Oracloid Blog

For only $299 you can access Virtual IOUG Collaborate 13 individually or setup a conference room at your company for the whole team. There will be two tracks broadcasted so if you have demand for both tracks, it make sense to purchase two access passes and setup two tracks broadcasted in parallel in your office so that members of your team can choose individually what to attend. I think that’s a steal even if you want to purchase this package individually.

Virtual attendance doen’t completely replace the physical presence but if you can’t come to Denver in April, this is the next best thing. Relationships that you gain from meeting your peers and speakers face to face are extremely valuable and you will cary them throughout your whole career. I’ve been just recently discussing with Rene Antunez (who’s just joined Pythian) how social media and twitter revolutionized our professional networking, and we agreed that things like Twitter alone won’t cut it for many of us. While some folks only know most of their peers online, the real relationships are established face to face — discussing a presentation with the speaker during lunch, sharing a drink at the reception or having a heated discussion in a pub near the convention center. With such relationships, social media becomes a natural extended communication channel.

But I digress… so those of you who can’t come to Denver for one reason or another, do consider taking Virtual IOUG Collaborate 2013 Pass and enjoy the session in tracks “High Availability, Disaster Recovery, Manageability” and “Performance, Scalability and Internals”. Here are some of the speakers you would have a chance to see over 4 days of sessions broadcasting:

• Kuassi Mensah, Oracle
• John Beresniewicz, Oracle
• Michael Abbey, Pythian
• Yury Velikanov, Pythian
• Craig Shallahamer, OraPub
• Karl Arao, Enkitec
• Carlos Sierra, Oracle
• Mark W Farnham, Rightsizing
• Guy Harrison, Dell
• Frits Hoogland, VX Company
• Tim Gorman, Evergreen Database Technologies
• Kyle Hailey, Delphix
• Gwen Shapira, Pythian

My favorite virtual track is Performance, Scalability and Internals but I will be at the conference physically so I will also be attending lots of sessions on Big Data and Data Science. By the way, as virtual attendee, you will get access to the recordings as well so even if you miss certain session live, you can watch it later at your convenience.

If your team is dispersed geographically, the members would need a pass each to watch broadcast live but, again, I still think it’s a steal at $299!

Looking forward to see some of you in Denver and some of you on Twitter talking about what you saw at the virtual conference. If you don’t come to Denver and not going to be virtual attendee — tell me why and what else can we do to plug you into Collaborate — I will relay your message to the IOUG Board of Directors and the Conference Committee.

NERSC’s Hopper NERSC; Design: Caitlin Youngquist/LBNL Photo: Roy Kaltschmidt/LBNL

I’ve been reading a book by my good friend Jeff Needham “Disruptive Possibilities: How Big Data Changes Everything” and it cemented some thoughts that had been forming in my head for a while and gave me bunch of new insights. Jeff managed to pack incredible amount of information in a very concise form. I thoroughly recommend getting a copy for you when it’s published (I’ve got author copy from Hortonworks at StrataConf in Santa Clara few weeks ago).

Supercomputers, and later High Performance Computing (HPC), have been around for a while. However, they were only available to organizations and projects that were extremely well funded. Military defense and intelligence departments are a good example. Oil and gas exploration that required enormous amount of processing to predict with high degree of certainty where to drill is another good example. The reason they can afford to invest in supercomputers is because the alternative was to drill expensive wells with little chance to hit the oil reserves. Since drilling a single well costs millions of dollars, companies can get high return on investment into supercomputing.

Modern commercial supercomputing in the age of Datafication is what we today call Big Data. I think a better term for it would be Data Supercomputing but the industry has already spoken so Big Data it is. The architecture shifted from environments that required massively-parallel compute-intensive number crunching to massively-parallel data-volume-intensive processing. The performance of processors and storage media capacity has been growing much quicker than storage and network performance while data volumes growth trumped all of them and this was triggered the shift in supercomputing architecture.

Hadoop is the first modern commercial supercomputing platform — it’s here to stay and evolve.

Spring is a very active conference season for me. I might be going to half a dozen conferences in 3-4 months. That’s a lot of travel but I look forward to all them. The conference I’m probably looking forward the most this year is IOUG COLLABORATE. Maybe because it’s the largest user group conference or because I have been missing some of the previous conferences for various reasons (like volcano activity in Denmark or delayed passport at the US consulate) or because I’m more and more connected with IOUG every year (this year I’m the IOUG Director of Communities) or because COLLABORATE is the conference I’m meeting some of my very good friends that I rarely see otherwise or because it’s in Denver this year – the place I’m going to every year for RMOUG but missed this February due to unfortunate circumstances.

