What's a NUMA?

While working with SAP and ORACLE on HPUX systems in recent years I've had to configure many a "NUMA" related parameter - well who hasn't these days?

So that I don't have to pretend to my wife that I know what that is I think I should probably find out and blog it here (as actually she doesn't care... of course)

I attended a good webconf today on tuning memory in HPUX systems. They mentioned NUMA architecture and tuning shared memory vs CLM - or Cell-Local-Memory, which is essentially memory local to the processor (in a multi-processor server, or servers).

And that's where NUMA is the paradigm - it stands for Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) and covers the design of systems with both memory that is locally assigned to processors and shared or interleaved memory that is shared between processors.

I won't go into much detail on L2, L3 and L4 caches as I cannot talk with great authority and I'm sure Google can well you... for a start though if it interests you checkout the NUMA entry in Wikipedia.... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-Uniform_Memory_Access

Multiple ORACLE installations - "make" errors

If you are running multiple installations on one server and you get make errors similar to below:

Unable to find make file: /oracle//102_64/network/lib/ins_net_client.mk
etc
SEVERE:OUI-10105:Some of the configuration assistants failed. However these are optional assistants, so they are not required for the correct configurati
on of your system. If you want to try to run those assistants again, select the failed assistants and click the 'Retry' button.

Then the fix is simple. You may, like I was, be using a single oraInventory location, which inventories details of installations. However if you manually uninstall or muck it around at all it's going to get very unhappy.
The the very least I suggest editing it for each installation to have a separate directory.
For example instead of just using /oracle/oraInventory for six db SIDs, use
/oracle/oraInventory/SID1dir
/oracle/oraInventory/SID2dir
/oracle/oraInventory/SID3dir
/oracle/oraInventory/SID4dir

Note the inventory location is set in /var/opt/oracle/oraInst.loc

For SAP ORACLE installations see SAP note: 350251

Abobe Captivate, SAP Tutor and WMV Converters

Looking at developing training with Adobe Captivate (AC) and/or SAP Tutor (ST).

Initially I thought I would embed ST files in a AC training course, as I was advised AC was a well liked tool for developing training at my company and it did seem quite swish. ST is pretty cool for recording interactive training from SAP systems so you can train people without any actual SAP access; however I soon found that I could record the same thing just using AC.

You can record "Full Motion" on the screen from AC, but the rate isn't great when I tested it and I'm not sure how you create it as an overlapping or embedded part of training - it doesn't seem that you can.
My webcam software records only WMV files by default so now I'm looking for a good solution to convert WMV files into a readable format. At home I use Cucusoft but I'm looking for an approved tool at work.
Ah-ha. An answer. You can use many things I'm sure, but I found that I could install and utilise Adobe "Media Encoder" to convert the WMV file into a Flash (f4v) video file.

Once this was done I was able to embed this video within training slides in AC.

It looks like you can create a very re-usable piece of training with access to a SAP training system, Adobe Captivate, Adobe Media Encoder, a decent webcam and a lot of patience. I'll report back again in future to note how this goes...