Viscosity Publications

Oracle Cloud Pocket Solutions Guide

As Cloud Computing has evolved and matured, it has sparked a growing interest in the enterprise market, where economic pressures challenge traditional IT operations. Many companies and government agencies face growing IT cost that originate from multiple sources such as legacy systems, software licensing, power consumption, and operating overhead. Cloud Computing, either through Private or Public cloud initiatives, is focused on addressing these issues by reducing costs through better standardization, higher utilization, greater agility, and faster responsiveness of IT services.  

Oracle is heavily invested in cloud initiatives and is looking to be one of the leaders in the magic quadrant. Oracle is aiming at contending for the AWS market share just like Microsoft Azure was able to obtain. Oracle has planted data centers in strategic locations worldwide for its cloud infrastructure. Oracle has robust offerings in SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS. In the SaaS space, Oracle already had a strong presence. Even though Oracle continues to invest in its SaaS environment, Oracle has invested significantly in the past couple of years to capture more of the market in the PaaS and IaaS space. 

This book will address Oracle Cloud fundamentals, Storage Cloud, Database Cloud, and Oracle Database Backup Cloud as a quick go-to reference guide, as seen by industry experts.

Oracle Exadata Experts Handbook

Spanning both ends of the database family spectrum, a run-away success, the blazingly fast Oracle Exadata Database Machine has been embraced by thousands of users worldwide — in government, the military, the large corporate enterprise to small business operations. Whether it is mundane day-to-day database-centric operations or in ecosystems that require nothing less than "extreme" database performance coupled with maximum levels of high availability in VLDB environments, Exadata has proved to be a viable and successful solution. The Oracle Exadata Expert's Handbook is today's most authoritative and practical guide to administering Oracle Exadata with maximum reliability, effectiveness, performance, and efficiency. Written by a consortium of internationally respected independent Oracle technology experts, it brings together core day-to-day knowledge, experiences, best practices, tips, and tricks you won't find anywhere else. Covering 11g and 12c versions of the underlying Oracle Exadata software, it provides hands-on, step-by-step coverage of all this and more. 

Oracle Database 12c Release 2 Performance Tuning Tips & Techniques (Oracle Press)

Proven Database Optimization Solutions―Fully Updated for Oracle Database 12c Release 2 

Systematically identify and eliminate database performance problems with help from Oracle Certified Master Richard Niemiec. Filled with real-world case studies and best practices, Oracle Database 12c Release 2 Performance Tuning Tips and Techniques details the latest monitoring, troubleshooting, and optimization methods. Find out how to identify and fix bottlenecks on premises and in the Cloud, configure storage devices, execute effective queries, and develop bug-free SQL and PL/SQL code. Testing, reporting, and security enhancements are also covered in this Oracle Press guide. 

• Properly index and partition Oracle Database 12c Release 2 
• Work effectively with Oracle Cloud, Oracle Exadata, and Oracle Enterprise Manager 
• Efficiently manage disk drives, ASM, RAID arrays, and memory 
• Tune queries with Oracle SQL hints and the Trace utility 
• Troubleshoot databases using V$ views and X$ tables 

• Create your first cloud database service and prepare for a hybrid Cloud 
• Generate reports using Oracle’s Statspack and Automatic Workload Repository tools 
• Use sar, vmstat, and iostat to monitor operating system statistics 

Expert Oracle Application Express Security (Expert’s Voice in Oracle)

Oracle ASM 12c Pocket Reference Guide: Database Cloud Storage

PDB Me to Oracle Cloud Pocket Solutions Guide: A Lazy DBA’s Guide to Mastering Multitenant Features on Oracle Cloud

This book focuses on a range of Oracle Database 12c Release 2 Multitenant features on Oracle Cloud, including faster PDB cloning with no downtime, tighter resource control at the PDB level, ILM Automatic Data Optimization (ADO) policies for PDBs using Heat Maps, and even FLASHBACK recovery for individual PDBs. This book explores the latest features of Oracle Database 12cR1 and 12cR2 Multitenant options. It provides practical, hands-on experience and numerous code examples that can immediately be leveraged when deploying, upgrading, and migrating to CDBs and PDBs with zero downtime. This book also demonstrates compelling Multitenant features such as: 

• Migrating Databases to Oracle Cloud 
• How to Perform Extreme Consolidation with Oracle PDBs 
• How to Deal with Oracle Wallets in Oracle Cloud 

• Application Containers: Isolating Applications from Each Other 
• Juggling Hot PDBs: Multitenant Migration Techniques 
• Implementing PDB Memory, CPU, I/O, and Other Resource Limits 
• Hot Data, Cold Data: Leveraging ILM and ADO for PDBs 

Virtualize Oracle Business Critical Databases: Database Infrastructure As A Service

Database Cloud Storage: The Essential Guide to Oracle Automatic Storage

A complete solutions guide to Oracle Automatic Storage Management (ASM) and overall cloud storage management. Oracle Cloud Storage Management contains the latest information on the inner workings of Oracle ASM and Oracle's overall cloud storage management strategy. This Oracle Press guide explains how to build and manage a scalable cloud storage infrastructure with Oracle ASM. You'll learn how to configure cloud storage solutions, build disk groups, use data striping and mirroring, and optimize performance. Details on ensuring consistency across server and storage platforms, maximizing data redundancy, and administering Oracle ASM are also included. 

