Top 133 Oracle Exadata Interview Questions

This tutorial gives you an overview of the questions appearing in an interview for Oracle Exadata. Top 133 Latest Oracle Exadata Interview Questions 2019. Click to checkout more!

Oracle Exadata Interview Questions:

Study the latest Exadata Interview Questions today here. If you are preparing for Oracle Exadata Interview Questions for Experienced or Freshers, you are at the right place to get the best questions and answers. Gathered all interview questions on Exadata from various websites into one place here. I hope, this makes it easier to prepare for interviews.

Here, We make sure that you refresh your technical knowledge on Exadata(pre-configured combination to run the Oracle Database).

Top 131 Latest Oracle Exadata Interview Questions

We will start with very frequent interview questions on Exadata.

Top 10 Oracle Exadata Interview Questions:  

Q1. What is Exadata?
Q2. What environment is a good fit for Exadata?
Q3. Key components of Exadata
Q4. Features of Exadata
Q5. What are the advantages of Exadata?
Q6. What are the Exadata Sizing configurations?
Q7. What is hybrid columnar compression?
Q8. What are the Parallelism instance parameter used in Exadata?
Q9. How do you Test performance of Exadata?
Q10. What are the ways to migrate onto Exadata?

Q1. What is Exadata?

Ans: Exadata is a pre-configured combination of hardware and software which provides a platform to run the Oracle Database.

Q2. What environment is a good fit for Exadata?

Ans: Exadata was originally designed for the warehouse environment. Later it was enhanced for use in the OLTP databases as well.

Q3. Key components of Exadata

Ans:
1. DB Server
2. Cell Storage
3. Infiniband Switch
4. Cisco Switch
5. PDU

Q4. Features of Exadata

Ans:
1. Smart Scan
2. Smart Flash Cache
3. IORM
4. Storage Index
5. EHCC (Exadata Hybrid Columnar Compression)

Q5. What are the advantages of Exadata?

Ans: The Exadata cluster allows for consistent performance while allowing for increased throughput. As load increases on the cluster, the performance remains consistent by utilizing inter-instance and intra-instance parallelism.
It should not be expected that just moving to Exadata will improve performance. In most cases, it will, especially if the current database host is overloaded.

Q6. What are the Exadata Sizing configurations?

Ans:
Exadata comes in following configuration
1. Full Rack
2. Half Rack
3. Quater Rack
4. 1/8th Rack

Q7. What is hybrid columnar compression?

Ans: Hybrid Columnar compression, also called HCC, is a feature of Exadata which is used for compressing data at column level for a table.

It creates compression data units which consist of a logical grouping of columns values typically having several data blocks in it. Each data block has data from columns for multiple rows.

This logarithm has the potential to reduce the storage used by the data and reduce disk I/O enhancing performance for the queries.

The different types of HCC compression include:

Query Low
Query High
Archive High
Archive Low

Q8. What is the Parallelism instance parameter used in Exadata?

Ans: The parameter PARALLEL_FORCE_LOCAL can be specified at the session level for a particular job.

Q9. How do you test the performance of Exadata?

Ans: You can use the “calibrate” commands at the cellcli command line.

Q10. What are the ways to migrate onto Exadata?

Ans: Depending on the downtime allowed there are several options:

Oracle DataGuard
Traditional Export/Import
Tablespace transportation
Goldengate Replication after a data restores onto Exadata.

Q11. What are the different Exadata configurations?

Ans: The Exadata Appliance configuration comes as a Full Rack, Half Rack, Quarter Rack or 1/8th rack.

The Full Rack X2-2 has 6 CPU’s per node with Intel Xeon 5670 processors and a total of 8 Database Server nodes. These servers have 96GB of memory on each node. A total of 14 Storage server cells communicate with the storage and push the requested data from the storage to the compute nodes.

The Half Rack has exactly half the capacity. It has 6 CPU’s per node with core Intel Xeon 5670 processors and a total of 4 Database Server nodes. It has 96GB of memory per database server node with a total of 7 Storage server cells.

The Exadata is also available in the 1/8th Rack configuration.

Q12. What is the secret behind Exadata’s higher throughput?

Ans: Exadata ships fewer data through the pipes between the storage and the database nodes and other nodes in the RAC cluster.

Also, its ability to do massive parallelism by running parallel processes across all the nodes in the cluster provides it with a much higher level of throughput.

