If you are running Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM) 13c, you should (must) be using Agent Gold Images (GI). They provide an easy way to manage the lifecycle of you OEM agents from a fancy dashboard.
The problem came while removing a Gold Image Versions in OEM 13.3PG. Guess what? The whole Gold Image disappeared!!!
This is not the expected behavior for this. The point here is that there were agents still subscribed to the GI. So even trying to create a new GI won’t allow us to subscribe those agents as they were still subscribed to the GI that was missing.
Using some Sherlock Holmes’ skills found that the GI was in fact still present in the OMR tables. You can use the query below to see all the GI currently living in your system.
SELECT image_name FROM MGMT$EM_GAI_ENTITIES;
What about the agents still subscribed to this GI?
SELECT * from EM_GI_AGENT_SUBSCRIBE WHERE gold_image_series='<GI Name>';
OK, so there should be something wrong here. After working with Oracle Support they found the issue and provided a patch. Please refer to Patch 28817766.
Apply this patch on top of your OEM 13.3 PG and you should see the GI again. If you are not able to see the GI, then create a new one with the same old name. Everything should look fine after that.
Formerly named Macromedia Flash (now Adobe Flash) player was really popular in the 2000’s. I remember learning it to add animation to Web Sites I was developing during my college years. Flash has also been the target of hackers to insert viruses, hence posing several security concerns to enterprises and home users.
In the IT world, change is the only constant. So, is time to move on to the next thing.
Adobe Flash is widely used in several Oracle sites. My Oracle Support, Oracle Business Intelligence EE, Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control, etc. Google just announced that it will stop supporting Flash in Google Chrome at the end of 2020.
That means that you will loose all those fancy graphs in your browser. Well, not quite. Oracle started to provide patches and upgrades to get rid of Adobe Flash and use JET instead.
First, keep in mind that you should upgrade your OEM 13c to the latest version (13.3PG). I discussed some new features of this version in a previous post.
1. Oracle Database 19c has been certified as a OEM Repository Database (OMR). This means that is time to upgrade your repository to a long term support release.
More info : EM 13.3C: Certification of 19c Database as an EM Repository Database and as a Managed Target (Doc ID 2541711.1)
2. Oracle EM 13.3.2 Bundle Patch (BP) is available. You must keep up with patching if you don’t want to encounter issues down the road.
More info: Enterprise Manager Cloud Control Database Plugin 13.3.2.0 Bundle Patch Bug List (Doc ID 2554474.1)
3. The latest EM 13.3.2 BP 3 has support for Oracle Autonomous Database (ATP-D). So, if you are running ATP in dedicated mode and you want to use OEM to manage your DB, is time to patch!!
If you are on the latest Exadata plugin for EM 13.3 (well, even the 13.2 version of the plugin). Be aware that there’s a bug where if the Exadata nodes’ names are longer than 7 characters, you cannot discover them.
EM just throws a weird error with below legend:
SEVERE: makeTargetsXml for each rack#: 1 e=java.lang.StringIndexOutOfBoundsException: String index out of range: -1
The solution is to apply the latest (March 2019) Bundle Patch to the agents running on the Exadata’s compute nodes.
More info on below MOS note:
Exadata Discovery Fails With “No New Component Is Discovered. Click Cancel” (Doc ID 2477624.1)
Another good excuse to keep your EM system up to date.
Oracle EM 13.3 PG was released April 28th 2019. This new (plugin only) release contains 8 new plugins including a new version of the DB plugin.
After installing these plugins we noticed several changes in behavior for the DB targets.
All pages that used Adobe Flash now use Oracle JavaScript Extension Toolkit (JET)
Top Activity and Emergency Performance pages were completely removed from the Performance menu
At the beginning was weird to use just ASH analytics instead of Top Activity page but all the key information is there. There’s an option to revert 3 JET pages back to Flash if needed.
This can be done through emctl commands. All this information can be found on MOS 2422790.1
Also, if you really need the old Top Activity page you can still access it using a direct URL link.
While trying to add an additional OMS to the current OEM 13.3 GCDomain using the provisioning console there’s an error in the Install homes step.
The error contains the following message:
Caused by: oracle.sysman.oii.oiif.oiifb.OiifbEndIterateException:
oracle.sysman.oii.oiif.oiifb.OiifbEndIterateException: SEVERE:Values for the following variables could not
be obtained from the command line or response file(s):
MYORACLESUPPORT_USERNAME(MyOracleSupportUsername)
Silent install cannot continue.
This issue is related to Bug 28290139 and the workaround can be found in MOS 2432095.1 After performing the workaround the OMS addition job needs to be executed from scratch. This resolves the issue.
Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse (ADW) is one of the so-called DB as a Service (DBaaS) or probably we should call it Data Warehouse as a Service (DWaaS) with the difference that this service is completely automatic and autonomous.
This service is comprised by an Oracle Database (of course) already pre-configured for analytics, data lakes and data warehouse workloads. This Oracle Database (PDB) has 18c features running on Exadata hardware. Oracle Exadata software is 18c with features like In-Memory delivered from the cell server.
There’s a service console that helps to manage the ADW services.
On top of this, Machine Learning (ML) tools help with data analysis and data models. Development tools like SQL Developer are useful to create objects, load data and more.
Let’s now talk about tasks that happen automatically:
Automatic statistics gathering during direct-path load operations
Automatic tuning
Automatic Partitioning
Automatic In-Memory
Automatic Indexing (soon)
Automatic Compression
Automatic Tablespace Management
Automated backups and patching
ADW is also capable of repair itself. Machine Learning is used to detect anomalies and uses pattern recognition to determine if this problem is already in the problem knowledge-base. If is a known problem, it will apply the fix automatically.
On the security side all the information is encrypted at rest. This means that backups and all data in the tablespaces is encrypted using TDE.
The connectivity between ADW and the rest of the world is secured be default. Oracle provides a wallet file that contains all the connectivity information required to login.
If you open this file you’ll notice that all connectivity is being done through SSL.
(security=(ssl_server_cert_dn=…
Provisioning is quite easy using the service console. From the main dashboard you can click on “Create a data warehouse” button.
Select the Workload type between Autonomous Data Warehouse ADW or Autonomous Transaction Processing ATP loads.
Next you choose a compartment where the ADW database is going to live. For this example I’m going to choose ADWTest01 compartment. It is not recommended to use the root compartment.
Then we are going to set the Display and Database names. For this example, I’m choosing 1 OCPU and 1 TB of storage. Keep in mind that ADW is elastic, this means we can add more OCPUs and Storage on the fly without the need for downtime.
From the Administrator Credentials section we are going to set the ADMIN account password.
Next is license type. You can choose to use a license that you already own or subscribe to a new one.
Last but not least is the Tags section. You can add a tag to this ADW database to better manage it inside your tenancy.
Let’s now click Create Autonomous Database and wait few minutes for OCI to provision it.
The orange ADW icon will turn green once the ADW database is fully provisioned.
In my next post I’ll cover how to connect o the ADW database and how to load data to it.