• Fully covers Oracle Exadata integration 
• Offers a comprehensive understanding of why cloud storage management is critical to modern storage and how to harness and integrate Oracle ASM 

• Covers practical day-to-day usage, general operations, best practices, and tips & techniques 
• Written by members of the team who developed and managed Oracle ASM/Cloud storage management 

Authors of the Database Cloud Storage book include Nitin Vengurlekar and Prasad Bagal

Oracle Data Guard 11g Handbook

• Master Oracle Data Guard 11g! Provide superior data protection, availability, and disaster recovery using the tested techniques in this Oracle Press guide. Develop a disaster recovery plan for your Oracle database to meet your organization's requirements. Written by a team of Oracle experts, Oracle Data Guard 11g Handbook provides a sound architectural foundation and best practices for configuration, monitoring, maintenance, and troubleshooting. You will get complete details on implementing deployment architectures to address requirements beyond disaster recovery. This invaluable resource also includes a full set of monitoring scripts available for download. 

  • Configure and deploy Oracle Data Guard for your environment. 
  • Tune and troubleshoot your physical and logical standby database. 
  • Implement the Oracle Data Guard Broker management framework. 
  • Integrate with Oracle Grid Control 
  • Monitor your Oracle Data Guard environment 
  • Enable read-only services and disaster recovery with Oracle Active Data Guard 
  • Configure seamless database and application failover 
  • Minimize planned downtime using Oracle Data Guard switchover 
  • Handle backup and recovery with Oracle Recovery Manager 

  Authors of the Data Guard 11g Handbook include: Larry Carpenter, Joe Meeks, Charles Kim, Bill Burke, Sonya Carothers, Joydip Kundu, Michael Smith, Nitin Vengurlekar 

Oracle Automatic Storage Management

This comprehensive resource provides complete details on Oracle Automatic Storage Management (ASM), Oracle's integrated file, and volume management interface. You will get complete information on general operations, administration, best practices, and expert techniques. Oracle DBAs will be able to implement robust storage solutions with help from this guide. Build and manage a scalable storage infrastructure with Oracle Automatic Storage Management Streamline data management and provisioning using Oracle Automatic Storage Management (Oracle ASM) and the detailed information in this exclusive Oracle Press resource. An Oracle Automatic Storage Management: Under-the-Hood & Practical Deployment Guide, written by a team of database experts, explains how to build and maintain a dynamic, highly available Oracle database storage environment. Inside, you'll learn how to configure storage for Oracle ASM, build disk groups, use data striping and mirroring, and optimize performance. You'll also learn how to ensure consistency across server and storage platforms, maximize data redundancy, and administer Oracle ASM from the command line. 

• Manage Oracle ASM Instances and configure Oracle RDBMS instances to leverage Oracle ASM 
• Define, discover, and manage disk storage under Oracle ASM 
• Create external, normal-redundancy, and high-redundancy disk groups 
• Add and remove Oracle ASM storage without affecting RDMS instance availability 

• Learn how Oracle ASM provides even I/O distribution 
• Work with Oracle ASM directories, files, templates, and aliases 
• Improve storage performance and integrity using the ASMLIB API 
• Simplify system administration with the Oracle ASM command line interface 
• Understand key internal Oracle ASM structures and algorithms 

• Handle backup and recovery with Oracle Recovery Manager 

Authors of the Oracle Automatic Storage Management book include Nitin Vengurlekar, Rich Long, and Murali Vallath. Charles Kim is the technical editor.

Linux Recipes for Oracle DBAs

Linux Recipes for Oracle DBAs, written by authors Darl Kuhn, Charles Kim, and Bernard Lopuz, is a comprehensive example-based book on managing Oracle Databases in a Linux environment. The book is written by DBAs for DBAs who live in the Red Hat and/or Oracle Enterprise Linux space. Who is this book for? Linux Recipes for Oracle DBAs is a book for Oracle database administrators who want to operate Oracle databases on the Linux operating system expertly. If you're new to Linux, migrating from a Unix platform, or want detailed solutions for tasks that Oracle DBAs perform on Linux servers, this book is for you. 

• Takes you directly from problem to solution 
• Covers the right mix of Linux user and administration tasks for database administrators 
• Respects your time by being succinct and to the point 
• Execute Linux commands applicable to Oracle Database administration. 

• Write shell scripts to automate critical DBA tasks. 
• Monitor, tune, and optimize a Linux server to run Oracle Database. 
• Perform Linux system administration tasks relevant to Oracle Database. 
• Implement Oracle RAC on Linux. 
• Implement Oracle ASM on Linux. 

