Thursday, July 24, 2008

Mass Changing

In some cases the domain name for an entire Oracle product has to be changed. Oracle tools have a pretty straightforward approach to this task: replace all occurrences of the domain name in all configuration files. Now, that's ok if the source domain name is lribinik.cool.blog, but what if I'm more enamored with Oracle than with myself and I happen to have a single label domain named ORA? Things are gonna get messy in this case (just use your imagination).

One of those cases is when you perform a cloning of your EBS environment and run adcfgclone. Now, I used to have this issue forever but I only noticed it used to target files under rdbms\admin, but after installng 11.5.9 CU2 (I think this is the patch to blame, but I might be wrong) I noticed every possible location is trampled by the huge Oracle monster: perl, jdk, jre, you name it. What da hell?! Why should perl\java code be changed AT ALL after a cloning process?
Had enough of this, really. To deal with this I've just removed lines relevant to those folders from the instconf.drv file and now I can clone quitely.

Similar processes for iAS domain name change are a bit more reasonable, they actually warn you about this in the documentation and let you know about a file that contains the list of files that will be changed, they actually try to stick with to relevant files.
I'm not sure though, if the chgip script (the one that changes the domain name) works with this file, because I think files not mentioned there are changed as well.

Anyway, I think the best way to avoid this problem is just to name your domain lribinik.cool.blog. It's a nice name.

Thursday, July 17, 2008

Education, Part II: Exams

I think I might have made a wrong impression on my previous post, studying is not really such a nightmare to me, I do enjoy it, it's just that sometimes it can get very exhausting and frustrating.

One of the aspects of studying that leave me emotion-mixed are exams.
On one hand, the exams' period is usually the period during the semester when I have the most free time - no lessons, (usually) no assignments and as my studying method is a quick revision of the lecture notes and solving previous tests I don't spend much time studying for an exam. Why not? Well, at least in my Masters I usually have a maximum of two previous exams to refer to and this doesn't leave me with much studying to do.
On the other hand, exams are annoying. One of the things that annoy me is that you would expect an exam to be designed to test your knowledge, but this is not always the case. That's why my studying method is as described above. You are not studying the course's material, you are studying for the exam.
For instance, I had three tests this last semester, each one of a different kind:
1. "A Literature exam", or at least this is the Hebrew term, meaning the exam isn't really designed to test your knowledge or understanding but how much you can write on a trivial subject and how accurately you can guess what negligible facts the lecturer expects you to mention.
2. An easy test but there was a catch... time shortage, and the lecturer won't add any time. So OK, it's a ranking system, the better students will probably solve the questions more quickly and will have a chance of answering all the questions, but I still think exams are supposed to test knowledge and not writing agility.
3. This one was an exam that really tested knowledge but we had only a small set of sample questions (without solutions) to study by.

Well, after telling everything I hate about studying I can now rest and don't think about it for the rest of the summer.

Thursday, July 10, 2008

Education, Part I: Masochism

Know this thing when bugs rush towards the light that's gonna fry them? Well, I sometimes feel like one, except I have more than a single chance.

What am I talking about? Last week I've finished the last test for the semester in my Master's studies and I can't help but feeling a great relief and thinking to myself "pheeeeew, done at last, three months of freedom, here I come!". And then I recall how it all began...

Before starting my Bachelor's degree I was excited - "WOW, University, that's going to be interesting!" (a bit geeky I know, but no hiding the truth here) - I think it took something like a couple of weeks to get me totally frustrated and counting the weeks 'till the end of the semester.
Before the 2nd year I thought - "Done with (almost)all the math so it's definitely going to be better this year" - well, not really(maybe a bit), but at least I started getting higher grades.
Before the 3rd and last year it was something like - "Well, I'm done with most mandatory courses so now I choose most of the courses I take, how bad can it get?" - and indeed, it was better but at the end of the year and the degree the only thing I could think regarding further education was "Nice it was, but a B.Sc. is more than enough for me. Thanks a lot dear university but I'll probably leave the Master's to someone else". I was truly sure there's no way I'll go for a Master's, at least not in the near five or so years.

Well, it took me one year to start considering the issue and another year to actually start studying, and again same old lies "It's a Master's so the courses are more interesting and less demanding", well it has some truth to it, but no matter what, at the end of the year I'm still exhausted and happy to get rid of all the courses I was so excited about taking.

So now I have three months to forget all I've written about here and get re-excited, you can count on me.

Talking about masochism, this week I've learned it can take the form of curiosity, I won't tell you what I'm talking about - this will be sadistic - so as translated directly from Hebrew "who understands, understands".

Thursday, July 3, 2008

Light at the End of the Tunnel, Part II: The End?

Well, it's time I conclude this whole upgrade story.

The other major problem I had, still have actually, is related to memory consumption. Apparently 10g processes consume more PGA, I haven't really understood yet if that's a planned behavior or a bug, but the fact is that just opening a forms' session process now takes something like 8MB of PGA instead of 3MB on 9i add to that the fact that I have more than a couple concurrent users that do more than just opening forms (they actually work with it), throw in my operating system (Windows 32bit), add to the mixture memory leaks in forms (mainly in the inventory module) and you might as well call Huston.

I had some advices from Oracle on this one but no real solution. I've tried reducing the stack size for processes using orastack, an Oracle expert (same one from here) suggested I ask the heavier users to close forms they don't currently use and found a yet unsolved bug that seems relevant, and I still have an open TAR regarding the issue.

So where do I stand now? I'm not really sure. I used to have the database crashing with ORA-7445 and ORA-04030 daily, and then it just stopped - yeah, I do face an occasional crash once in a week or two but somehow the problem is not such a pain in the ass anymore. One of the possible causes is a reduced number of concurrent users, it seems that it's just enough to save me from the fatal memory consumption limit.

I'll probably let you know if I have any insights and I do have a lot to say about the increased memory consumption of 10g but that's stuff for a post with a different title.