triBLOG

Visual Studio 2010 Release Candidate (RC) available next week

.NET Rocker » TrivadisContent — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 13:10:55 GMT

The launch date for Visual Studio 2010 RTM is the 12th of April. This month there’ll be a Release Candidate (RC) and Scott Guthrie mentioned on his blog in a post about ASP.NET MVC 2 RC that it will be available soon. Now everybody speculates about the date and what “soon” means. Days or weeks? The [...]...(read more)

Ausserplanmässiger Security-Fix für WebLogic

Sven's Technik-Blog » TrivadisContent — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 06:57:41 GMT

Oracle hat gestern einen Security-Fix ausserhalb der quartalsweise erscheinenden CPUs veröffentlicht. Dieser schliesst eine Lücke im im WebLogic Node Manager (CVE-2010-0073), welche remote ohne Authentifizierung ausgeführt werden kann. Der CVSS-Basescore ist 10 – es kann also zum kompletten Verlust der Integrität, Vertraulichkeit und Verfügbarkeit führen! Deshalb empfiehlt Oracle den Patch sofort einzuspielen. Mehr Informationen und der Link zum [...]...(read more)

The Art of Application Performance Testing

Striving for Optimal Performance — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 13:52:38 GMT

If you are looking for a book that describes how to approach and carry out a performance testing project, don’t look further. Get a copy of The Art of Application Performance Testing: Help for Programmers and Quality Assurance (O’Reilly, 2009). In it Ian Molyneaux manages to cover, in 160 pages, a crucial topic that [...]...(read more)

The Last Drupal Post

realfiction - TrivadisContent — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 17:32:01 GMT

The Domain transfer of realfiction.net is almost through, which means that I say goodbye to the Drupal CMS and hello to Rf.Sites, my own codebase to publish stuff. If availability is gone at some point it means that the new nameservers are being propagated through the webs. Redirects should be in place for the most important URLs, however, this one post will not be migrated anymore, so enjoy while it's there :)...(read more)

Does the Query Optimizer Cost PX Distribution Methods?

Striving for Optimal Performance — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 11:55:15 GMT

The short answer to this question is “yes”, it does. Unfortunately, the distribution costs are not externalized through the execution plans and, as a result, this limitation (yes, it is really a limitation in the current implementation, not a bug) confuses everyone that carefully look at the information provided in an execution plan of a [...]...(read more)

Speaking at BASTA! Spring about WPF 4.0 and MVVM

.NET Rocker » TrivadisContent — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 16:20:47 GMT

The BASTA! (=Basic Days => in German Basis Tage) is “the” Conference in Germany about .NET. The BASTA! Spring is from 22nd to 26th February. I’ve two sessions there: one Wednesday (24. February) and one on Thursday (25th February). I’ll talk about the new features in WPF 4.0 and about the Model-View-ViewModel-Pattern (MVVM). Find more (German) [...]...(read more)

Using the event API to publish an event to the Event Delivery Network (EDN) – the Spring way

Enjoy IT - SOA, Java, Event-Driven Computing and Integration » Trivadis — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 00:59:13 GMT

The Event Delivery Network (EDN) in Oracle SOA Suite 11g provides a declarative way to use a publish/subscribe model to generate and consume business events without worrying about the underlying message infrastructure. Events can be published / subscribed from a variety of programming environments such as Java, PL/SQL, SOA Composites, and ADF-BC applications In his blog [...]...(read more)

Edition-Based Redefinition

Striving for Optimal Performance — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 18:42:58 GMT

Upgrading critical applications can be very difficult. One of the main problems is that for reasons of availability, long downtimes cannot be periodically scheduled. Therefore, for such applications, it is desirable to implement online upgrades. This requires that the application in question, as well as any software used by the application (e.g. the database engine) [...]...(read more)

Oracle optimizer system statistics are critical !

Yann Neuhaus — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 20:04:00 GMT

The goal of this post is not to describe a tuning session; as reminder, this blog has been created to allow information exchange around Oracle High Available infrastructures J. However this week I really wondered how "corrupted" Oracle SYSTEM Optimizer statistics (not object statistics) could have a HUGE impact on the database performances.

