Migrating to different endianness

I recently moved a 2TB database from Linux, Oracle 11.1 to AIX, Oracle 11.2 using impdp with network_link and parallel options. The data was imported in about two hours and the indexes took another 7 hours. There was no downtime but we kept the users off the system while this was happening.

Here is the command I used on the new server:

nohup impdp system/secret NETWORK_LINK=olddb FULL=y  PARALLEL=25 &

Then you can run this to see which parallel process is importing which table:

impdp system attach
Import> status
Import> parallel=30 << this will increase the parallel processes if you want

I had created all the datafiles in the new database and created a db link named olddb beforehand. The servers were on the same local area network and the network was the bottleneck.

 

RAC on AIX

I just finished the class: X0161 Oracle RAC on AIX Systems Workshop taught by Andrei Socoliuc of IBM Romania. Andrei knew a lot about Oracle RAC and AIX so it was a good class. I thought the best part was the hands on labs, especially the pre-installation preparation of the operating system. There was also a lot of good information on hardware and LPAR configuration. This is my first RAC class since 2003 when it had just been released, so the overview of RAC was a good way for me to get a refresher on RAC internals. My only complaint  is that we spent a lot of time on IBM’s shared disk solution (GPFS) and very little on Oracle’s ASM .