It also has much bigger pipes in the cluster using Infiniband interconnect for inter-instance data block transfers as high as 5X of fibre channel networks.

Q13. What is a storage index and how it works?

Ans:
1. Storage Indexes consist of a minimum and a maximum value for up to eight columns. This structure is maintained for 1MB chunks of storage (storage regions).
2. Storage Indexes are stored in memory only and are never written to disk.
3. Storage Index filters out data from the consideration.

Q14. Which protocol is used by ASR to send notifications?

Ans: SNMP

Q15. Is manually intervention possible in the storage index?

Ans: No

Q16. What is cellcli?
Ans: This is the command-line utility used to manage the cell storage.

Q17. How do you create obtain info on the Celldisks?

Ans: At the cellcli command line you can issue the “list celldisk” command.

Q18. How would you create a grid disk?

At the cellcli command, you would need to issue the “create grididsk all ..” command.

Q19. What are the cellinit.ora and the cellip.ora files used for?

Ans: These files have the hostnames and the IP address of all the nodes in the cluster. They are used to run commands on the remote databases and cellserver nodes from localhost.

Example:
cat /etc/oracle/cell/network-config/cellinit.ora
ipaddress1=192.168.47.21/24

$ cat /etc/oracle/cell/network-config/cellip.ora
cell=”192.168.47.21:5042″
cell=”192.168.47.22:5042″
cell=”192.168.47.23:5042″

Q20. What operating systems does Exadata support?

Ans: Exadata has traditionally run Oracle Linux OS. Recently, Solaris has also been made available on this engineered system.

Q21. What are the options to update cell_flashcache for any object?

Ans:
KEEP
DEFAULT
NONE

Q22. What is the default size of a smart flash log?

Ans:
512MB per module.
Each storage cell has 4 modules so its 4X512 MB per CELL

Q23. What is flash cache and how it works?

Ans: The flash cache is a hardware component configured in the Exadata storage cell server which delivers high performance in reading and writing operations.
The primary task of smart flash cache is to hold frequently accessed data in the flash cache so next time if the same data is required then physical read can be avoided by reading the data from the flash cache.

Q24. What is cellcli?

Ans: cellcli – It is cell command-line utility. We can manage cell storage with the use of cellcli utility. We can say it’s a utility to administer cell storage.
CELLCLI-ALTER CELLCLI-CREATE CELLCLI-DROP CELLCLI-LIST

Q25. Types of EHCC:

Ans:
1. Query Low
2. Query High
3. Archive High
4. Archive Low

Q26. Which package can be used to estimate the compression ratio of the table?

Ans: DBMS_COMPRESSION

Q27. Background services of Cell Server

Ans:
MS- Management Server
cellsrv – Cell Server
RS – Restart Server

Q29. How to replace faulty HDD in Exadata Storage?

Ans:
All the HDD are hot-swappable so if we are using proper redundancy then we can direct remove and replace the new HDD.
Storage software will take care of all the stuff in the background after replacing the HDD.

Q30. How many disk comes within a storage cell?

Ans: 12

Q31. What is the purpose of the spine switch?

Ans: Spine switch is used to connect or add more Exadata machines in the cluster

Q32. How to migrate database from normal setup to Exadata?

Ans:
Their many methods we can use to migrate DB to Exadata. Below are some of them.
1. Export/Import
2. Physical Standby
3. Logical Standby
4. Transportable Tablespace
5. Transportable Database
6. Golden gate
7. RMAN cold and hot backup restoration
8. Oracle Streams

The use of the migration method totally depends on source setup as well as downtime consideration.

Q33. Exadata shutdown and start-up procedure

Ans:
Shutdown Procedure:
Stop Database and Listener
Stop Cluster
Shutdown Database Servers
Shutdown Cell Storage
Shutdown all the switches
Remove powers from PDUs
Start-up procedure would be in reverse order.

Q34. How many database servers comes in 1/8th rack and quarter rack?

Ans: 2

Q35. How many cell storage comes in full rack exadata machine?

Ans: 14

Q36. Can we use flash disk as ASM disk?

Ans: Yes

Q37. Which protocol used for communication between database server and storage server?

Ans: iDB protocol

Q38. Which OS is supports in Exadata?

Ans: Database servers has two option for OS either Linux or Solaris which can be finalized at the time of configuration Cell storage comes with Linux only.