Indeed, a customer of mine migrated from Oracle 9i on TruCluster to Oracle 11.1 on Linux Clusterware. Nothing special. He performed several import tests and application tests. During the validation phase, everything worked fine. In the week-end of the year switch (2009 to 2010) the production database was migrated for the real "go-live". The migration worked fine but on Monday the performances were quite poor. Very strange because the week before, during the validation tests, the application worked fine.

The customer didn't change anything between production and validation, he just collected the system statistics on the morning of the go-live.

After a deeper analysis we observed with the developers, that none of the explain plan corresponded to the expectations. The selective index was ignored, only the index on the columns referenced in the "order by" clause (but not efficient) were used.

As you may also experienced in projects, a huge SQL troubleshoot session has been started, analysing in depth all the plans, checking the optimizer parameters, and so on....

Let's take this simple SQL as example, the function based index on "SUBSTR(NLS_LOWER("DATAAREAID"),1,4), SUBSTR(NLS_LOWER("SALESID"),1,20)" is used even if the index on "Substr(Nls_lower(customerref),1,60)" would be much more efficient.

SELECT /*+ FIRST_ROWS (100)*/ a.salesid,
a.salesname,
a.reservation,
a.custaccount,
a.invoiceaccount,
a.deliverydate,
a.deliveryaddress,
a.url,
...............a.recid,
a.del_correctivereason,
a.cibzvkgreetingtext
FROM     salestable a
WHERE    ((Substr(Nls_lower(dataareaid),1,4) = Nls_lower(:in1))
          AND ((NOT ((returnstatus = :in2))
                AND NOT ((returnstatus = :in3)))
               AND (Substr(Nls_lower(customerref),1,60)LIKE Nls_lower(:in4) ESCAPE N'\')))
ORDER BY Substr(Nls_lower(a.dataareaid),1,4) DESC,
         Substr(Nls_lower(a.salesid),1,20) DESC

Index I_366SALESIDX, index Columns ("bad index") :

Column Name Data Type
SUBSTR(NLS_LOWER("DATAAREAID"),1,4) COLUMN EXPR.
SUBSTR(NLS_LOWER("SALESID"),1,20) COLUMN EXPR.

Index I_366CIBZALCUSTOMREFIDX, index Columns ("good index") :

Column Name                             Data Type
SUBSTR(NLS_LOWER("DATAAREAID"),1,4)     COLUMN EXPR.
SUBSTR(NLS_LOWER("CUSTOMERREF"),1,60)   COLUMN EXPR.

Having a look at the in explain plan, we see that the not effective index on SUBSTR(NLS_LOWER("SALESID"),1,20) is used.

While using values for the bind variables we obtain the following SQL execution statistics :

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id | Operation                    | Name          | Rows | Bytes | Cost |
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT             |               |     1 | 1435 | 3088K|
|   1 | SORT ORDER BY               |               |     1 | 1435 | 3088K|
|   2 |   TABLE ACCESS BY INDEX ROWID| SALESTABLE    |     1 | 1435 | 3088K|
|   3 |    INDEX RANGE SCAN          | I_366SALESIDX | 3865K|       | 31656 |
------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Statistics
----------------------------------------------------------
        316 recursive calls
          4 db block gets
     447118 consistent gets
     234802 physical reads
          0 redo size
      15011 bytes sent via SQL*Net to client
       3044 bytes received via SQL*Net from client
          2 SQL*Net roundtrips to/from client
          0 sorts (memory)
          0 sorts (disk)
          0 rows processed

When observing the Optimizer System statistics, we discovered the following issues :

select * from aux_stats$

SNAME           PNAME           PVAL1      PVAL2
--------------- --------------- ---------- ----------------
SYSSTATS_INFO   STATUS                     COMPLETED
SYSSTATS_INFO   DSTART                     01-04-2010 09:45
SYSSTATS_INFO   DSTOP                      01-04-2010 10:45
SYSSTATS_INFO   FLAGS                    0
SYSSTATS_MAIN   CPUSPEEDNW         542,903
SYSSTATS_MAIN   IOSEEKTIM            6,958
SYSSTATS_MAIN   IOTFRSPEED       21836,194
SYSSTATS_MAIN   SREADTIM            28,136 <= ! Too high !
SYSSTATS_MAIN   MREADTIM            66,433 <= ! Too high !
SYSSTATS_MAIN   CPUSPEED               611
SYSSTATS_MAIN   MBRC                    12
SYSSTATS_MAIN   MAXTHR           386176000
SYSSTATS_MAIN   SLAVETHR           3713024

SREADTIM, MREADTIM had HUGE values.