• Remotely (and securely!) manage Oracle on Linux.

Oracle Database 11g

Oracle Database 11g: New Features for DBAs and Developers is a comprehensive, example-laden review of the new features and improvements offered by the latest release of Oracle Corporation's flagship database product. Years of database administration and development experience from authors Sam Alapati and Charles Kim are combined with sound, step-by-step testing, and a heartfelt emphasis on what matters in the real world to help you get the most out of Oracle Database 11g. We would like to thank David Sweet for his exclusive contribution to the development chapter in the areas of PL/SQL and Java.   

• Learn what’s new that really counts 
• See actual examples and test run output 
• Book for Developers and Database Administrators 
• Make sound decisions on new feature adoption 
• Chapter dedicated for ASM New Features 

• Chapter dedicated for Data Guard New Features 
• Chapter dedicated for RMAN New Features 
• Chapter dedicated for Streams Replication 
• Chapter dedicated for Database Security 
• Chapter dedicated for Data Warehousing 

• Chapter dedicated for Performance Manageability 
• Chapter dedicated for Application Development covering PL/SQL, Java, and XML 
• Discover which new features of the latest release of Oracle’s flagship database product are worth adopting.

Oracle ASM 12c Pocket Reference Guide: Database Cloud Storage

Oracle ASM continues to be the best practice for implementing Oracle Databases. Whether leveraging a single instance database or a clustered database with RAC, you can benefit from this book's real-life examples of administering and maintaining ASM. Consolidated by Charles Kim and Nitin Vengurlekar, this pocket reference guide is loaded with command line interface syntax for Oracle ASM 11g Release 2 or Oracle ASM 12c. Whether you are a newbie to ASM or a long-time veteran, this pocket reference guide is packed with relevant tidbits. Charles and Nitin have combined experiences of over 48 years of Oracle experience and are authors of many Oracle books. Charles is the Founder and President of Viscosity North America, and Nitin is the Chief Technology Officer. They are subject matter experts of RAC/ASM/Exadata technologies.

Virtualize Oracle Business Critical Databases: Database Infrastructure as A Service

Virtualize Oracle Business Critical Databases, September 2014 Update: This book is a single source of information for an Oracle DBA to understand the benefits of virtualization and how to effectively deploy Oracle Database as A Service on a vSphere Platform. This book targets DBAs looking at implementing Oracle on a virtualized infrastructure. Key topics include deployment, scaling, troubleshooting, and performance tuning. The authors, Charles Kim, George Trujillo, Steven Jones, and Sudhir Balasubramanian have spent several years focusing on virtualizing Tier-One high-performance Oracle platforms. The authors include VMware VCPs, VMware vExperts, as well as an Oracle ACE, Oracle ACE Director, and hold certifications in the Oracle stack. Imagine a world where your system administrator(s) provisions a fully functional Linux server that is patched with all the up-to-date kernel parameters, updated device drivers, and configurations in 1 hour. The time that you make the request to the time that you get access to a server that has a fully configured Red Hat 5/6 or Oracle Linux 5/6 environment is within a couple of hours. Moreover, the build is consistent and reliable every time. This should be a realistic goal for most companies today, and this book can guide you along your journey. 

Hadoop as A Service

Hadoop is a software platform that is going to continue to encounter tremendous growth in the IT industry over the next few years. So, it raises the question of what is the best platform for running Hadoop? The safe and easy answer is physical servers. However, in many environments, using physical servers is not the automatic correct answer. As Hadoop continues to grow in popularity, more organizations are going to be looking at two key questions. The first question is whether they should virtualize Hadoop and, if so, to what level. Virtualization is also a natural stepping-stone to the Cloud. Raising the second question, should they be deploying Hadoop as a Service in the Cloud. This book will address both questions. The virtualization of Hadoop or delivering Hadoop as a Service may not be an either-or situation but a blended solution. 

Linux and Solaris Recipes for Oracle DBAs

Linux and Solaris Recipes for Oracle DBAs, 2nd Edition is an example–based book on managing Oracle Database under Linux and Solaris. The book is written for database administrators who need to get work done and lack the luxury of curling up fireside with a stack of operating-system documentation. Instead, this book provides task-oriented coverage designed around the needs of the Oracle Database Administrator. Find the right chapter. Look up the task to perform. See the solution. Implement the solution straight away in your environment. Get the job done. New in this edition is coverage of Oracle's own Solaris operating system. Oracle Corporation has been working diligently to bring commonality between Solaris and Linux. This book takes advantage of those efforts to provide task-oriented solutions that work on common distributions of Linux, such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Oracle Enterprise Linux while accommodating the growing number of Oracle Solaris customers. Examples in the book match the tasks DBAs perform daily, even hourly. Solutions come first in the book but are always followed by close explanations of the details.