Q39. What is ASR?

Ans: ASR is the tool to manage the Oracle hardware. Full form of ASR is Auto Service Request. Whenever any hardware fault occurs ASR automatically raise SR in Oracle Support and send a notification to the respective customer.

Q40. How to integrate Exadata with OEM 12c?

Ans:
1. Install OEM agent on DB server
2. Launch auto-discovery with the use of One Command XML file
3. Specify required credentials for all the components
4. Review Configuration
5. Complete the setup

Q41. How to upgrade the firmware of Exadata components?

Ans: It can be done through ILOM of DB or Cell server.

Q42. Where we can define which cell storage can be used by a particular database server?

Ans: CELLIP.ORA file contains the list of storage server which is accessed by DB server.

Q43. What are the Exadata Health check tools?

Ans:
1. Exacheck
2. sundiagtest
3. oswatcher
4. OEM 12c

Q44. What is EHCC?

Ans: EHCC is Exadata Hybrid Columnar Compression which is used to compress data in the Database.

Q45. What is offloading and how it works?

Ans: It refers to the fact that part of the traditional SQL processing done by the database can be “offloaded” from the database layer to the storage layer
The primary benefit of Offloading is the reduction in the volume of data that must be returned to the database server. This is one of the major bottlenecks of most large databases.

Q46. What is the difference between cellcli and dcli?

Ans:
Cellcli can be used on respective cell storage only.
DCLi (Distributed Command Line Utility) – DCLI can be used to replicate commands on multiple storage as well as DB servers.

Q47. What is IORM and what is its role in Exadata?

Ans: IORM stand for I/O Resource Manager which manages the I/Os of multiple databases on storage cell.

Q48. How we can check whether oracle best practice has been configured on Exadata?

Ans: We can execute Exacheck and verify the best practice setup on Exadata machine.

Q49. How many networks are required in Exadata?

Ans:
1. Public/Client Network — For Application Connectivity
2. Management Network — For Exadata H/W management
3. Private Network — For cluster inter connectivity and Storage connectivity

Q50. What is the command to enable query high compression on table?

Ans:
SQL>alter table table_name move compress for query high;

Q51. How to take cell storage software backup?

Ans: It is not required to take a backup as it happens automatically. Exadata use internal USB drive called the Cellboot Flash Drive to take backup of software.

Q52. What is the difference between wright-through and write-back flashcache mode?

Ans:
1. writethrough –> Falshcache will be used only for reading purpose
2. writeback –> Flashcache will be used for both reading and writing

Q53. Which feature of Exadata is used to eliminate disk IO?

Ans: Flash Cache

Q54. What is the capacity of Infiniband port?

Ans: 40 Gbps

Q55. What is the difference between high capacity and high-performance disk?

Ans:
1. High capacity disk comes with more storage space and less rpm (7.5k)
2. High-Performance disk comes with less storage and high rpm (15k)

Q56. When one should execute Exacheck?

Ans: Before and after any configuration change in Database Machine

Q57. What is grid disk?

Ans:
Grid Disks are created on top of Cell Disks and are presented to Oracle ASM as ASM disks.
Space is allocated in chunks from the outer tracks of the Cell disk and moving inwards. One can have multiple Grid Disks per Cell disk.

Q58. Which network is used for RAC inter-connectivity?

Ans: Infiniband Network

Q59. What are the steps to create DBFS?

Ans:
1. Create Directory
2. Create Tablespace on database which you are going to use for DBFS
3. Create user for DBFS
4. Grant required privileges to created user
5. Now connect to database with created user
6. Create dbfs filesystem by invoking dbfs_create_filesystem_advanced
7. Mount file system by starting dbfs_client

Q60. Which migration methodology available if want to migrate from high endian to low endian OS architecture?

Ans:
1. Golden Gate
2. Transportable Tablespace
3. Incremental Transportable Tablespace
4. Data Pump

Q61. What is a Cell and Grid Disk?

Ans: Cell and Grid Disk are a logical component of the physical Exadata storage. A cell or Exadata Storage server cell is a combination of Disk Drives put together to store user data. Each Cell Disk corresponds to a LUN (Logical Unit) which has been formatted by the Exadata Storage Server Software. Typically, each cell has 12 disk drives mapped to it.

Q62. What is Flash cache?