Single Read Time has 28 ms of wait time ! This is for such a system almost impossible since it enjoys quite fast hardware (last HP EVA technology, last HP server, HBA for connection to disks, aso ...). While analysing the average I/O waits with Grid Control we observed between 1 and 4 ms wait time.

The customer remembered that these system statistics were calculated during quite heavy load.

We started again the system statistics calculation during the lunch break (during 30 minutes with normal/low load) and observed the results :

exec dbms_stats.gather_system_stats
(gathering_mode => 'interval',interval => 30);

SQL> select * from aux_stats$;

SNAME           PNAME           PVAL1      PVAL2
--------------- --------------- ---------- -----------------
SYSSTATS_INFO   STATUS                     COMPLETED
SYSSTATS_INFO   DSTART                     01-05-2010 12:25
SYSSTATS_INFO   DSTOP                      01-05-2010 12:55
SYSSTATS_INFO   FLAGS                    0
SYSSTATS_MAIN   CPUSPEEDNW         542.903
SYSSTATS_MAIN   IOSEEKTIM            6.958
SYSSTATS_MAIN   IOTFRSPEED       21836.194
SYSSTATS_MAIN   SREADTIM             6.565
SYSSTATS_MAIN   MREADTIM             7.939
SYSSTATS_MAIN   CPUSPEED               825
SYSSTATS_MAIN   MBRC                    14
SYSSTATS_MAIN MAXTHR            10621952
SYSSTATS_MAIN   SLAVETHR              1024

Now the single block read time (SREADTIM) is 6,5 ms, the maxthr (means maximum I/O throughput in bytes/s) slowed down from 386 MB/s to 10MB/s. This was due to the lower activity on the server during system statistics collection.

The optimizer directly integrated these changes, and the plan now uses the right/selective index : I_366CIBZALCUSTOMREFIDX

While using values for the bind variables we obtain the following execution statistics :

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id | Operation                    | Name                    | Rows | Bytes | Cost |
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT             |                         |     1 | 1435 | 2931 |
|   1 | SORT ORDER BY               |                         |     1 | 1435 | 2931 |
|   2 |   TABLE ACCESS BY INDEX ROWID| SALESTABLE              |     1 | 1435 | 2930 |
|   3 |    INDEX RANGE SCAN          | I_366CIBZALCUSTOMREFIDX | 3805 |       |    20 |
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

          0 recursive calls
          0 db block gets
       3933 consistent gets
       2867 physical reads
          0 redo size
      14982 bytes sent via SQL*Net to client
       3014 bytes received via SQL*Net from client
          2 SQL*Net roundtrips to/from client
          1 sorts (memory)
          0 sorts (disk)
          0 rows processed

Costs dropped down from 3088K to 2931.

As a conclusion we could state that we solved the performance problem just by choosing the right interval to collect the system statistics. The important of these system statistics is well described in the book of my friend Chris (http://antognini.ch/top/).

Join Elimination

Striving for Optimal Performance — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 17:50:30 GMT

In some specific situations the query optimizer is able to completely avoid executing a join even if a SQL statement explicitly calls for it. Two are the cases currently covered by this optimization technique, which is called join elimination. The first one was introduced in Oracle Database 10g Release 2, the second one in Oracle [...]...(read more)

Using the new Object/XML Mapping Support of Spring 3.0 with JiBX and Maven

Enjoy IT - SOA, Java, Event-Driven Computing and Integration » Trivadis — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 19:17:28 GMT

The Object to XML mapping functionality (OXM) has been moved from Spring Web Services project to the core Spring Framework with version 3.0 of Spring. Object/XML Mapping, or O/X mapping for short, is the act of converting an XML document to and from an object. This conversion process is also known as XML Marshalling, XML Serialization [...]...(read more)

Solving javax.naming.NameNotFoundException: Unable to resolve ‘jdbc.SOAAppUserDataSource’ with Oracle SOA Suite 11g Adapter Services

