DatabaseVerse: Journey into the World of Databases

Many customers are on the journey to the cloud, they have their most important Oracle databases and workloads running on premises. Some of the customers have their databases running on an Exadata Database Machine. That’s cool, as Exadata provides the best performance you can find out there, no other vendor offers something similar.

On Exadata Database Machine customers have full control in all the layers:

• Virtual Machines
• Databases Server Nodes
• Exadata Storage nodes.

There are dedicated tools to manage the life cycle of the database nodes server through DBMCLI, and the same for storage cell nodes using CellCLI.

Customer have full responsibilities of the Exadata Infrastructure, they have to patch, apply secure fixes and apply any other maintenance activities as they have full control.

Cool! but Why are you telling me all of this?, because migrating to the cloud is probably the right step but there are important things that you should know and take into consideration.

So, What are the difference between Exadata Database Machine and ExaDB-D (Exadata Database Service on Dedicated Infrastructure) and ExaC@C (Exadata Cloud at Customer)?

There are couple, but in this post I’m going to focus in the operational model only. As I mentioned previously, on Exadata Database Machine (on-premises) customers have full control but in the Cloud it is not the same.

As you saw in the previos image, customers still have full control in the virtual machines but there are limitations when we take into consideration the database servers nodes and storage server nodes on ExaDB-D and ExaC@C. The most important is:

Customers are not allowed to SSH into the cell or database node to manage the node using CellCLI or DBMCLI.

This is because Oracle own and manage the infrastructure and hardware components: physical database server hosts, Exadata Storage Servers, Network Fabric Switches, PDUs, ILOM, Control Plane etc.

In simple words, as Oracle manages the infrastructure, they are also accountable for keeping it up to date. Customers do not need to worry about patching those components; Oracle does that for you. Of course, you need to accommodate a proper maintenance window, and you will be notified by them at least two weeks before the patching scheduled date.

But what about monitoring? As a customer, I don’t manage the infrastructure components. Should I monitor the Exadata Storage nodes?

Short answer: YES, you should.

And here is where ExaCLI comes into the picture.

What is ExaCLI?

ExaCLI is a command-line administration tool that runs on database and cell nodes and enables you to manage nodes remotely.

You can use ExaCLI to manage cell and database node configuration and objects in the remote node’s environment. ExaCLI supports the same command syntax as DBMCLI and CellCLI. Not all CellCLI commands can be run through ExaCLI.

More information: https://docs.oracle.com/en/engineered-systems/exadata-database-machine/dbmmn/exacli.html#GUID-60E8E8DF-3B50-4041-BF30-00ABE46783A4

If you have databases running on Oracle Exadata Infrastructure (ExaDB-D or ExaC@C) or are planning to do so and you are not using ExaCLI, maybe you should take a look at the tool and add it as part of the monitoring.

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