Ans: Four 96G PCIe flash memory cards are present on each Exadata Storage Server cell which provide very fast access to the data stored on it. This is further achieved by also provides mechanism to reduces data access latency by retrieving data from memory rather than having to access data from disk. A total flash storage of 384GB per cell is available on the Exadata appliance.

Q63. What is Smart Scan?

Ans: It is a feature of the Exadata Software which enhances the database performance many times over. It processes queries in an intelligent way, retrieving specific rows rather than the complete blocks. It applies filtering criteria at the storage level based on the selection criteria specified in the query. It also performs column projection which is a process of sending only required columns for the query back to the database host/instance.

Q64. What are the Parallelism instance parameter used in Exadata?

Ans: The parameter PARALLEL_FORCE_LOCAL can be specified at the session level for a particular job.

Q65. What are the ways to migrate onto Exadata?

Ans:
1. Depending on the downtime allowed there are several options:
2. Traditional Export/Import
3. Oracle DataGuard
4. Tablespace transportation.
5. Goldengate Replication after a data restore onto Exadata.

Q66. What operating systems does Exadata support?

Ans: Exadata has traditionally run Oracle Linux OS. Recently, Solaris has also been made available on this engineered system.

Q67. Which statistic can be used to check flash hit ration on database level?

Ans: Cell flash cache read hits

Q68. Which disk group is used to keep OCR files on Exadata?

Ans: +DBFS_DG

Q69. How many Exadata wait events contained in 11.2.0.3 release?

Ans: There are 53 wait events are exadata specific events.

Q70. What is the difference between an Exadata X3-2 machine and an Exadata X3-8 machine?

Ans: The X3-8 is comprised of 2 large SMP compute servers while the X3-2 can scale to as many as 8 compute servers as processing requirements increase.

Q71. What are the three major components of Exadata database server?

Ans:
Database Instance
ASM Instance
Database Resource Manager

Q72. What is the difference between DBRM and IORM?

Ans: DBRM is the feature of database while IORM is the feature of storage server software.

Q73. What are the different Exadata configurations?

Ans: The Exadata Appliance configuration comes as a Full Rack, Half Rack or Quarter Rack.
The Full Rack X2-2 has 6 CPU’s per node with Intel Xeon 5670 processors and a total of 8 Database Server nodes. These servers have 96GB of memory on each node. A total of 14 Storage server cells communicate with the storage and push the requested data from the storage to the compute nodes.
The Half Rack has exactly half the capacity. It has 6 CPU’s per node with core Intel Xeon 5670 processors and a total of 4 Database Server nodes. It has 96GB of memory per database server node with a total of 7 Storage server cells

Q74. What are the key Oracle Exadata Features?

Ans:
Some of the key hardware and software features are:
1. Hardware level
2. Storage Server Cells
3. High Speed Infiniband Switch
4. Software level
5. Smart Scan,
6. Flash Cache
7. Hybrid Columnar Compression
8. IORM (I/O Resource Manager)

Q75. How much time required to apply bundle patch on Half rack Exadata Database Machine with rolling option?

Ans: Approximate 3 hours per Cell and DB server including Infiniband & PDU patching required 1 hour each

Q76. What benefit we can get if we apply bundle patch on exadata in rolling fashion while ASM configured with high redundancy?

Ans: It will reduce the risk of storage disk failure

Q77. Advantages and disadvantages of rolling and non-rolling patching on Exadata Database Machine.

Ans:
Rolling Advantages:
No downtime required
Disadvantages:
1. It takes more time to apply bundle patches
2. If ASM is on normal redundancy than disk failure on another Cell could lead to the DB corruption.

Non-Rolling
Advantages:
1. Less time required to do the patching
2. It could eliminate the risk of single disk failure if ASM configured with normal redundancy
Disadvantages:
Downtime required while applying bundle patch.

Q78. Which ASM parameters are responsible for Auto disk management in Exadata?

Ans:
_AUTO_MANAGE_MAX_ONLINE_TRIES — It controls maximum number of attempts to make disk Online
_AUTO_MANAGE_EXADATA_DISKS — It control auto disk management feature
_AUTO_MANAGE_NUM_TRIES    — It controls maximum number of attempt to perform an automatic operation

Q79. How to enable Flashcache compression?

