Performance

Cleaning up older patch artifacts – improving opatch performance

This blog post is about a feature not only I but you did ask for actually for a long time. Cleaning up older patch artifacts – improving opatch performance. Both in one opatch release. And opatch 12.2.0.1.37 from April 2023 has it.

A little bit of history

One of the longest journey I had ever done in my long time in Oracle was helping customers to find a voice for patch cleanup. Oracle 19c is a long term support release. Many customers upgraded to it already. And you apply patches on a regular …

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Datapatch may be slower when Traditional and Unified Auditing are on

I wrote several times especially about Unified Auditing in the past. It is a very efficient and useful way to audit operations in the database. But you need to be a bit careful about what’s on, and what isn’t. Now we recently had a customer case where it was clearly proven that Datapatch may be slower when Traditional and Unified Auditing are on. But how can this happen?

Recapping Traditional Auditing

At first, I am neither a security not an auditing expert. But I played quite a bit with Unified Auditing over the …

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Oracle Cloud World 2022 – Database Upgrade and Patching Labs

Oh … it’s just a few weeks left until Oracle Cloud World 2022 will start on Oct 17, 2022 in Las Vegas. If you have some final doubts whether you should go or not, let me tell you that it’s like Oracle Open World just under a different name. And in a different place. But with the same cool people and many great talks. Take the chance to meet the developers, their managers and the product managers behind the features you daily use – or miss. We’ll be there – and this is YOUR chance now to sign up for …

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Intel uses AutoUpgrade to upgrade from Oracle 11.2.0.4 to 19c

Funny, I was traveling recently with RAC PM Anil Nair – but he forgot to tell me that this cool story has been published just a few days before we took of for YATRA 2022 to India: Intel uses AutoUpgrade to upgrade from Oracle 11.2.0.4 to 19c. I know that Anil is simply so busy – and my surprise was huge.

What’s the story?

Gagan Singh, Enterprise Architect at Intel, shared it with me last week. The goal was to upgrade from Oracle 11.2.0.4 to Oracle 19c with the least amount of downtime

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OC YATRA 2022 visiting 6 cities in India in July 2022

Yes, you read correctly in my blog post’s title: OC YATRA 2022 visiting 6 cities in India in July 2022. And it is already July. Just a few days to sign up – if you haven’t already. So please register here: https://www.aioug.org/ocyatra-2022

Just pick one of the six cities from the agenda page:

  • 23 July 2022, Saturday – Chennai
  • 24 July 2022, Sunday – Bengaluru
  • 26 July 2022, Tuesday – Mumbai
  • 28 July 2022, Thursday – Pune
  • 30 July 2022, Saturday – Delhi
  • 31 July 2022, Sunday – Hyderabad

And register yourself.

Please check out the awesome agenda with …

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Binary patching is slow because of the inventory

The headline of this blog post may sound a bit cryptic: Binary patching is slow because of the inventory. But actually this seems to be one of the main causes when your binary patching gets slower and slower with every patch you apply.

The more you patch, the worse it gets

Well, this is a tough headline. But you may have read my blog posts about my quarterly patching experience. It actually started with the July 2021 RU in my 19c environment when I wrote:

At least in my environment, both checks with the

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How to speed up your database and GI patching

Several of you mailed me already and commented. And I know that I promised this blog post for weeks, if not longer. So let me try to explain How to speed up your database and GI patching. Since this blog post has a longer history, I’d say far over 6 months, it will be a bit longer than the usual posts. At when I started writing it, I decided to split it up into several pieces to make it more digestible but also to allow easier finding of certain topics. I hope it may help easing some recent patching …

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Virtual Classroom Seminar #14: AutoUpgrade 2.0 on May 5, 2022

If you finally want to see all the cool new features of AutoUpgrade 2.0 (the 2.0 is just a marker we use to say: We improved it significantly!), the please sign up to Virtual Classroom Seminar #14: AutoUpgrade 2.0 on May 5, 2022.

Virtual Classroom Seminar #14: AutoUpgrade 2.0 on May 5, 2022

Photo by Alex Knight on Unsplash

What are we going to talk about?

The development team invested a lot of resources to implement some of the most wanted features in AutoUpgrade. Spoiler: One feature is still missing but will be released very soon. In this Thursday’s Virtual Classroom Seminar we will talk about:

  • PDB and non-CDB
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Some very important MOS Notes when you upgrade and patch

Today, I would like to publish only a short blog post with some hints to MyOracle Support (MOS) notes we find quite helpful. The idea of all these notes I will list below is to help you finding the right patches before you upgrade or patch to Oracle 19c. So see our collection of Some very important MOS Notes when you upgrade and patch below.

Why do you need patch bundles?

