Recent Posts by Martin Mueller

James McPherson some time ago authored a few blog articles which still are useful today. Similar to what happened to articles done by Darryl Gove these got accidentally deleted as well when James left Oracle.  These new/old articles cover various topics, of which the intro on Solaris Analytics might be of particular interest to a wider audience: Solaris Analytics: An Overview (1/30/2018) Oracle Instant Client: Now Available in IPS (7/7/2015) My Own Crash-n-Burn Farm: Using...

We just brought back a lot old but still good (read:useful) content on Oracle Developer Studio related topics. These are articles that were accidentally removed, all authored by Darryl Gove, a former Oracle and Sun employee. Some date back ten years but they are still valid, or explain fundamental topics: On misaligned memory accesses (6/1/2006) RAW pipeline hazards (1/12/2011) Endianness (10/21/2011) Please mind the Gap (1/12/2012) RAW Hazards Revisited (again) (12/17/2014) Inline...

MOSC: Oracle Systems and Oracle Solaris Community Forum As an Oracle user you know what to do when something does not work as it should or breaks, contact Oracle support by opening a Service Request (SR). But where to turn to if you just have a (technical) question? Often nothing is actually malfunctioning but still you need to reach out to a subject-matter-expert and a SR might be immediately closed because nothing is broken. There is a place worth a visit for any technical...

Database Load Generation and Software in Silicon The Oracle SPARC CPUs all offer specific circuitry to accelerate certain Oracle database functionality, esp. with regard to the inmemory option. (SPARC M8 also adds acceleration for al NUMBER related operations inside the Oracle database ontop of the aforementioned inmemory acceleration. These will not be covered here) The existence of these Software-in-Silicon technologies of course pose the question what are they good for in...

The Solaris Image Packaging system ("IPS") is the software distribution and lifecycle framework designed to distribute the Solaris operating system with all its userland and kernel components. It is of course not restricted to just operating system packages, it can be (and is already) used to change system configuration or install 3rd party software. In this article I do want to walk you through how to set up a very minimal package repository server to serve as a sandbox for...

Consolidation of different workloads often involves the use of virtualization technologies and/or partitioning of a physical server platform. Scenarios that involve partitioning sometimes result in under utilized hardware because of a too coarse granularity in compute resources. A single core might already be much more than the workload running on it needs. The same issue only seldom arises in memory assignments, the majority of partitioning technologies allow memory...

Some time ago I published an article on monitoring DAX activity on SPARC M8 (and to a certain degree the whole article also applies to SPARC M7 or S7) This article better had preceded the article on the DAX as it targets the SPARC M8 core. The goal is to give you a better understanding of the plethora of performance relevant events that a SPARC M8 CPU can measure or count. Like all SPARC CPUs (and Intel CPU have similar event counters) SPARC M8 provides a lot of information...

[Update October 2020] Oracle will introduce an extended support offering for Oracle Solaris 11.3 for a limited time. Details can be found in the updated Lifetime Support Policy document for operating systems and hardware and this blog article After July 2020 you will not get any more LSUs (Limited Support Updates) for Solaris 11.3, so it is time to move to Solaris 11.4. If this is old news to you you can safely stop reading this article, we have stated that publicly e. g....

Today we bring a video to you that shows an advanced use case for our WebUI. It recorded one part of the Hands-on-Lab we offered at Oracle Openworld in San Francisco this year.  Solaris StatsStore's WebUI has been described as the easy to use interface to various kinds of performance and status information Solaris can collect. Having a graphical representation of well-known data like average CPU utilization, or disk I/O, or network load is what very many other tools can...