a per 10secs snapshot of AWR.. compare the AAS and latency (avgwt ms) columns of the above image and below

Again, this is pretty useful for monitoring the high level smart scans IO that’s happening across your Exadata cluster, if you are on an environment where there’s separation of duties you can even hand off this script to the sys admins that are monitoring the storage cells with their home grown alerting scripts, kSar, or nagios.. so this will serve as their view on the database side of things.

And if any of your clients haven’t adopted the IORM, this is very useful for DEMOs to customer sites to showcase the IORM capabilities.. and if you don’t want to show the latency and other columns you can opt to just use the simple output which only shows the smart scans MB/s (see get_smartscan.simple on README ). Most of the time.. the simpler the output the easier for them (users) to understand.

Sweet! right?!?

Wait.. Does the toolkit work on non-Exadata DBs?

The SECTION 1 works on Exa and non-Exa (I’ve also mentioned this at the beginning of this post)

The SECTION 2 works well on Exa because the underlying scripts just makes use of dcli commands, some shell and SQL.. but if you are interested to have the smartscanloop output on non-Exa environment I have the script get_smartscan.nonexa on the toolkit that shows the “physical read total bytes” instead of the “cell physical IO bytes eligible for predicate offload”..

then on each node do this if it’s a non-Exa RAC

$ while : ; do ./get_smartscan.nonexa | grep "%" ; echo "--" ; sleep 2 ; done
%,05/12/12 12:57:33,DEMO1     ,      0,
%,05/12/12 12:57:35,dbm1      ,      0,
%,05/12/12 12:57:38,DBFS1     ,      0,
%,05/12/12 12:57:40,exadb1    ,      0,
%,05/12/12 12:57:42,PRIMARY1  ,      0,
--
%,05/12/12 12:57:46,DEMO1     ,      1,
%,05/12/12 12:57:48,dbm1      ,   2078, @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
%,05/12/12 12:57:50,DBFS1     ,      0,
%,05/12/12 12:57:52,exadb1    ,    972, @@@@@@@@@@
%,05/12/12 12:57:55,PRIMARY1  ,      0,
--
%,05/12/12 12:57:59,DEMO1     ,      0,
%,05/12/12 12:58:01,dbm1      ,   1088, @@@@@@@@@@@
%,05/12/12 12:58:03,DBFS1     ,      0,
%,05/12/12 12:58:05,exadb1    ,   2356, @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
%,05/12/12 12:58:07,PRIMARY1  ,      0,
--
%,05/12/12 12:58:11,DEMO1     ,      0,
%,05/12/12 12:58:14,dbm1      ,   1000, @@@@@@@@@@
%,05/12/12 12:58:16,DBFS1     ,      0,
%,05/12/12 12:58:18,exadb1    ,   2336, @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
%,05/12/12 12:58:20,PRIMARY1  ,      0,
--
%,05/12/12 12:58:24,DEMO1     ,      0,
%,05/12/12 12:58:26,dbm1      ,   1031, @@@@@@@@@@
%,05/12/12 12:58:29,DBFS1     ,      0,
%,05/12/12 12:58:31,exadb1    ,   2071, @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
%,05/12/12 12:58:33,PRIMARY1  ,      0,
--

But wait! there’s more!

$ less smartscanloop.txt | sort -nk5 | tail
pd01db03: %,05/10/12 21:29:28,biprd2    ,   7358, @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
pd01db03: %,05/11/12 08:57:12,biprd2    ,   7363, @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
pd01db03: %,05/10/12 14:55:54,biprd2    ,   7454, @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
pd01db03: %,05/11/12 09:29:57,biprd2    ,   7556, @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
pd01db03: %,05/10/12 18:17:50,biprd2    ,   7785, @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
pd01db03: %,05/10/12 19:12:19,biprd2    ,   7880, @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
pd01db03: %,05/11/12 10:31:24,biprd2    ,   7886, @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
pd01db03: %,05/10/12 19:15:48,biprd2    ,   8112, @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
pd01db03: %,05/11/12 10:31:40,biprd2    ,   8138, @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
pd01db03: %,05/10/12 18:49:46,biprd2    ,   9315, @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@

and since it’s a CSV file you can then easily graph it in Tableau! (just put a header on it first)

host       , time            , inst     , smartscan,
pd01db01: %,05/10/12 13:08:14,hcmprd1   ,      0,
pd01db01: %,05/10/12 13:08:16,paprd1    ,      0,
pd01db01: %,05/10/12 13:08:18,rmprd1    ,      0,
pd01db01: %,05/10/12 13:08:20,lmprd1    ,      0,
pd01db01: %,05/10/12 13:08:22,DBFSPRD1  ,      0,
pd01db01: %,05/10/12 13:08:24,hcrprd1   ,      0,
pd01db02: %,05/10/12 13:08:14,hcrprd2   ,      0,
pd01db02: %,05/10/12 13:08:16,rmprd2    ,      0,
pd01db02: %,05/10/12 13:08:18,paprd2    ,      0,
pd01db02: %,05/10/12 13:08:20,hcmprd2   ,      0,
pd01db02: %,05/10/12 13:08:22,DBFSPRD2  ,      0,
pd01db02: %,05/10/12 13:08:24,lmprd2    ,      0,
pd01db03: %,05/10/12 13:08:14,biprd2    ,   3412, @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
pd01db03: %,05/10/12 13:08:16,DBFSPRD3  ,      0,
pd01db04: %,05/10/12 13:08:14,DBFSPRD4  ,      0,
pd01db04: %,05/10/12 13:08:16,mvwprd2   ,      0,
pd01db04: %,05/10/12 13:08:18,fsprd2    ,    763, @@@@@@@@
pd01db04: %,05/10/12 13:08:20,mtaprd112 ,      0,
... output snipped ...

and hack the data! remember on the advanced output you can slice and dice it by host, time, inst, aas, latency, returned, ic, smartscan..

