Some time ago I updated my terraform command line tool to the version 0.15.3 and was surprised how easy it went. Originally I planned to write a blog but it was not too much to write about. The upgrades to version 11 or 13 were much more painful. Last week HashiCorp announced Terraform version 1.0 General Availability and it meant that the time for a new upgrade had come. I upgraded it on one of my machines and decided to write a short blog about both upgrades to encourage people to try and do the upgrade.
Continue reading “Upgrading Terraform command line to the latest version.”Month: June 2021
Linux Hugepages and AUTO_ONLY in Oracle 19c.
Most Oracle DBA are sufficiently educated about benefits using large memory pages for Oracle database SGA to reduce overhead and improve performance. If you want to read more about it you can start from that Oracle blog or read it from other multiple articles and blogs. Oracle is using parameter use_large_pages to direct behaviour of an Oracle instance during startup.
In the previous versions before 19c we had three possible values – “TRUE”, “FALSE and “ONLY”. Since Oracle 11.2.0.3 the “TRUE” meant that the instance will allocate as many hugepages as free available in the system and get the rest from the normal small pages. The “FALSE” would tell it to not use the hugepages at all and the “ONLY” would be able to start an instance only if sufficient number of free hugepages is available in the system to fit all SGA in it. The “TRUE” was default for all databases.
In the 19c version we got one more value – “AUTO_ONLY” and now it is the default value for Exadata systems running Oracle Database 19c. The description in documentation is not totally clear and sounds very similar to the description of “ONLY” value. Here is an excerpt from the documentation:
“It specifies that, during startup, the instance will calculate and request the number of large pages it requires. If the operating system can fulfill this request, then the instance will start successfully. If the operating system cannot fulfill this request, then the instance will fail to start.”
Let me show you how it works. Here is my sandbox with a 19c database and no hugepages is configured on the box by default.
Continue reading “Linux Hugepages and AUTO_ONLY in Oracle 19c.”Google Bare Metal in numbers.
In the previous posts I shared my first impression and how to start using the Google Bare Metal Service (BMS). In this post I will try to show some numbers related to the performance of the solution and you can compare it with your existing environment.
Let me start from the box characteristics. For my tests I was using a “o2-standard-32-metal” box located in the us-west2 zone (Los Angeles) . The solution was configured with 2Gbps interconnect and had a couple of storage resources attached to it. The first one was represented by two 512Gb disks based on HDD storage where I placed my binaries and a recovery ASM disk group and the second was a 2Tb volume “all flash” I used for data. Here is summary table:
| Characteristic | |
| BMS Box type | o2-standard-32-metal |
| CPU | Intel(R) Xeon(R) Gold 6234 CPU @ 3.30GHz |
| CPU sockets | 2 |
| CPU cores | 16 |
| Memory | 384 GB |
| Disk 1 | 512 Gb – Standard disk |
| Disk 2 | 512 Gb – Standard disk |
| Disk 3 | 2048 Gb – All flash |
| Network | 4 NICs Speed: 25000Mb/s |
| OS | Oracle Linux 7.9 |
Before starting the tests I updated my Oracle Linux and installed a number of packages required for my Oracle database and packages to test IO and Network such as fio and iperf3. Here is a summary table with software and tools used to test the performance.
| Package | Testing scope |
| fio | IO performance |
| stress-ng | CPU. Memory |
| swingbench | Oracle database performance |
| SLOB | Oracle database IO |
| iperf3 | Network |
| oratcptest | Network |