Ans: CellCLI> ALTER CELL flashCacheCompress=true

Q80. How many Exadata Storage Server Nodes are included in Exadata Database Machine X4-8?

Ans: 14 storage nodes

Q81. Getting ready for a Exadata interview?
Ans: Make sure to refresh your knowledge by reviewing this list of Exadata Interview Questions.

Q82. What environment is a good fit for Exadata?

Ans: Exadata was originally designed for the warehouse environment. Later it was enhanced for use in the OLTP databases as well.

Q83. What are the advantages of Exadata?

Ans: The Exadata cluster allows for consistent performance while allowing for increased throughput. As load increases on the cluster the performance remains consistent by utilizing inter-instance and intra-instance parallelism.
It should not be expected that just moving to Exadata will improve performance. In most cases it will especially if the current database host is overloaded.

Q84. What is the secret behind Exadata’s higher throughput?

Ans: Exadata ships less data through the pipes between the storage and the database nodes and other nodes in the RAC cluster.
Also it’s ability to do massive parallelism by running parallel processes across all the nodes in the cluster provides it much higher level of throughput.
It also has much bigger pipes in the cluster using Infiniband interconnect for inter-instance data block transfers as high as 5X of fiberchannel networks.

Q85. What are the different Exadata configurations?

Ans: 

• The Exadata Appliance configuration comes as a Full Rack, Half Rack, Quarter Rack or 1/8th rack.
• The Full Rack X2-2 has 6 CPU’s per node with Intel Xeon 5670 processors and a total of 8 Database Server nodes. These servers have 96GB of memory on each node. A total of 14 Storage server cells communicate with the storage and push the requested data from the storage to the compute nodes.
• The Half Rack has exactly half the capacity. It has 6 CPU’s per node with core Intel Xeon 5670 processors and a total of 4 Database Server nodes. It has 96GB of memory per database server node with a total of 7 Storage server cells.
• The Quarter Rack exactly half the capacity. It has 6 CPU’s per node with core Intel Xeon 5670 processors and a total of 2 Database Server nodes. It has 96GB of memory per database server node with a total of 3Storage server cells.

The Exadata is also available in the 1/8th Rack configuration.

Q86. What are the key Hardware components?

Ans: 

• DB Server
• Storage Server Cells
• High Speed Infiniband Switch
• Cisco Switch

Q87. What are the Key Software Features?

Ans: 

• Smart Scan,
• Smart Flash Cache
• Storage Index
• Exadata Hybrid Columnar Compression (EHCC)
• IORM (I/O Resource Manager)

Q88. What is a Cell and Grid Disk?

Ans: 

• Cell and Grid Disk are a logical component of the physical Exadata storage. A cell or Exadata Storage server cell is a combination of Disk Drives put together to store user data. Each Cell Disk corresponds to a LUN (Logical Unit) which has been formatted by the Exadata Storage Server Software. Typically, each cell has 12 disk drives mapped to it.
• Grid Disks are created on top of Cell Disks and are presented to Oracle ASM as ASM disks. Space is allocated in chunks from the outer tracks of the Cell disk and moving inwards. One can have multiple Grid Disks per Cell disk.

Q89. What is IORM?

Ans: 

• IORM stands for I/O Resource Manager.
• It manages the I/O demand based on the configuration, with the amount of resources available. It ensures that none of the I/O cells become oversubscribed with the I/O requests. This is achieved by managing the incoming requests at a consumer group level.
• Using IORM, you can divide the I/O bandwidth between multiple databases.
• To implement IORM resource groups, consumers and plans need to be created first.

Q90. What is hybrid columnar compression?

Ans: Hybrid Columnar compression, also called HCC, is a feature of Exadata which is used for compressing data at column level for a table.
It creates compression data units which consist of logical grouping of columns values typically having several data blocks in it. Each data block has data from columns for multiple rows.
This logarithm has the potential to reduce the storage used by the data and reduce disk I/O enhancing performance for the queries.

The different types of HCC compression include:

• Query Low
• Query High
• Archive High
• Archive Low

Q91. What is Flash cache?

Ans: Four 96G PCIe flash memory cards are present on each Exadata Storage Server cell which provide very fast access to the data stored on it.
This is further achieved by also provides mechanism to reduces data access latency by retrieving data from memory rather than having to access data from disk. A total flash storage of 384GB per cell is available on the Exadata appliance.

What is Smart Scan?

