Oracloid Blog

Reanimating the Sydney MySQL User Group!

What: Sydney MySQL User Group meetup #7 - The Reboot

When: July 16, 2009 5:30 PM (please don’t forget to RSVP yes/no/maybe)

Where: Sydney, CBD - join the meetup for exact location.

We are back! After 3 years of being silent, SMUG (can I call it so? I know there are conflicts with other acronyms) resurrects the meetings.

The logistic of the meetup is the following:

• 5:30pm — the gathering starts and we have pizza and beers and talking your peers
• 6:00pm — we start the presentation
• 7:00pm — break and peer networking consuming the leftovers
• 7:30pm — we have an open (but slightly moderated) discussion. Topic is TBC. Perhaps, we can talk about future of MySQL now that Oracle’s bought Sun?

The schedule is very approximate and we will be quite flexible. We should finish about 8:30pm.

Presentation: Migrating 1 Terabyte Database to MySQL — Case Study by Alex Gorbachev (well, that’s me).

This presentation is based on the real project migrating from RDB on OpenVMS to MySQL on Linux. We will review the migration of the data itself and what infrastructure has been setup — high availability cluster with Heartbeat, DR site replication, organizing backup for 1 TB database. The system has been successfully put in production few months ago.

The attendance is completely free but of course someone need to cover the venue and that great stuff we are going to eat and drink so…

My company, The Pythian Group, is sponsoring the SMUG for now. You probably heard of Pythian, the leading provider of database services for MySQL as well as Oracle and SQL Server.

Nice people from Navicat, kindly offered to join us sponsoring the pizza and drinks. If you happen to manage MySQL databases you probably heard for Navicat, an award-winning database administration tool. More details - http://www.navicat.com/en/products/navicat_mysql/mysql_overview.html

Those of you in Sydney — looking forward to see you all there.

What: Sydney Oracle Meetup #7 - Advanced Queuing in E-Business Suite
When:Tuesday, June 30, 2009 5:30 PM (please, make sure to RSVP yes/no/maybe)
Where: Our standard location in Sydney CBD

Welcome to our meetup #7! This meetup will be focused on Oracle Advanced Queuing (AQ) feature and its usage in Oracle E-Business Suite.

For inexperienced SOM members, we are starting with the meet & greet and pizza+drinks at 5:30 pm and move to smart things at 6:00 pm. We will be there until about 8:30pm (some are sticking around a bit longer while some might take off a bit earlier) and will have a break in the middle. The second half is generally more open-ended as most of you already know.

So what are the goodies at this meetup?
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No doubt you want to cast you first vote for my abstract — Developing Plug-ins for Oracle Enterprise Manager by example :)

Every Oracle professional knows about Oracle Enterprise Manager’s extensive monitoring capability for Oracle products. However, only few realize that Oracle Enterprise Manager can be easily extended thanks to its Extensibility framework.

Session includes a demo of the plug-in development scenarios. After this presentation, attendees will be able to design and develop management plug-ins for their own applications.

Login to Oracle Mix and vote now. At the time of writing, my session is on the very top — help to keep it there! ;-)
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The first videocast was quite popular — it has more than 300 views in couple weeks and considering no Hollywood stars were starring in that video and there were no nude scenes, I think it’s fair to say that this format was very much welcomed by the audience.

Today, I’m posting the follow up session on VIP’s (Virtual IP’s) with Oracle RAC. What I demonstrate today is a typical configuration mistake for a RAC databases created with Database Configuration Assistant (DBCA) and what’s the result of such omission.

It’s actually logged as a bug 4338578 on Metalink (thanks to Marcin Przepiorowski for reference). However, I believe it’s not a database issue but (1) misunderstanding how remote listener registration works, (2) documentation bug and (3) DBCA bug.

I’ve been just sending the abstracts for UKOUG 2009 Conference before the extended deadline is over and realized that I hadn’t spread those exciting news. Actually, the news spread via Twitter before I saw the official confirmation in my inbox. Well, I guess the blog post title says it all. It’s a pleasure to join this program and get engaged in its activities.