Now that I think about it, I think the reason I’m looking forward to it so much this year is because this year is special for IOUG – it’s our 20th anniversary and COLLABORATE 13 is where the main celebration is going to happen.

I wish I can see many of the blog readers there so if you are at COLLABORATE 13 — do find me to say hello please. If you are not yet committed to come to Denver in April, I would love to do something to swing the balance of your decision scale towards COLLABORATE. The best gift I could think of is to contribute an hours of my personal time to you as thank you for coming to Denver for this special for IOUG COLLABORATE conference. Phone or video call would be the best communication media and you can choose any topic you want to talk about that you think I can contribute to – be it around community involvement, blogging, certifications or a technology topic such us discuss your approach to database consolidation, your company’s big data strategy, Hadoop adoption plans or focus on specific issue you are facing such as a specific performance issue you need help with or disaster recovery strategy. Anything goes, we can even talk about woodworking if you’d like. Though, I have much more shallow knowledge and limited experience in woodworking compare to database technologies.

So what do you need to to claim an hour of my time? Register for IOUG COLLABORATE 13 before the end of March and use the code BOD13. I will reach our to you and arrange some time between us. You can also reach out to me by leaving a comment on this blog post below or just filling the Contact Us form referring to my attention as long as you register between now and the end of March 2013, count on that offer.

Why BOD13 priority code? Well, we have a small friendly competition between the board of directors and conference committee on who can attract the most attendees. It’s more fun than anything else and this proposal is my way to get your registrations on my side. ;)

Don’t forget to leverage group discount if you can and discount for hotel booking through IOUG — this will save you quite a bit off registration fees. The early bird discount is over but those those are still valid.

See you in Denver!

I’ve recently realized that I didn’t post anywhere the second version of my presentation — Under The Hood of Oracle Clusterware 2.0: Grid Infrastructure, codenamed UTHOC2. I think it would be very useful as I still see lots of questions being asked and UTHOC1 covers Oracle RAC 10g and 11gR1 only. 11g Release 2 brought many changes in the clusterware and the slides needed some good refresh.

Seeing how much changes are in 11.2, I wouldn’t expect that the next release (and some call it 12c and say it’s coming out very soon) of Oracle Database will have any significant changes. Now, participating on Oracle beta I know more than what could assume couple years ago but I shall remain silent for now and just leave you with my old opinion. Perhaps, there will be time for UTHOC3 soon. What do you folks think?

Update 7-May-2013: Almost 100 people filled in the survey and here are the result:

BCT survey results

I wrote a presentation on Oracle Block Change Tracking (BCT) internals more than 6 years ago. Back then it was based on Oracle Database 10g Release 1. I have also wrote a paper in support of the presentation for Collaborate 2007 (You are coming to COLLABORATE 13 in April. Aren’t you?).

To the best of my knowledge, the core principles of block change tracking are still the same. In fact, recently Oracle asked me if they could publish this paper in the knowledge base on My Oracle Support so now it’s there — ORACLE 10G BLOCK CHANGE TRACKING INSIDE OUT [ID 1528510.1]. I guess it means it’s still very relevant.

This reminded me that Fast Incremental Backups, enabled by Oracle BCT, is a very handy feature and I see lots of use cases that could leverage it but for some reason don’t. Thus, I wanted to run a quick poll to see how the adoption of BCT is amongst the audience of this blog. If the poll embedded below doesn’t get displayed, you can follow this link.

As a reminder, Block Change Tracking enables Oracle database to keep track of changed fragments of datafiles between incremental backups. Using this log, it’s possible to identify the fragments of a datafile that changed after a particular incremental backup and then only read those fragments during the next incremental backup.

Block Change Tracking enabled us to deliver some innovative solutions to our customers. One unconventional use case is incrementally updated standby when you need to replicate a database that changes the same blocks over and over again and by that generates so much redo that it’s not feasible to transfer that amount of redo to a remote site (like DR site) for replication. Transferring and applying incremental backups often requires much less bandwidth in these cases. Incrementally updated standby is also a way to replicate large data warehouses that are updated in NOLOGGING mode because standard physical standby doesn’t capture those NOLOGGING changes so Data Guard for Data Warehouse is useless if you need to replicate NOLOGGING changes.