Here’s the IO graph per instance

and IO graph per instance and host

Hope I’ve shared you some good stuff

I ran into an interesting problem recently when attempting to publish an MS Access application with Citrix XenApp. The application pulled data from an Oracle database, so an ODBC connection was created on the Citrix server. What we found was that when a non-privileged user tried to run the application, the connection failed. When the Citrix server admin ran it, however, it worked. Furthermore, as long as the admin was logged in, anybody else could run the application successfully; when he logged out, the users’ connections broke again.

Since Access is not my area of expertise, we finally contacted Microsoft tech support after trying a few suggestions we dug up in our own research. The support analyst clued us in to the following solution, which I pulled from an Oracle Primavera setup document.

From what I’ve seen on different support forums, this seems to be a pretty standard setup task when running Oracle on Windows over Citrix.

If using an Oracle database platform, confirm [that] the Create Global Objects Windows Security Policy is set up on the Terminal Servers and add the domain Users or Groups of the end-users who will be accessing the published application. If the local security policy is not setup, the following steps can be used to add the policy:

1. Click Start, Programs, Administrative Tools, and then click Local Security Policy.
2. Expand Local Policies, and then click User Rights Assignments.
3. In the right pane, double-click Create Global Objects.
4. In the Local Security Policy Setting dialogbox, click Add.
5. In the Select Users or Group dialog box, select the user group that these end users are a part of, click Add, and then click OK.
6. Click OK.

If using an Oracle database platform, the Oracle client software also requires that you give the Authenticated User Group, Read and Execute privilege to the Oracle Home Directory and ALL its sub directories and files on the Terminal Servers.

“E4 is the first Exadata conference aimed towards a global audience, one that not only focuses entirely on Exadata and enterprise Big Data topics, but also features sessions by speakers at the top of the field who have worked on many different Exadata environments,” stated Enkitec Europe’s Managing Director, Tanel Põder.

E4 will feature single-track sessions with more intensive break out deep-dive explorations over two days. Registration fees are $1,250 for on-site attendees (includes accommodations for two nights).  Mr. Põder continued, “This event is important, due to the Exadata product’s relative youth and fast paced change, it’s hard to get quality information on the wide variety of Exadata topics from one place.”

Enkitec believes that Exadata is a revolutionary change in database architecture. With over a dozen Exadata experts on the company roster, Enkitec is considered to be a worldwide authority on the subject.

“Enkitec has completed a large number of Exadata implementations, maybe more than any other company in the world,” stated Enkitec Exadata Evangelist, Kerry Osborne, “We’re seeing that once companies get their Exadata in-house, they often get frustrated at not knowing how to make the platform to perform optimally. Our team has taken our own machines apart with a screwdriver to learn how to make Exadata work better for our customers. We want to share these experiences with other users to help them truly understand Exadata internals. That’s what our first-ever E4 is all about.”

For those interested in staying the week, Enkitec will also teach two intensive Exadata-centric courses at the Four Seasons Hotel immediately following E4, from August 15th – 17th. Participants can choose between “Exadata Administration” and “Exadata Performance Optimization.” The cost of each three-day course is $2,400.

E4 Event Summary
What: Two days of deep diving into the internals of all things Exadata — providing the tools and knowledge Exadata users need to more fully understand its advanced powers.
When: August 13-14, 2012; 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. each day
Where: Four Seasons Hotel, Irving, Texas
Cost: $1,250 (includes accommodations for two nights); $500 virtual
Paper Submissions: http://www.enkitec.com/e4/call-for-papers/
Registration Portal: Will commence week of May 14, 2012
Questions? Email e4@enkitec.com

Date: August 13 – 14, 2012, in Irving, Texas

E-mail your abstract to e4@enkitec.com

Submissions must be received by 5:00 p.m. CT May 31, 2012.

Winners will be notified before June 8, 2012.

Read on…

Begin forwarded message:

Have you ever tried to decipher a really ugly, unformatted SQL statement that someone gave you or you pulled out of one the database views or an AWR report? Tim Fox turned me on to the SQL formatting capability of SQL Developer a few weeks ago (actually Brian Hill found it first and showed Tim). It is awesome! It’s a little unintuitive to use though. Here’s how I use it.

1. start up the SQL Developer (there are versions for Mac OS and Windows by the way)
2. Click File->New and choose the SQL File option
– this opens a Query Builder Pane (you don’t need to connect to a database)
3. Pick any random file to open
4. Paste your nasty 10 page long query into the Query Builder pane replacing the text from your random file
5. Right click on the text in the window (brings up a long menu)
6. Click the Format menu Item (it’s at the bottom of the menu in version 3.0)

Viola – nicely formatted SQL text

The latest version of SQL Developer (3.0.x) is actually much better than the previous version by the way.

I haven’t closed SQL Developer since I found out about this capability!

SQL Developer is a free tool that can be downloaded from Oracle’s web site here:

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/developer-tools/sql-developer/downloads/index.html

Note version 3.1 is now available but I haven’t tried it yet.