How to Change IP adresses of SCAN Name in Oracle 11gR2 RAC

Today, I needed to update the IP adresses of scan name in Oracle 11gR2 RAC environment. As you know, these IP addresses are defined in DNS but they also stored in Oracle Clusterware resource configuration to tell which IP addresses will be served by SCAN VIP services. So when you update the IP addresses of the scan name in DNS, you also need to update the resource configuration. This is a very simple task: Stop the SCAN listeners, stop the SCAN (Virtual IP) services and then run “srvctl modify scan” command for the scan name:

Be sure that all the SCAN VIP services are down:

Re-configure scan virtual ip adresses and run the scan listeners:

You can check the new configuration by running “srvctl config scan”.

2 CommentsOracle,

Upgrading Oracle RAC Database 11.2.0.2 to 11.2.0.3 (Grid + DB)

A new patchset for Oracle 11.2 has been released. This patchset is a full installation of the Oracle Database software. So you don’t need to install 11.2.0.1 before installing 11.2.0.3. You can read the complete list of new features of 11.2.0.3 from here:

http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E11882_01/server.112/e22487/chapter1_11203.htm

I downloaded the patchset and wanted to upgrade my 2-node RAC database. It’s just a test database running on VirtualBox. Latest PSU and GI PSU (12419331 and 12419353) are already applied. Before I upgrade the database, I have also applied patch 12539000. Installer checks if this patch is applied. It seems it’s an important patch because it fixes a bug directly related with upgrade process (Bug 12539000 – 11203:ASM UPGRADE FAILED ON FIRST NODE WITH ORA-03113).

The patchset contains 7 zip files but we need only the first 3 zip files to upgrade our grid and database.

First I’ll upgrade the grid infrastructure, then I’ll update the DB. Before you upgrade your database, I recommend you to read “Master Note For Oracle Database Upgrades and Migrations” MOS ID 1152016.1.

As you know, starting from oracle 11gR2, the Oracle DB and grid upgrades are done via the “out of place upgrade”. So I switch to root user, create a new directory for the Oracle software:

Read More

17 CommentsOracle, , ,

DB_ULTRA_SAFE Parameter

DB_ULTRA_SAFE is a new parameter introduced in 11g. It provides an integrated mechanism to offer protection from various possible data corruptions. and provides critical high availability benefits for Oracle Database. Setting DB_ULTRA_SAFE initialization parameter will configure the appropriate data protection block checking level in the database. It will control DB_BLOCK_CHECKING, DB_BLOCK_CHECKSUM, and DB_LOST_WRITE_PROTECT.

DB_BLOCK_CHECKING controls whether or not Oracle performs block checking for database blocks.

DB_BLOCK_CHECKSUM determines whether DBWn and the direct loader will calculate a checksum (a number calculated from all the bytes stored in the block) and store it in the cache header of every data block when writing it to disk.

DB_LOST_WRITE_PROTECT enables or disables lost write detection. A data block lost write occurs when an I/O subsystem acknowledges the completion of the block write, while in fact the write did not occur in the persistent storage.

Read More

Oracle, ,

Oracle 11g New Feature: RMAN Data Recovery Advisor

In Oracle 11g, RMAN provides a new advisor called Data Recovery Advisor (DRA). DRA has several new commands to help DBAs for performing recovery tasks.

To list of database failures, you can issue:

DRA will consolidate related failures into a single failure. You can list a failure individually by issuing “list failure X detail” command.

Read More

2 CommentsOracle, ,