Ron Ekins' – Oracle Technology, DevOps and Kubernetes Blog
A technical resource for Data Professionals
Background Following the recent announcement by Oracle on the de-support, and deprecation of the Oracle ASM Filter Driver (ASMFD). See Note: Oracle Automatic Storage Management Filter Driver (ASMFD) (Doc ID 2806979.1) I am starting to more interest in the use of Oracle ASMLib v3.1 for long term Oracle support, and also for the io_uring, and Thin... Continue Reading →
Introduction Following the recent announcement of the deprecation and desupport of the Oracle ASM Filer Driver (ASMFD), and the release of a new version of the Oracle ASMLib for Oracle Automatic Storage Management (ASM). It's the perfect time to revisit ASMLib and write a blog on how to download, install, and configure the ASM library... Continue Reading →
I was recently asked Does a Pure Storage FlashArray include empty, unused Oracle Database space within its data reduction calculation ?. As I am sure many others may have had the same question, I thought it would make a good topic for a blog post, so here we go. FlashArray Data Reduction From the FlashArray... Continue Reading →
Background As a long time fan of the Oracle ASM Filer Driver, one of the major benefits for Oracle ASM Filter Driver (AFD) is AFD Filtering. AFD can ensure writes are only performed by trusted and registered Oracle processes, blocking potentially damaging writes that would have otherwise resulted in data corruption. Unfortunately, a recent Linux... Continue Reading →
Background Ok, what is the Oracle ASM Filter Driver ? The Oracle ASM Filter Driver (Oracle ASMFD) is an Oracle provided Linux kernel module that resides in the IO path of the Oracle ASM disks. Oracle ASMFD provides a number of advantages over the use of ASMLIB and UDEV managed volumes, these include: storage protection... Continue Reading →
I recently published a blog on restricting Linux block storage IO sizes using Kernel settings, but what if you don't have root access, or want a more dynamic approach for your Oracle Database. In this blog post I am going to explore the use of multiblock read count (MBRC) on an Oracle 19c Database. Oracle... Continue Reading →
I have previously shared how to install the Oracle ADM Filter Driver (ADMFD) using the CLI and also using the Oracle Installer graphical UI. In the post I will share how to migrate existing Oracle ASM UDEV managed disks to use the newer ASM Filter Driver (ASMFD). To confirm ASM Filter Driver has already been... Continue Reading →
Traditional disk based storage systems use a sector size of 512 bytes, some all-flash-arrays use 4K sectors sizes, but it's not something we generally consider, do you know what you are using ? If you're not sure you may want to check-out now of my recent posts on how to check disk sector sizes from... Continue Reading →
I was recently asked 'How can I check to see if my storage supports 4K sector sizes, and if my Oracle 19c database is using it' ? In this post I will share how to check disk sector sizes from Linux, from Oracle Automatic Storage Management (ASM) and via the Oracle kfed utility. Traditional disk... Continue Reading →
In this post I will share how to perform an online move of an Oracle 19c RAC database to a Pure Storage ActiveCluster Pod to provide Active-Active synchronous replicated storage for an extended / stretched Oracle RAC cluster. Step 1 - ActiveCluster Pod The first step is to create a Pod, in the example below... Continue Reading →