Enjoy IT - SOA, Java, Event-Driven Computing and Integration » Trivadis — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 14:22:35 GMT

I run into this rather “stupid error” a couple of times already. It’s very easy to solve, however it’s also very easy to do it wrong when configuring Oracle SOA Suite 11g Adapter services through the WebLogic Console. I hope this blog entry will help new users when running into this problem: You get the following error [...]...(read more)

Posting Source Code with Microsoft Live Writer and WordPress

Enjoy IT - SOA, Java, Event-Driven Computing and Integration » Trivadis — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 19:32:53 GMT

Today I searched for a solution to post source code using Microsoft Live Writer to my blog hosted on WordPress.com. WordPress itself has an integrated Syntax Highlighter supporting most popular languages. Details of how to use it can be found here. But how do you use the WordPress Syntax Highlighter when using Microsoft’s Live Writer (which I [...]...(read more)

Using SnagIt Screen Capture Plug-In for Windows Live Writer

Enjoy IT - SOA, Java, Event-Driven Computing and Integration » Trivadis — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 19:32:50 GMT

Screen captures are important when blogging and having an easy way to capture images from the screen and embedding them into a blog entry is a key feature. SnagIt from Techsmith Corporation is a popular and very usable utility for taking such snapshots of screens. When using Windows Live Writer blogging client software there are different [...]...(read more)

Implement Domain Value Maps (DVM) with Oracle Service Bus (OSB) 10R3

Enjoy IT - SOA, Java, Event-Driven Computing and Integration » Trivadis — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 12:50:53 GMT

Domain Value Maps (DVM) are an interesting feature of Oracle SOA Suite for supporting Canonical Data Models. They help to map from one vocabulary, used in a given domain, to another vocabulary used in a different domain. For example, one domain might represent a country with a numeric code while another domain may represent a [...]...(read more)

Use comments on actions to increase maintainability of your Oracle Service Bus (OSB) flows

Enjoy IT - SOA, Java, Event-Driven Computing and Integration » Trivadis — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 23:55:33 GMT

Ever wondered how you can increase the understandability and the maintainability of your OSB message flows in a Proxy Service? As you know, a message flow in OSB consists of different actions. Unfortunately these actions are just labeled according to the action type, so for example you can have many Assign, Validate, Service Callout, … actions, [...]...(read more)

2. Trivadis Oracle Forms Community Event: “Migration mit SOA - ganz konkret und real!”

Markus Imboden — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 08:15:00 GMT

Der 1. Trivadis Oracle Forms Community Event liegt nun schon einige Zeit zurück. Ihr wertvolles Feedback hat uns gezeigt, dass diese Plattform auf Ihr Interesse stösst.

TRIVADIS löst gerne das Versprechen ein, die Plattform weiter zu führen. Dabei sollen technische und strategische Themen zukünftig klar abgegrenzt und fokussiert werden.

Das 2. Trivadis Oracle Forms Community Event stellt die Technologie in den Mittelpunkt und greift das von Ihnen am meisten favorisierte Thema‚ Modernisierung von Forms-Anwendungen in Richtung SOA auf.

Die 3. Durchführung des Trivadis Oracle Forms Community Events, welche im Sommer 2010 geplant ist, wird ein strategisches Thema ausleuchten.

Wir freuen uns darauf, Sie am 2. Februar 2010 bei der nächsten Ausgabe des Trivadis Oracle Forms Community Events zu begrüssen.

Anmeldung: “Migration mit SOA - ganz konkret und real!”

Agenda

15.30 Uhr Begrüssung
15.35 Uhr Präsentation des Migrationsprojekts
16.45 Uhr Feedbackrunde
17.00 Uhr Apéro

The DataGrid and the “Input string is not in a correct format” message in Silverlight

.NET Rocker » TrivadisContent — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 16:03:34 GMT

If you play around with the DataGrid in Silverlight and try some scenarios, maybe you come around the FormatException with the Message “Input String is not in a correct format”. You get this Exception if your Data-Object e.g. has a Property of type int and the user enters some characters in the DataGrid. The Exception [...]...(read more)

Great news for Silverlight on Linux

.NET Rocker » TrivadisContent — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 09:40:31 GMT

The Silverlight-Plugin runs per default on Windows and MacOs. For Linux-Machines there’s an opensource implementation driven by Microsoft and Novell called Moonlight. While Silverlight is currently in Version 3 available and Version 4 (already in beta) is expected for spring next year, the Moonlight implementation was only availabe in Version 1. And Version 1 means [...]...(read more)

Chinese Edition of TOP Available!