Ans: 

• It is a feature of the Exadata Software which enhances the database performance many times over. It processes queries in an intelligent way, retrieving specific rows rather than the complete blocks.
• It applies filtering criteria at the storage level based on the selection criteria specified in the query.
• It also performs column projection which is a process of sending only required columns for the query back to the database host/instance.
• What are the Parallelism instance parameter used in Exadata?
• The parameter PARALLEL_FORCE_LOCAL can be specified at the session level for a particular job.

Q92. How do you Test performance of Exadata?

Ans: You can use the “calibrate” commands at the cellcli command line.

Q93. What types of operations does Exadata “offload”?

Ans: Some of the operations that are offloaded from the database host to the cell servers are:

• Predicate filtering
• Column project filtering
• Join processing
• Backups

Q94. What is the purpose of spine switch?

Ans: Spine switch is used to connect or add more Exadata machine in the cluster

Q95. How would you create a grid disk?

Ans: At the cellcli command you would need to issue the “create grididsk all ..” command.
What are the cellinit.ora and the cellip.ora files used for?
These files have the hostnames and the ip address of all the nodes in the cluster. They are used to run commands on remote database and cellserver nodes from a local host.
Example:
cat /etc/oracle/cell/network-config/cellinit.ora
ipaddress1=192.168.47.21/24
$ cat /etc/oracle/cell/network-config/cellip.ora
cell=”192.168.47.21:5042″
cell=”192.168.47.22:5042″
cell=”192.168.47.23:5042″

Q96. What operating systems does Exadata support?

Ans: Exadata has traditionally run Oracle Linux OS. Recently, Solaris has also been made available on this engineered system.
To prepare for your Oracle DBA interview here are some additional questions focusing on other database areas.

Q97. What is Exadata in brief?

Ans: exadata is pre-configured combination of hardware and software which provides a platform to run the Oracle Database.

Q98. What is flash cache and how it works?

Ans: The flash cache is a hardware component configured in the exadata storage cell server which delivers high performance in read and write operations.
Primary task of smart flash cache is to hold frequently accessed data in flash cache so next time if same data required than physical read can be avoided by reading the data from flash cache.

Q99. What is ASR?

Ans: ASR is the tool to manage the Oracle hardware. Full form of ASR is Auto Service Request.
Whenever any hardware fault occurs ASR automatically raise SR in Oracle Support and send notification to respective customer.

Q100. What is the difference between cellcli and dcli?

Ans: Cellcli can be used on respective cell storage only.
DCLi (Distributed command Line Utility) – DCLI can be used to replicate command on multipla storage as well as DB servers.

Q101. What is the difference between wright-through and write-back flashcache mode?

Ans: writethrough –> Falshcache will be used only for reading purpose
writeback –> Flashcache will be used for both reading and writing
Exadata sizing configuation
Full Rack
Half Rack
Quater Rack
1/8th Rack

Q102. What are the steps to create DBFS?

Ans: 

• Create Directory
• Create Tablespace on database which you are going to use for DBFS
• Create user for DBFS
• Grant required privileges to created user
• Now connect to database with created user
• Create dbfs filesystem by invoking dbfs_create_filesystem_advanced
• Mount file system by starting dbfs_client

Q103. What is the difference between DBRM and IORM?

Ans: DBRM is the feature of database while IORM is the feature of storage server software.

Q104. What is smart flash cache?

Ans: Flash cache is the PCIe (Peripheral Components Interconnect Express) card which is plugged into the back end of the storage cell.

Q105. How smart scan works?

Ans: If any query executes on database server than database server sends the extents and metadata to the storage cell.
Smart scan will scan data blocks to identify relevant rows and columns.
Once data identified by smart scan, it will return to database with only appropriate rows
and columns.
Once DB server gets the data, it will assemble returned data into result set.
This operation will save the bandwidth as well CPUs and memory cost on database server
as whole sql processing happens on storage server.
Get through the interview bar with our selected interview questions for Oracle Exadata enthusiasts

Q106. What are the pre-requisites to configure ASR?

Ans: Access to My Oracle Support
Internet connectivity using HTTPS
Network connectivity from ASR server to Exadata components

Q107. Which MOS ID I should refer for latest patch update?

Ans: MOS 888828.1

Q108. Which tool is used to generate initial configuration files based on customer’s data?

