Oracle 11gR2 Performance Tuning for RHEL 6.6

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Can someone please confirm that the document titled "Deploying Oracle Database 11g R2 on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 - Best Practices" has not been updated since Ver 1.4, dated December 2013?

I'm getting lots of questions on the Red Hat recommended tuning parameter settings for Oracle 11g R2 and this seems to be a good source of information. I just want to be sure I have the latest revision.

Can someone please confirm this?

Thanks.

Shaun.

Responses

Hi Shaun,

Yes, the 1.4 version [1], authored on Dec 10 and uploaded on Dec 11 2013, is the latest version of this document available from the Customer Portal.

I suppose you're downloading the file from the landing page [2], but you may also find the KnowledgeBase article [3] useful as there's a discussion where people discuss the contents of the 'recommended practices'.

[1] https://access.redhat.com/sites/default/files/attachments/deploying-oracle-11gr2-on-rhel6_1.4.pdf
[2] http://www.redhat.com/en/resources/deploying-oracle-11gr2-on-rhel-6
[3] https://access.redhat.com/articles/395013

Not that Red Hat isn't a trustworthy source, but, in general, I would tend to look at my application-vendor as the authoritative source for getting the most out of my application (rather than my OS vendor). Translation: for Oracle databases (or any component of their app stacks), I'd probably be looking at Oracle-published documentation maintained on oracle.com versus Red Hat's documentation.

And to provide an alternative viewpoint from Mr. Jones...we had a very bad experience with (very expensive) Oracle tech support regarding a Solaris-to-Linux migration. Oracle was basically quoting their installation guide back at us, which was completely useless at that point-we'd already read it & followed it. But Oracle's docs only work for systems that are close to "normal"; our configuration is a little non-standard (many small but separate Oracle DB instances on a single server).

Red Hat support, on the other hand, figured out exactly what was going on, recommended a number of changes, and explained why each change should be made as they recommended. After 2 days of downtime (fortunately on a development system, not production) fighting with Oracle support, Red Hat had us up & running within a couple of hours.

For Oracle-on-Linux, I would recommend reading both vendors' docs. If you fit the general use case, you should be fine. But if your use case is a little unusual, and things aren't working, I wouldn't hesitate to call on RH support.

In general, I don't call vendors' tech support lines. In most cases, you're stuck wasting several hours with the tier 1 and 2 guys repeating all the stuff you already tried before they'll finally escalate you to their back line engineers (unless you're lucky enough to have a "business critical" account).

Part of the key to getting the most out of Oracle's documentation and web sites is leveraging their communities. Much like there's several good Red Hat specific resources in the Red Hat communities, there's (or at least used to be) some really good Oracle studs in those communities. Met some really talented folks through those communities who have skills that just aren't found in tier 1 and tier 2 phone support groups

Basically, there's a few who know the Oracle code well enough that, even if they haven't specifically implemented on a given flavor of OS, they know the knobs - throughout the application-stack and without - and why they need to be tweaked for different use-cases. Typically allows them to quickly point you in the right direction. However, that's also an exercise in "networking" - more the long game than the "oh crap, my stuff's broken right now".

The doc you mentioned is what we use in our environment. There are a few items which we checked the Oracle recommendations for, but for the most part we just followed the Red Hat best-practices. I created a script that either validates the settings, or updates the host to match their recommendation(s). The kernel tuning was still a bit lost on me in attempting to figure out the best values, but I worked with my DBAs to get those values and they seem to be working fine.

There is also a pretty cool video on tuned (I had not worked much with tuned until I started to build out RHEL 6 for Oracle 11gR2)
https://access.redhat.com/videos/898563

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