What: Sydney Oracle Meetup #6 — storage for Oracle databases

When: June 17, 2009 5:30 PM. Please RSVP Yes/No/Maybe.

Where: Our usual location at Sydney CBD. Level 3 this time!

Details:

We will start at 5:30PM with pizza and drinks and roll on from there as usual.
Note that we are meeting at the level 3 this time!

This meetup will be focused on storage technologies for Oracle database. It looks like a short presentation on Oracle Automatic Storage Management is in order - quite a few people are missing the concepts of the Oracle flagman storage storage solution and it’s useful to understand the approach whether you use it now or not.

Just got an interesting note on Twitter that you can’t call a stored procedure dynamically in Oracle from a PL/SQL block like passing the procedure name in a variable.

Well, yes we can!

And the answer is EXECUTE IMMEDIATE — it can be used to run anonymous PL/SQL blog and not just a SQL statement. However, you will want to think many many times before doing so… if you love your data.

Let’s create the test procedures:

SQL> create or replace procedure bingo as
  2  begin
  3  dbms_output.put_line('Bingo!');
  4  end;
  5  /

Procedure created.

SQL> create or replace procedure bambam as
  2  begin
  3  dbms_output.put_line('BAM BAM!');
  4  end;
  5  /

Procedure created.

Now let’s create a wrapper that we will call passing a procedure name:

I think it was the smallest group so far which is not surprising considering that Monday has been the least popular day in our internal poll. We had a tad less than 20 people but very good size for the informal discussion of Oracle 11g adoption that took place at the second half of the meetup.

Turned out that there are very few people running 11g in production. Besides us at Pythian with number of clients on 11g, we’ve had only couple people I think including Carl Young from Metcash. Carl shared their experience of running a multi-terabyte data-warehouse on Oracle 11g and how the migration happened. Thanks a lot Carl for your insights!

If you haven’t seen the case study from Oracle about this migration — see what benefits Metcash had with 11g migration. I myself took note of few areas — Query Cache helped a lot on dimension tables lookups and some popular reports, Materialized Views invalidation problems reduced, CBO becomes smarter.

Some of the things to pay attention to in 11g — Oracle Warehouse Builder 11g (11.1.0.6) has actually less features than the latest OWB 10g release. If you look at 11.1.0.7’s list of bugs fixed (Metalink Note 601739.1), you would see a few dozen bugs on “Wrong Results” Read more...

“Seeing it once is better than hearing about it a thousand times” — I think this is the closest translation from one Russian proverb. I may add that hearing and seeing might be often better then reading so let me try to start a series of small videocasts about Oracle database technology.

One of the topics that beginners RAC DBA’s (along with network engineers supporting Oracle database infrastructure) are confused about is the Virtual IP usage in Oracle RAC starting from Oracle Clusterware 10g.

More than a month has passed since Sydney Oracle Meetup #2. We shot some video, but it took me a while to process it and publish a few interesting pieces, but I finally got it all.

Ric Van Dyke’s presentation on tuning SQL queries using 10046 trace is available on the SOM website in the Files section (you must be a member). However, there were no material from Tanel Poder’s session — it’s title started with “Zero Slides…” and Tanel demonstrated live some of his secrets of productivity in Oracle troubleshooting. Luckily, my colleague, Andrey Goryunov, managed to shoot some of it on the video and I’m publishing here a couple fragments on the visualization of Oracle performance troubleshooting.

Make sure you are watching them in HQ on YouTube to see more details and if you like these videos, make sure you rate them.

PerfSheet is a very handy solution based on Microsoft Excel scripting and let you automate extraction and charting of any data you can extract from an Oracle database (and generally speaking, any other database). The best thing is that Tanel has put great efforts in it and made it available to everyone for free. One demo is worth many words so here we go:

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