Ans: OEDA (Oracle Exadata Deployment Assistance)

Q109. What are the unique features of Exadata?

Ans: 
Smart Scan (Cell Offload)
Flash cache
EHCC (Exadata Hybrid Columnar Compression)
IORM (IO Resource Manager)
Storage Index

Q110. Which all networks available in Exadata?

Ans: 
Infiniband Network
ILOM and Management Network
Client/Public Network
What are the Exadata Health check tools available?
Exacheck
sundiagtest
oswatcher
OEM 12c

Q111. What is client or public network in exadata?

Ans: Client or public network is used to established connectivity between database and application.

Q112. What are the steps involved for initial Exadata configuration?

Ans: 
Initial network preparation
Configure Exadata servers
Configure Exadata software
Configure database hosts to use Exadata
Configure ASM and database instances
Configure ASM disk group for Exadata

Q112. What is iDB protocol?

Ans: iDB stands for intelligent database protocol. It is a network based protocol which is responsible to
communicate between storage cell and database server.

Q113. What is LIBCELL?

Ans: Libcell stands for Library Cell which is linked with Oracle kernel. It allows oracle kernel to talk with the storage server via network based instead of operating system reads and writes.

Q114. Which packaged is used by compression adviser utility?

Ans: DBMS_COMPRESSION package

Q115. What is the primary goal of storage index?

Ans: Storage indexes are a feature unique to the Exadata Database Machine whose primary goal is to reduce the amount of I/O required to service I/O requests for Exadata Smart Scan.

Q116. What is smart scan offloading?

Ans: Offloading and Smart Scan are two terms that are used somewhat interchangeably. Exadata Smart
Scan offloads processing of queries from the database server to the storage server.
Processors on the Exadata Storage Server process the data on behalf of the database SQL query. Only the data requested in the query is returned to the database server.

Q117. What is checkip and what the use of it?

Ans: Checkip is the OS level script which contains IP address and hostname which will be used by Exadata in configuration phase. It checks network readiness like proper DNS configuration, it also checks there is no IP duplication in the network by pinging it which not supposed to ping initially.

Q119. Which script is used to reclaim the disk space of unused operating system?

Ans: For Linux: reclaimdisks.sh
For Solaris: reclaimdisks.pl

Q120. What is smart flash log?

Ans: Smart flash log is a temporary storage area on Exadata smart flash cache to store redoes log data.

Q121. Which parameter is used to enable and disable the smart scan?

Ans: cell_offload_processing

Q122. How to check infiniband topology?

Ans: We can verify infiniband switch topology by executing verify-topology script from one of our database server.

Q123. Can we use HCC on non-exadata environment?

Ans: No, HCC is only available data stored on Exadata storage server.

Q124. What is resource plan?

Ans: It is collection of plan directives that determines how database resources are to be allocated.

Q125. What is DBFS?

Ans: DBFS stands for Database File system which can be built on ASM disk group using database tablespace.

Q126. What are the major steps involved for cell server patching?

Ans: 

• Check and note down existing configuration of cell
• Clean up any previous patchmgr utility
• Verify that the cells meet prerequisite checks
• Patch cell server using patchmgr
• Validation updated cell

Q127. What is the purpose of infiniband spine switch?

Ans: Spine switch is used to connect multiple exadata database machines.

Q128. What is OEM?

Ans: OEM is Oracle Enterprise Manager which is centralized tool to monitor and administer systems as well software.

Q129. What is offload block filtering?

Ans: Exadata storage server filters out the blocks that are not required for the incremental backup in progress so only the blocks that are required for the backup are sent to the database.

Q130. Which command is used to monitor BCT?

Ans: SQL>select filename,status, bytes from v$block_change_tracking;

Q131. How to add memory into database server?

Ans: Power off database server
Add memory expansion into server
Power on the server

Q132. What are the ways to migrate onto Exadata?

Ans: Depending on the downtime allowed there are several options:
Oracle DataGuard
Traditional Export/Import
Tablespace transportation
Goldengate Replication after a data restores onto Exadata.

Q133. What are the types of EHCC?

Ans: 
Query Low
Query High
Archive High
Archive Low

Conclusion:

We saw the interview question on  Oracle Exadata which are frequently asked now a days. This is the complete collection on Exadata. If you come across any new interview question, Please let us know in the comments section or contact us page. We will update this post for job searching candidates.