One million kernels!

That’s a whole mess of VMs. Given the enormous amount of growth the computing world has gone through in the last few decades, you have to wonder whether one day we will be able to duplicate the internet as we know it today onto one single machine hosting millions (or billions) of VMs. It’s an interesting concept, at the least!

Perhaps Oracle will find a niche in the million-VM-system world. Oracle 15N – The Neuronetworked Database.

• Access to Metalink
• Loads of good coffee
• At least two computers
• A yearly cruise on which they can learn Oracle

There’s only one thing better than an Oracle class, and that’s an Oracle class taught by top notch instructors aboard a cruise ship sailing the western Caribbean. I’ve been on two such cruises, and they’re getting better every year.

Last year, I taught aboard the Carnival Glory in a three day RAC at Sea blitz. This year I was joined by John Garmany and Don Burleson in our Oracle Tuning TechBlast at Sea aboard the Royal Caribbean Liberty of the Seas, where we explored many advanced Oracle topics: everything from object storage to backups to the optimizer.

In March of 2009, we’ll be setting sail again with the Oracle TechBlast at sea on the new Independence of the Seas, a veritable floating city. One day of class will be held in the Ft. Lauderdale Grande Hotel and Yacht Club, with the two remaining days being at-sea days aboard the ship. Stops this year include Belize, Costa Maya, and Cozumel, with no class on port days! Topics include Oracle RAC, Tuning, Streams, Dataguard, and more.

You can read all about the 2009 TechBlast here.

I hope that you can join myself, John Garmany, Andy Kerber, and Don Burleson as we run through a wide array of important Oracle topics.

Having a hard time convincing your boss? Try these tactics!

It’s a great opportunity and a lot of fun. Bring your friends, your family, and enjoy joining a group of fellow Oracle professionals in one of the best training opportunities out there.

Follow Tico the Fairy as she teaches Princess Ruruna how to simply management of her nation with a well made database.

Why not? Google used a comic to sell their new Chrome browser, after all!

Actual Headline: Oracle Shareholders Choke On Ellison’s Package

Carry on.

UPDATE: Thanks to Bob Rhubart for pointing out the subtitle!

Don’t you love it when sci-fi comes to life? Imagine setting up your system architecture using technology like this!

And so I’d like to introduce The Adventures of Ace, DBA. Ace is a Jr. DBA trying to make it in a tough corporate world. The comic is about his trials and tribulations, imaginings, and other fun experiences as a highly stressed DBA.

Enjoy!

http://www.orcldba.com/ace/

Hellraiser

Okay, so Hellraiser is just a computer, but what a fine computer it is.

The CyberpowerPC Gamer Infinity 9310

• Quad Core 2.4GHz 64-bit processor
• 8GB DDR2 800 RAM
• 6 SATA drive bays, RAID configurable
• Dual NVIDIA GeForce 8800GT 512MB 16X PCI Express Video Cards
• and all the usual fixins

If you’re ever in the market for a machine that will act something like a server when you run Oracle, this one does the trick. Not only that, but it comes with a price tag of only $1,719.99 from NewEgg.com (note that price includes only 4GB RAM and one 500GB 7200RPM SATA drive).

It is extremely quiet, lightning fast, very powerful, and highly recommended. The graphics are overkill for Oracle, but great for whatever graphic intensive software you might also be running. However, I will say that it is HUGE. The system in box weighs 72 pounds, and stands a little higher than my knee. But with that comes the thrill of knowing that your home computer can probably run Oracle better than many of your clients’ servers!

For instance, building a filesystem in C that connects to Oracle and uses queries in order to create inode structures.

It’s not done by a long shot; hell, it’s not even presentable, but I’m still kind of proud of it since:

• I didn’t know C when I started it
• It’s a neat concept
• If I can remember how I did it, it could be an interesting piece of software

I won’t pretend that I know how to do complex filesystem work. I did have some help.

FUSE – Filesystems In Userspace

The main component (other than C itself and the OCI) is a software package called FUSE. Basically it is an interface to the kernel that allows user created pass-through filesystems. Instead of creating a filesystem that maps only to disk, you can create directory structures, files, etc. that map to anything you can imagine. I have seen a Wikipedia Filesystem, a Zip Filesystem, and several others that are very interesting. One in particular struck me as a good idea: DBToy from thesaguaros.com. DBToy is a database browser for use with MySQL or Postgres. Using that tool as a guide, I was able to hack out a version for Oracle.

