In the Lab

Hands-on technical implementation and testing

Connecting Oracle 26ai to S3-Compatible Object Storage

In the Lab / /

TL;DR: DBMS_CLOUD requires valid HTTPS certificates with matching hostnames. Self-signed certs or HTTP-only? DBMS_CLOUD won’t work. This post shows what breaks and why. Version Note: This uses Oracle 26ai (23.26.1.0.0). SSL handling behavior changed in 23ai. On 19c/21c, sqlnet.ora settings like SSL_SERVER_DN_MATCH=NO still work, so self-signed certs may be viable with additional configuration. The steps […]

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Deploy, Score, and Compare Data Infrastructure on K8s with Lakebench

In the Lab / /

Finding which lakehouse architecture performs best on your infrastructure is expensive. Deploying a single stack on Kubernetes by hand takes days (ask me how I know). A different catalog, a different query engine, a different version, different resource profiles. The cost of the first deployment is high. The cost of repeating it for every permutation

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Installing Oracle Database 19c RAC on OEL 8: Four Traps

In the Lab / /

I recently built a two-node Oracle RAC 19c cluster on Oracle Linux 8.10 with Pure Storage FlashArray backend. The hardware was solid, the network was configured, the storage was presented. What should have been a straightforward installation turned into a four-hour troubleshooting session because of issues that aren’t documented in Oracle’s installation guides. This post

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Oracle Database Support for HammerDB-Scale

In the Lab / /

Oracle ranks #1 on the DB-Engines database popularity ranking, ahead of MySQL, SQL Server, and PostgreSQL. Running Oracle benchmarks alongside SQL Server in my day-to-day testing made perfect sense from the start, but HammerDB-Scale v1.0 focused on getting SQL Server working properly first. Version 1.1 adds Oracle support with the same parallel orchestration framework that

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Schrödinger’s dNFS: The Empty Row Mystery

In the Lab / /

You will end up here: v$dnfs_servers returns no rows. You’ve checked everything. The library is linked. The alert log shows dNFS loaded. Your oranfstab is syntactically perfect. The NFS mounts are there. And you’re convinced it’s broken, I was too. I spent three hours proving dNFS was configured correctly while simultaneously proving it wasn’t working.

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Stress Testing Consolidated Platforms with Database Workloads

In the Lab / /

Your storage vendor claims 500K IOPS. Your server vendor promises 128 cores of “enterprise-grade performance.” Your hypervisor can “easily handle” 50 VMs. Your network fabric has “plenty of headroom.” Then you consolidate eight production databases onto the platform and everything falls over at 3 AM on a Tuesday. What happened? Nobody actually tested what happens

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