What are your use cases for block change tracking? Take the poll and feel free to provide more details in the comments section below on how you are using the Block Change Tracking feature or what prevents you from the using it.

This is just a small bug fix release of the plugin. It was actually quietly released for a while now of if you have downloaded the plugin recently, you have the latest version. To be sure — check the version in the Console or you will see it in the file name.

There are two bugs fixed:
1. Deployment on an OMS hosted on Solaris didn’t work (and suspect could be the same for Agents on Solaris).
2. Changing thresholds on the metrics caused an error “Modification of Target Monitoring Settings has Failed”. Also applying monitoring template was failing for the same reason.

If you did’t know that you can setup threshold and customized the thresholds that are set out of the box with the plugin then you are not using full capabilities of the Enterprise Manager. You can do that in the MySQL target menu — Monitoring -> Metric and Collection Settings. When alert or warning conditions are met, Oracle EM can raise incidents and send notification according to your settings. As I stated above, 12.1.0.1.0 had a bug that prevented users from changing the thresholds.

Same known issues exist as for 12.1.0.1.0 release.
Useful links:

• Plugin home page
• Plugin download
• Plugin requirements
• Installation instruction

Follow the same deployment procedure for upgrade — (1) import into EM12c using EMCLI, (2) upgrade on OMS by deploying on OMS, (3) upgrade on Agents byt deploying on agents.

Happy monitoring!

Announcing the IOUG Big Data Special Interest Group (SIG)!

We have the SIG meeting at Oracle Open World — come join us with you morning coffee. Nothing better than starting your Big morning with Big Data talks! Yes — we actually managed to get the room at this busy times at OOW thanks to IOUG.

What: IOUG Big Data SIG Meeting

When: 8:45-9:45am, Tue, 2-Oct-2012

Where: Moscone West Level 3, Overlook 3 (OOW12)

Everyone is welcome. Gwen Shapira is the SIG leader and expect lots of great things in that space. The SIG is also looking for volunteers — that’s going to be hot space so if you want to engage early come and let us know.

Whether you are at OOW12 or not, please join the SIG as a member in LinkedIn. We have a small goal to reach — I told Gwen that we will reach 1,000 members by the OOW and she is very skeptical. If you have interest in Big Data, please join the SIG and share it to you networks — Big Data SIG needs big membership! ;)

Gwen, if we reach 1,000 members — you buying the drinks!

As I’ve become Director of Communities for IOUG recently, I’m intimately involved in many aspects of leading IOUG community. One of the area the user group is pursuing all the time is finding the new speakers and that takes some part of convincing the community members to actually start presenting. There are many of you who have exciting projects and implementations to share but can’t quite convince themselves to actually present.

So… whether you are a total newbie presenter or a presenter with experience that didn’t present at IOUG Collaborate conference yet, you might find this webinar useful — IOUG: Call for Speakers Informational Webinar. Hope to see you selecting one of your projects or a technical area you are excited and knowledgeable about and send your abstract. Feel free to post any question if have them — I’ll make sure they get answered.

Oracle OpenWorld 2012 is just over a month away and yes we are organizing the Annual Oracle Bloggers Meetup — one of your top favorite events of the OpenWorld.

What: Oracle Bloggers Meetup 2012

When: Wed, 3-Oct-2012, 5:30pm

Where: Main Dining Room, Jillian’s Billiards @ Metreon, 101 Fourth Street, San Francisco, CA 94103 (street view). Please comment with “COUNT ME IN” if coming — we need to know the attendance numbers.

Traditionally, Oracle Technology Network joins Pythian sponsoring the venue and drinks.

As usual, vintage t-shirts from previous meetups will make you look cool — feel free to wear them. This year’s activity is still being planned — we have lots of cool ideas and couldn’t decide which one is the coolest but if you have something interesting in mind — let me know privately {last_name} at pythian.com. There will also be some cool swag for the blogger.

For those of you who don’t know the history… The Bloggers Meetups during the Oracle Open World were started by Mark Rittman and continued by Eddie Awad and then I picked up the flag in 2009. The meetups have been great success so let’s keep them this way! To give you an idea, here are the photos from the OOW08 Bloggers Meetup (courtesy of Eddie Awad) and last year’s meetup blog post update from myself.