Striving for Optimal Performance — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 01:26:53 GMT

Few weeks ago the Chinese Edition of my book, Troubleshooting Oracle Performance, was published by China-Pub! Honestly, this is something I did not expect when publishing the book. Even though I still have to touch one of them myself, let me spend few words about it… I still remember when I saw for the first time part [...]...(read more)

Silverlight 4 – How to focus a TextBox that is contained in your Custom Control on Startup

.NET Rocker » TrivadisContent — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 20:27:56 GMT

Focusing a TextBox that’s inside a Custom Control isn’t so easy at startup of your application. Let me explain the problem that is also discussed on http://forums.silverlight.net/forums/t/151235.aspx. Imagine you’ve created a custom control that has a TextBox as Part-element. The Style that sets the Template would look like this: <Style TargetType="local:SimpleControl"> <Setter Property="Template"> [...]...(read more)

Does CREATE INDEX Gather Global Statistics?

Striving for Optimal Performance — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 08:54:04 GMT

You can add the COMPUTE STATISTICS clause to the CREATE INDEX statement. It instructs the SQL statement to gather and store index statistics in the data dictionary, while creating the index. This is useful because the overhead associated with the gathering of statistics while executing this SQL statement is negligible. In Oracle9i, the gathering of [...]...(read more)

Oracle 11gR2 backups to tape with RMAN and Netbackup

Martin Wunderli — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 07:49:00 GMT

Short answer: Currently a no-go, e.g. on Linux. Symantec told my customer to expect a new version of their libobk in Q1/2010. Until then, backups have to be made to disk and then saved with bpbackup (the Symantec CLI util for netbackup) to tape.

Luckily my customer already used our TVD-Backup suite (sorry, german description) which is perfectly capable of just doing this (among a lot of other wonderful things ) and relieving the DBA from writing scripts for this task (incl. space management etc.).

Maybe you have a look...

Martin

x86 platforms, why continue to pay for unsupported virtualization technologies ? : "Oracle VM vs VMware Server"

Yann Neuhaus — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 11:52:00 GMT

This small blog post provides a status of the tests we are currently performing with Oracle VM Clusters (Management and Availability purposes). We manage our OracleVM cluster infrastructure with Grid Control, since the release 10.2.0.5 (and patch 8244731) includes virtualization administration. However only Oracle VM 2.1.5 is currently supported, we wait for 2.2.0 support.

Our cluster is composed of two servers connected to an iSCSI shared storage on which OCFS2 has been installed.

The following features have been successfully tested :

Guest machine live migration
Template creation and deployment
Tests of High Availability features while stopping/crashing a Guest

These first results look quite interesting. Considering the low price of the Oracle VM support, see (https://shop.oracle.com/pls/ostore/product?p1=Virtualization&sc=ocomlink_buynow_virtualiztion). We can consider that Oracle VM managed through Grid Control offers a competitive integrated management and monitoring framework compared to VMware. Another fact must be considered : Oracle VM is fully supported by Oracle for productive database servers, in addition if a Guest Server has been created with a limited amount of Virtual CPUs, only these CPUs must be licensed. Keep in mind that in an ESX cluster, all the processors of the cluster must be licensed as soon as a Guest VM is running Oracle within the cluster.

Oracle VM seems to become a right serious virtualization alternative ...

ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2010 – Abstract Accepted

Enjoy IT - SOA, Java, Event-Driven Computing and Integration » Trivadis — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 22:57:41 GMT

Good news for me today! I received an email telling that my abstract on Testing SOA Suite 11g Systems has been accepted. I’m honoured and looking forward to present at the ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2010 conference. Here is the abstract I submitted: Best Practices for testing SOA Suite 11g based systems The purpose of testing in general is to assess applications quality. Many [...]...(read more)