New Whitepaper: "Oracle Database on Linux on System z - Disk I/O Connectivity Study"

For databases the IO performance is very important. This new whitepaper tries to develop guidelines for disk configuration and tuning hints for both ECKD and FCP devices. It also compares Oracle 10 and Oracle 11 for the transactional workload used. So if you needed a reason for an Oracle upgrade - there is another one.

New Redpaper: "Installing Oracle 11gR2 RAC on Linux on System z"

This Redpaper describes the installation of the latest Oracle DB on RHEL 5 and SLES 11 for Linux on System z. It covers both ECKD as well as SCSI installations and on the Oracle side the Grid Infrastructure and RAC.
It's a good documentation that you should read before you starting the installation!

OCFS2 support for Linux on SLES

Recently there has been quite some discussion around the support for OCFS2. SUSE has published their support statements in two blog entries:

• the first one from November 2nd talks mainly about Linux on System z support
• the second one from November 4th is a more general support statement

So the good news is that there will be continued support for a shared file system integrated in the SUSE distribution. SUSE support will require the installation of the High Availability Extensions (HAE) that are included for Linux on System z and POWER.

So it's best to view OCFS2 as a cluster file system that has been created by Oracle. Don't get confused with the Oracle DB itself. If Oracle RAC is a requirement, you are not dependent on OCFS2 - Oracle ASM is in my opinion better integrated with the Oracle DB and should be used.

Oracle 11g R2 - RMAN compression eating up CPU resources