Example Usage

[root@615349 orafs]# ls -ltr
total 148
-rw-r--r--  1 oracle dba   1542 Sep 23  2007 orafs.h
drwxr-xr-x  2 root   root  4096 Sep 23  2007 old
-rw-r--r--  1 oracle dba    804 Jun 15 00:13 makeit
-rw-r--r--  1 oracle dba   5824 Jun 15 00:17 orafs.c
drwxr-xr-x  2 root   root  4096 Jun 15 00:19 mount
drwxr-xr-x  5 root   root  4096 Jun 15 01:21 backup
-rw-r--r--  1 oracle dba  14070 Jun 15 01:21 ora_driver.c
-rw-r--r--  1 root   root 15084 Jun 15 01:21 ora_driver.o
-rw-r--r--  1 root   root 13972 Jun 15 01:21 orafs.o
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root   root 29612 Jun 15 01:21 orafs
[root@615349 orafs]# ls -ltr mountdir
total 0
[root@615349 orafs]# ./orafs mountdir
[root@615349 orafs]# cd mountdir
[root@615349 mountdir]# ls -ltr
total 0
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root 0 Dec 31  1969 TSMSYS
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root 0 Dec 31  1969 SCOTT
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root 0 Dec 31  1969 OUTLN
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root 0 Dec 31  1969 HR
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root 0 Dec 31  1969 FLOWS_FILES
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root 0 Dec 31  1969 FLOWS_020100
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root 0 Dec 31  1969 DIP
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root 0 Dec 31  1969 DBSNMP
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root 0 Dec 31  1969 CTXSYS
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root 0 Dec 31  1969 ANONYMOUS
[root@615349 mountdir]# cd HR
[root@615349 HR]# ls -ltr
total 0
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root 0 Dec 31  1969 REGIONS
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root 0 Dec 31  1969 LOCATIONS
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root 0 Dec 31  1969 JOBS
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root 0 Dec 31  1969 JOB_HISTORY
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root 0 Dec 31  1969 EMPLOYEES
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root 0 Dec 31  1969 DEPARTMENTS
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root 0 Dec 31  1969 COUNTRIES
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root 0 Dec 31  1969 CDEMO81_EMP
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root 0 Dec 31  1969 CDEMO81_DEPT
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root 0 Dec 31  1969 CAR
[root@615349 HR]# cd EMPLOYEES
[root@615349 EMPLOYEES]# ls -ltr
total 0
-r--r--r--  1 root root 0 Dec 31  1969 data.csv
[root@615349 EMPLOYEES]# cd ../COUNTRIES
[root@615349 COUNTRIES]# ls -ltr
total 0
-r--r--r--  1 root root 0 Dec 31  1969 data.csv
[root@615349 COUNTRIES]# cd ../../..
[root@615349 orafs]# umount mountdir

But What Did It Do?

When I ran the orafs program, two things happened:

1. A connection to Oracle was made as SYSTEM
2. A FUSE filesystem was mounted on the mountdir directory using API calls

This allowed me to cd to the mountdir directory and use standard OS commands like ls -ltr. The first level directory is schema names. In each schema directory are directories for each table. In each table directory is a file called data.csv. It doesn’t actually contain anything yet, but hey, it’s a start. Just being able to navigate through Oracle’s data dictionary at the OS level is neat enough.

Also notice that to remove it, I had to use the umount command. This isn’t a fake mounting of any kind, it truly did get mounted at the OS level!

Nothing On Disk

One of the coolest features of FUSE is that nothing had to be written at all to disk. The data from the data dictionary was not written to disk at any time. The orafs program used no flat files or anything of the sort. When ls -ltr is called, it actually did a query on the fly. For instance, select table_name from dba_tables where owner = ?. My code passes results to FUSE, and FUSE makes it understandable to the OS.

Great, But Why?

Yeah, that’s the big question. The reason I even did it in the first place was that I thought it would be a neat concept. Then it was a challenge. Now it’s something for which I have absolutely no time!

But if I had things my way, here’s what I’d love to do with it:

• Have 3 files in each table subdirectory: data.xml, data.csv, and ddl.sql. The data.xml and data.csv files would have all of the rows from the table arranged in the proper format. This table would not actually be queried until you opened the file in some way. Imagine, simply doing cp data.csv /home/oracle/table.csv to get a comma delimited dump of your data! ddl.sql would, of course, contain the DDL to regenerate the object.
• Create symbolic links to child tables based on constraints
• Use the creation date from DBA_OBJECTS and DBA_USERS to set the dates when browsing the directory
• Allow command line args for login/password instead of hardcoding. I had this at one point but got rid of it due to coding issues
• Figure out how to use malloc() and calloc() properly so I don’t waste memory

It’s a big list that I’ll probably never get through; however, it doesn’t hurt to have goals.

In fact, imagine some other uses for FUSE with Oracle (maybe I’ll tackle them one day):

• Mount an ASM diskgroup, allowing ASMCMD-like commands for browsing, but also allowing cp commands to a normal filesystem using RMAN commands in the code
• Mount a table that contains a BLOB and a column containing the file name of each row. You could actually see the BLOBs on disk with the proper filename, all dynamic from the DB without duplicating space usage

I may actually try to learn some of the FUSE bindings I’ve seen. FUSE-J for instance is a Java binding, which would probably make the coding MUCH easier. However, the thought of rewriting all the code I’ve done so far for orafs makes my head hurt.

Anyone good with C and OCI that would like to see the code? I’d be happy to share, maybe someone else can do something with it. After you fix all my horrible code, of course.

So I ask you, what parameters would you just LOVE to see show up by Oracle 20rr (Really Robust)? I’ll start:

1. _allow_all_corruption = TRUE|FALSE
2. make_cbo_work = TRUE|FALSE
3. ignore_bad_queries = TRUE|FALSE
4. ignore_user_list = (comma delimited list of users)
5. auto_create_sr_on_error = TRUE|FALSE

Oh, and also two SQL*Plus commands I’d like:

1. set alias for select = sleect
2. set tab complete on

Any other ideas?

The story, so I hear, is that a film student did this for a contest called Trailer Park. The goal is to take a movie and create a trailer for that movie that makes it seem like a completely different genre. Whatever the case, it is absolutely excellent!