RTFAL!

This is a note-to-self really. When playing around with Oracle and something’s not working – RTFAL: Read The Flippin Alert Log!

After resizing a VM I was getting this problem:

[oracle@RNMVM01 ~]$ sqlplus / as sysdba

SQL*Plus: Release 11.2.0.1.0 Production on Sat Apr 24 17:44:44 2010

Copyright (c) 1982, 2009, Oracle.  All rights reserved.

Connected to an idle instance.

SQL> startup nomount
ORA-00845: MEMORY_TARGET not supported on this system
SQL>

I spent longer than I should have reading around on google, hitting various pages which all talked around memory management and /dev/shm

If I’d followed the logical process, I’d have checked the alert log:

Starting ORACLE instance (normal)
WARNING: You are trying to use the MEMORY_TARGET feature. This feature requires the /dev/shm file system to be mounted for at least 536870912 bytes. /dev/shm is either not mounted or is mounted with available space less than this size. Please fix this so that MEMORY_TARGET can work as expected. Current available is 529969152 and used is 0 bytes. Ensure that the mount point is /dev/shm for this directory.
memory_target needs larger /dev/shm

Following the syntax from here I duly allocated the space as Oracle requested:

[root@RNMVM01 ~]# mount -t tmpfs shmfs -o size=536870912 /dev/shm

and now Oracle was happy:

SQL> startup nomount
ORACLE instance started.

Total System Global Area  535662592 bytes
Fixed Size                  1337720 bytes
Variable Size             402654856 bytes
Database Buffers          125829120 bytes
Redo Buffers                5840896 bytes

As a ‘hack’ when it comes to Oracle server stuff, I have to say it’s a pleasure to work with most of the time, lots of helpful logs & documentation 🙂

Opera + Oracle EM = true love

A faithful FireFox user for many users, I’ve been having a rather delightful rekindling of my old love for Opera recently. Back in the days, when I was a beardless bairn, I even paid for Opera I liked it so much. Then Firefox came along and Opera got dropped by the wayside like a teenage crush.

Well Opera 10.5 was released recently and I’m liking it. I miss my Firefox extensions too much to switch entirely, but damn, Opera is FAST!!

I think it was Doug Burns at UKOUG TEBS last year who mentioned Opera and EM went well together and I’d back that up, it is nice and fast.

Using Opera with EM also lets you take advantage of Opera’s window/tab management to create a rather nice display of multiple EM pages like this – all within one self-contained browser window

Even better, you can can use Opera’s Save Session functionality to save the position of each window, and then load it up on demand:

There’s too much Opera doesn’t do (full integration with LastPass, Echofon, ReadItLater, etc) for me to ditch Firefox, and maybe it’s a good thing it resists the move to bloatware to keep it running fast.

My first presentation – help!

I’m doing my first ever conference presentation next month at the 2010 Rittman Mead BI Forum.

My presentation is called Performance Testing OBIEE, which is something I’ve spent a lot of time working on over the last few months. I think the challenge is going to be distilling it all into a session that’s not going to overwhelm everyone or bore them to death! Well, actually, the challenge is going to be the presenting. I can talk geek one-on-one, but talking to a whole bunch of people, not wittering but staying focussed, holding their attention….uh oh.

I’d love to hear from anyone, particularly seasoned conference speakers, with any suggestions for not making a complete foul-up of my presentation 🙂

I put the question out on Twitter yesterday and got the following helpful advice from Pete Scott of RittmanMead

and from Lisa Dobson:

I’ve sat through enough death by powerpoint presentations where all too often the contents of the presentation go in the deck, and then someone reads through them.

Ultimately there has to be something that I add by being in the room instead of just emailing the deck to everyone!
Do I go brave and take after Doug Burns’ “How I learned to love Pictures” and do minimal slides and then talk & demo?
Is having ppt slides a useful crutch for someone not used to presenting?

So – help out a newbie – post your hints, tips, suggestions & comments here please 🙂