NUMA after 10.2.0.4 Upgrade is Automatically Enabled

On HP UX platform I recently did an upgrade project of a 1TB warehouse system from 10.2.0.2 to 10.2.0.4. After upgrade I saw a strange behaviour that Oracle Database alert.log started reporting ORA-07445:[$PXNMOVE] and ORA-07445:[$COLD_KKERFP()+1984]. These errors are diagnosed as faulty CPU , so had to replace all Cell Boards on the Faulty HP Superdome Hardware.

Later the performance went down and we could not load the data on time. Things went bad.
All I saw is the first three CPUs were used by the system and not the rest of the CPUs.




With a lot of investigation between HP & Oracle , it was finally discovered to be the NUMA setup within Oracle Code to use the first cell board and ignore the rest.

alert.log looked like the below for NUMA configuration
and NUMA PG = 3, CPUs = 3


Statement from Oracle was "NUMA is turned on by default 10.2.0.4 and as per the observation only 3 CPU is used."

Later the Init.ora parameter were setup to disable the NUMA.
_enable_numa_optimization=FALSE
_db_block_numa=1
Database was restarted and we were able to see the Oracle processes working on all the 10 CPUS.

Now the alert.log will showed like
and NUMA PG = 1, CPUs = 10

I hope this information will help HP Customers running Oracle Database.

BI EE - Installation

Preparing to EE Installation was quite easy task. I started with version 10.1.3.3.

It is worth reading the "System Requirements and Supported Platforms for Oracle® Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition" Guide before starting off.

System Requirements and Supported Platforms

PDF

I started the installation on HP-UX 11.23 Itanium 64 bit Server where there was already Discoverer 10.1.2.2 already running. The goal was to integrate BI Discoverer and BI EE.

During the setup OracleBI_HOME and OracleBIData_HOME has to be specified.
OracleBI_HOME is the BI Installation Directory
OracleBIData_HOME is the BI Data Directory


I opted for the Advanced option to Install the BI EE onto an exising 10g SOA Suite version 10.1.3.1.0 , so that I could get the BI EE Intergrated with the existing SSO Setup.



In the further installation screens , existing 10g SOA suite location and access details were supplied which enable the BI to get installed.

Further discussion : BI processes and the startup and shutdown procedure for them.

BI Enterprise Edition

Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition is a full range of BI Components that every one was looking for. It includes Dashboard , Answer , Delivers , Publisher and Disconnected Analytics.

If you are familiar with other Oracle Products then Dashboard is similar to Portal , Answer is similar to Discoverer , Delivers is similar to Alerts , Publisher is previously known as XML Publisher.

In the further topics I will cover my experience in getting the BI EE working.

Oracle Application Server : Renaming Hostname

On one of the implementation we had the Infrastructure and the Customer Database Installed on the same host. The Infrastructure Database was created with MRCA and the Customer Database is a Warehouse System.

The existing architecture looks as below;



The proposed architecture was to migrate into DMZ architecture and it looks like below;



The proposed plan was to move the Infrastructure Database into a new node and place it in the DMZ.

After reading the Changing Network Configurations of application server , we came to know that the IP address can be change but not the hostname. Oracle support does not have a script to update the hostnames as there are plenty of records where the hostname was recorded.

Finally we ended up moving the Warehouse System into a different node. Warehouse implementation has an option to change the hostname. But the work involved in migrating the Warehouse Database was huge as we did not have other options.