While the initial meetings were mostly around Oracle database folks, the latest meetups are joined buy guys and gals from lots of Oracle technologies – Oracle database, MySQL, Applications, Sun technologies, Java and more. All bloggers are welcome. This year we expect large attendance from APEX meet up group as well. We estimate to gather have around 150 bloggers.

See the results of last 2010 year’s meetup here and here follow all the links.

If you are planning to attend, please comment here with the phrase “COUNT ME IN”. This will help us make sure we have the attendance numbers right. Make sure you provide your blog URL with your comment — it’s a Bloggers Meetup in the end! Make sure you comment here if you are attending so that we have enough room, food and (most important) drinks. Last year we barely fit. Again, we are reserving a bigger room but we want to make sure we can fit everyone!

Of course, do not under any circumstances forget to blog and tweet about this year’s bloggers meetup.

Speaking about blogging… The winner of the last year’s competition on the best and most creative coverage introducing the most bloggers met at the meetup is… drum roll please… Bjoern Rost with the #oow11 blogger meetup blog post:

Looking forward to seeing even more of you again this year! Our big helpers this year are Vanessa Simmons and Maryanne Birksted behind the scene from Pythian marketing forces.

MySQL management plugin for EM 12c has been long overdue. I’ve initially migrated the older plugin to EM 12c about 6 months ago and few dozen people received this as initial beta of the plugin. It worked OK but didn’t use any of the 12c new features and its home page was a bit of a mess in the EM 12c Cloud Control web interface.

I’ve had lots of new features to add but I didn’t really have much time to invest into completing them all. Finally, I decided to just finish the home page dashboard and clean it up from all unfinished new features. I did, however, finish MySQL Slave configuration and status monitoring which was the largest gap in the the functionality of the previous plugin. There is no custom UI for MySQL slave management yet (that’s coming) but monitoring is available as standard metrics and configuration management features.

Home page looks like that in the released plugin version 12.1.0.1.0:


There you can see the summary of the MySQL instance configuration in the top left corner. Below that there is availability history and to the right there are several performance charts showing you the current snapshot of MySQL instance and how it’s doing. At the bottom of the page, there is a standard EM incident management panel.

Note the standard plugin menu in the top-left corner below the target name:

This is where you can access standard EM 12c user interface to metrics, incidents, configuration management, reports and target setup.

For example, Configuration section gives you access to the latest target configuration as well as the history and comparison with past or another MySQL target configuration:

Note that Slave Configuration is new compare to previous version of plugin for Grid Control. The configuration is obtained from show slave status. Show slave status also has some real-time setting which I collect at Slave Status Realtime. Most of these settings are only important as the current snapshot so by default I didn’t schedule the collection of those metrics. They include the position in bin logs and relay logs, for example, as well latest errors of SQL and IO threads. Few metrics are also collected in Slave Status collection group — Slave Lag in seconds (using Seconds_behind_master of show slave status) and the state IO and SQL slave threads which might be important to look at and set thresholds to raise incidents automatically.

Known issues:

1. Plugin home page generate run-time errors if MySQL target is down. This is because dashboard is using real-time data and it can’t retrieve it. I’m looking into the ways to solve this. It’s a bit annoying as there are multiple errors popping up but you don’t need to close them and you can just select page from the menu that you want (like target setup or latest configuration). You don’t really have anything useful on home page when target is offline.
2. If you’ve been using the previous private beta version — please undeploy it and deploy the new plugin from scratch. The new Plugin Id is different but the target type is the same so you will encounter and error during deployment. Note that you might loose target instances when you undeploying the old beta release of the plugin along with its configuration and metrics history. When I tested it on my setup, I was able to undeploy and deploy new one without removing existing targets and all their settings persisted but to be on the safe side I would remove old targets and add them again. The future plugin upgrade should be straightforward.

Please report any other issues you encounter — I’m sure there will be plenty as I haven’t done extensive testing. Consider this more of the first release candidate quality. Please also comment if you get it to work along with you EM detailed version for OMS and Agents, Agent OS, MySQL OS and MySQL version.

Useful links:

• Plugin home page
• Plugin download
• Plugin requirements
• Installation instruction

Happy monitoring!