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Bart Sjerps General

Dirty Cache has moved to a new home: https://dirty-cache.com. New great content is coming up!

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Welcome back at our new site!

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Oracle on VMware – The Final Frontier

Bart Sjerps Oracle, Virtualization

Final FrontierA question I tend to ask my customers almost always is what their current state is regarding IT transformation and journey to the cloud. Of course such a strategy does not work very well on bare metal and some kind of isolation between services and physical hardware is required – which naturally includes virtualization, as well as the use of some kind of container technology, as-a-Service paradigms, changes in IT administration and operations etc.

Nearly always the answer includes “We already virtualized everything! … Well, ehm, except Oracle….”

TL;DR: There are no more roadblocks for virtualizing Oracle, including license issues. See the last section “Mythbusting” of this post for a summary on myths and truths.

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What was the name of that SQL script again? SQLWrap to the rescue!

Bart Sjerps Oracle


If you are a frequent user of Oracle SQL*Plus, you probably also know about a tool called rlwrap. Bare SQL*Plus does not offer command history, arrow-key editing or any type of word completion so it feels like you’re thrown back in the late 90s using a Spartan SQL interface.

Prefixing “sqlplus” with “rlwrap” drastically improves usability as now you can easily edit your commands, recall history and possibly add a list of frequent used words for TAB autocompletion.

Alternatives are Oracle SQLcl, Oracle Developer or 3rd party tools like GQLPlus or Quest TOAD/SQL Navigator.

But for those who have to live with the natively provided SQLPlus, wrapping it in rlwrap offers an excellent user experience. You can even search the sqlplus history (type CTRL-R and enter parts of what you’re looking for). Many more keyboard shortcuts are available much like on the Linux BASH command line.
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QDDA update – 2.2

Bart Sjerps General


Quick post to announce QDDA version 2.2 has been published on Github and in the Outrun-Extras YUM repository.

Reminder: The Quick and Dirty Dedupe Analyzer is an Open Source Linux tool that scans disks or files block by block to find duplicate blocks and compression ratios, so that it can report – in detail – what the expected data reduction rate is on a storage array capable of these things. It can be downloaded as standalone executable (QDDA download), as RPM package via YUM or compiled from source (QDDA Install)

QDDA 2.2 adds:

  • DellEMC VMAX and PowerMAX support (using the DEFLATE compression algorithm)
  • bash-completion (by entering on the command line, RPM version only)
  • Improved options for custom storage definitions
  • Internal C++ code improvements (not relevant to the normal user)

Note to other storage vendors: If you’d like your array to be included in the tool, drop me a note with dedupe/compression algorithm details and I’ll see what is possible.

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