Installing RAC 11.2.0.2 on Solaris 10/09 x64

One of the major adventures this time of the year involves installing RAC 11.2.0.2 on Solaris 10 10/09 x86-64. The system setup included EMC Power Path 5.3 as the multipathing solution to shared storage.

I initially asked for 4 BL685 G6 with 24 cores, but in the end “only” got two-still plenty of resources to experiment with.  I especially like the output of this command:

$ /usr/sbin/psrinfo | wc –l
 24

Nice! Actually, it’s 4 Opteron processors:

$ /usr/sbin/prtdiag | less

System Configuration: HP ProLiant BL685c G6
 BIOS Configuration: HP A17 12/09/2009
 BMC Configuration: IPMI 2.0 (KCS: Keyboard Controller Style)

==== Processor Sockets ====================================

Version                          Location Tag
 -------------------------------- --------------------------
 Opteron                          Proc 1
 Opteron                          Proc 2
 Opteron                          Proc 3
 Opteron                          Proc 4

Database Gateway for Sybase

Before starting to write this article I was wondering if it was of any use to anyone. Who in their right state of mind would use the Database Gateway for xxx, be it Sybase or Adabase or whatever othere database was to be used. If you have to, simply configure another data source in your code and read data from where you need it. Note that I said read! Ever since Piet de Visser’s presentation about simplicity I have been a great supporter of the simplicity approach. Or, like James Morle likes to quote, simplicity is the ultimate form of sophistication.

Transparent Gateways desupported

So, anyway, I have been asked to link Sybase ASE 15.0.3 to an Oracle 10.2.0.4 database, all on Solaris 10/SPARC 64bit. A quick proof of concept had to be performed. Initially I started out with Transparent Gateway for Sybase, the name of the product for 10g Release 2. I should have known something was wrong when the link to download the software was broken and I had to manually copy & paste it. Well to cut a long story short, 10.2 gateways are desupported since 2008! I wasted a whole 2 hours before that came up on MOS. The workaround is to use > 10.2 software for this, and I went for 11.2. MOS states that this is possible for > 9.2.0.7, > 10.1.0.4 and > 10.2.0.3. My database was 10.2.0.4 which means I’m fine.