At first, it is always our recommendation to upgrade to the most recent Release Update (RU). This is currently Oracle 19.11.0 while I’m …

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Data Pump Super Patch for Oracle 19.10 and newer

Just a few days we released a Data Pump Super Patch for Oracle 19.10 and newer. “Newer” refers to the fact that once 19.11.0 will be available, this merge patch I’m writing about will be available as well right away (sorry, got delayed a bit). And if you work with Data Pump, you may want to consider this performance patch collection.

Why do you need this patch?

Many customer will know the issue that adding changes with datapatch may take a long time as soon as dpload.sql is involved. And this …

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Sign up for the Upgrade 19c Virtual Classroom Seminars for the US, Canada and LAD

It took a while. And many of you asked whether we will run our Virtual Classroom Seminars we ran successfully for Australia and New Zealand in April and from June to now in EMEA for the US, Canada and South and Latin America time zones as well. And we do. It’s time to Sign up for the Upgrade 19c Virtual Classroom Seminars for the US, Canada and LAD.

Everything you need to know about Upgrade, Migration and Consolidation

When we ran these events especially for EMEA, a lot of colleagues asked us whether …

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Cool Features not only for DBAs – Virtual Classroom Series No.7

Happy New Year to all of you. I hope you are all well. After an heavily active 2020 with more virtual seminars than ever before it’s time to start in 2021 with Cool Features not only for DBAs – Virtual Classroom Series No.7 on Jan 14, 2021.

Why Cool Features for DBAs?

Actually the idea is not new. And we’ve included some slides into our workshops already for quite a while. But there are simply too many cool features. Our focus is in features which usually don’t make it into advertising or …

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Upgrade Seminars 1 and 2 – A quick recap, slides download and more

Thank you for participating in the first two seminars. Roy and I did already the “Release and Patching Strategy” webinar on Tuesday, June 23. And today  “AutoUpgrade to Oracle 19c”. So it time for Upgrade Seminars 1 and 2 – A quick recap, slides download and more.

Upgrade Seminars 1 and 2 - A quick recap, slides download and more

Photo by v2osk on Unsplash

Slides Download

I uploaded the slides already to https://mikedietrichde.com/slides/#WEB2020. Of course, I will upload the other slide decks as well to the same location.

Seminar Recordings

As soon as the recordings page has been completed, we will send out an email. And I will post the links …

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Upgrade to Oracle Database 19c – Virtual Classroom Series

Roy and I delivered a similar seminar already for the Australia and New Zealand region. And now it is time at a more convenient time zone setting for EMEA and India. So if you are not tired of web seminars yet, please sign up for our Upgrade to Oracle Database 19c – Virtual Classroom Series.

Upgrade to Oracle Database 19c - Virtual Classroom Series

Photo by Bima Rahmanda on Unsplash

4 Web Seminars – Going far beyond upgrades

The idea for this series of 4 web seminars is to cover not only the database upgrade itself. You will get much more than technical upgrade information. And we will …

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4+1 Seminars: Upgrade, Migrate, Consolidate to 19c – not only for Australia

Actually this weekend Roy and I would have flown from Australia to New Zealand. We planned at least 5 seminars. And we’ll do them in person as soon as conditions allow. If you are not tired yet of all these seminars offered to you, then we have the right offering for you.

And not only for those of you based in Australia and New Zealand. Singapore, Japan, Korea and other countries in this part of the globe. Roy and I will run for 4+1 Seminars: Upgrade, Migrate, Consolidate to 19c – not only for

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Unified Auditing policies can slow down the upgrade

Unified Auditing policies can slow down the upgradeI posted several blog posts about Unified Auditing in the past. And recently a large customer in the UK alerted me about their upgrades with PDBs from 12.1 to 12.2 taking much longer when Unified Auditing policies were enabled. It looks like as if Unified Auditing policies can slow down the upgrade.

We did some further investigations. See the results below.

Unified Auditing

You find a good number of blog posts explaining how to migrate to Unified Auditing, the performance tweaks in Oracle 12.1.0.2 and some other things:

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Unified Auditing – Performance Improvements in Oracle 12.1.0.2

Unified Auditing got introduced in Oracle Database 12.1.

Unified Auditing - Performance Improvements in Oracle 12.1The downsides of the “old” auditing facilities became obvious when too many users had activities or transactions at the same time leading to audit records being written into AUD$. Contention was a typical issue. The same thing happened when too many users tried to login at the same time. Furthermore protecting the auditing information required Database Vault as there was no default protection available.

This – and some other things – should be remedied by Unified Auditing which is available since Oracle Database 12c. It gets enabled in sort of a “mixed …

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Different Metrics for SPA (SQL Performance Analyzer)

I’m more the command line type of person. Once I’ve understand what’s going on behind the curtains I certainly switch to the GUI-click-click tools. But in the case of Real Application Testing – even though the support via the OEM GUI is excellent – sometimes I prefer to run my procedures from the command line and check my reports in the browser.

Recently Thomas, a colleague from Oracle ACS Support, and I were asking ourselves about the different comparison metrics for the SQL Performance Analyzer reporting We did scan the documentation but we found only examples but no complete …

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