Oracloid Blog

The second, and the last, day of AUSOUG 2007 in Melbourne is over. Earlier today I had great presentation as I already blogged about. I had a quick chance to peak into Steve Lemme’s presentation on CA approach for solving an IT management dilemma. The only reason I was interested in it is because one of our clients is using CA Unicenter and looking to move away from it so I wanted to make sure that this is right (I’m quite sure myself anyway but it’s just a DBA perspective).

I had baked potato for lunch plus a sandwich. After that me and Paul Moen went down for a coffee (thanks to Chris Muir for suggestion of a better place). Oh yes - I’ve finally had a pleasure to meet Chris Muir.

Instead of keynote and the following presentation, I paid a visit to exhibitors and spoke to practically every exhibitor. It turned out that some of them knew or heard about Pythian which was quite pleasing to hear. I also found out that Han Xie (I’ve met him yesterday first time during follow up on my RAC presentation) from Dialog Information Technology had only come because of my presentation! As soon as he saw my name on the agenda few days ago, he requested his managers to send him over. This was a very pleasing compliment — thanks Han.

I sat on presentation about Web 2.0 interface with APEX but, frankly, I was almost falling asleep as the result of little rest last night and extremely monotonic speaking manner of the speaker. I also expected to be presented on how actually do that in APEX instead of some pretty much web 2.0 propaganda and demonstration of few cool widgets. Widgets were very cool indeed but it was definitely not my expectations. Anyway, what am I, DBA, supposed to know about development?

The last session for me was The Great Oracle Development Tools Debate with panel speakers (no need for names ;) being proponents of:
- Oracle JDeveloper
- Oracle Forms
- Oracle APEX
- Oracle Fusion as the whole concept

No one from .Net and only one person from the audience admitted he is using it. Strange, I quite liked .Net when I used it few years ago. If only it could run on non-windows platforms.

Anyway, the whole audience was pretty much concerned about discontinued Forms support (2014 was the year given by Lynne Munsinger from Oracle). So it was clear that new projects don’t start in Forms nowadays. But the choice between APEX and J2EE based platform was difficult. The audience was very cautious about Java and Fusion while optimistic on APEX. However, concerned that APEX won’t fit enterprise solutions bill, many are waiting on Java platform to become enough stable and reliable enough to build applications that can be supported for years to come instead of changing technology every year or so.

From my point of view it all boils down to when the business wants to spend the money — in advance with Java based Fusion and have a risk of loosing everything or slowly as the progress using APEX and having results right away. For me the choice is clear but modern architects and technologists might not agree with me.

Closing was quick — Babette didn’t win anything even though I sacrificed my chance for her (read that I was too lazy to stamp the paper at every exhibitor). I’m satisfied with the conference. I met many interesting people and discussed about how people work here in Australia and how the business is organized.

I’m going to the observation deck now to watch the sunset and I must harry not to miss it. I’m leaving tomorrow morning and will be in Ottawa on Wednesday night after the long journey (I don’t want to think about it now).

Regardless of my unfortunate early wake up, the day started great. I spent a couple hours reviewing and tightening up my block change tracking presentation. Unfortunately, just before the beginning I realized that one animated slide was completely screwed up and I wasn’t able to fix it on time so I apologize to the audience once again — it will be uploaded fixed.

Other than that screwed up slide, the presentation went very well. I had a small room (90 people) and it was pretty packed with few seats empty so very good turnover and almost nobody stepped away even though I warned about the level of material in the disclaimer. Very brave audience — thanks Ozzies!

So I’m pretty happy about today and decided that quick update on the blog wouldn’t harm. By the way, this update is “sponsored” by Global Software Inc.. These guys provide Excell automation software to simplify access to any ERP application database like Oracle E-Business Suite. Thanks Sherri!

I’ve got up at 6:30 today (it becomes a bad habit) because my phone started to make annoying sounds at 5:45 — it’s way too clever about meeting reminders and timezone-aware. I wish sometime technology is not that smart. Even though I went to bed after 3AM, I couldn’t get back to sleep — either I worry too much (ring-ring, Marco) or it’s that street noise that get through the window — I’m on the first floor and the hotel is next to a busy train station. But good for you — I decided to update the blog with few photos of Melbourne to kill some time and distract me from thoughts about my coming presentations.

Melbourne is a beautiful city! Interesting view from the Yarra River on a part of CBD:

We bought Sunday tickets (just two bucks each) and walked to Bourke Street for lunch. Babette took Chinese and I stopped at Tai chicken dish that supposed to be spicy but for some reason wasn’t at all.
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Monday, 26th of November, 2007.

I set my alarm at 6:30 so that I can finish all my morning procedures on time and register earlier. It wasn’t too difficult to wake up early today as I was in bed before midnight yesterday. Babette has already posted some details about yesterday and I only need to sort out my photos to add some “coloring” to it (at some point I’ll figure out how to do that on time!).

I registered at about 8:30 and went to the speaker prep. room. I was looking for internet there but…

When I first saw the label, I thought it’s some kind of a ba

Quick sum up of my previous post – I’m in Sydney this week and getting ready for my AUSOUG “snoitatneserp” next week. (Note that I wrote it in Sydney last week and only now managed to get the photos sorted out — sorry for the delay).

Thursday evening I was honored with a visit to Noons’ house. We had done a very nice walk around his place through Warriewood Wetlands. It was one of the most amazing walks I had –- a walking path via jungle style swamp (heh… they call it wetlands).

I saw many bird species but couldn’t remember the names – sorry Nuno, I know you tried your best. Actually, I think I do remember at least one – Kukubara Kookaburra (thanks Nuno!). Birds were beautiful and some fellows you can see here courtesy of Noons. I also saw few iguanas “water dragons” lizards (thanks Sarah) on the way and they ran away quickly as soon as they realized that I’m watching them.

It’s amazing that such a magical place can be so close to Sydney –- it took us only 40 minutes by car to get there from Sydney CBD but we had to leave early to get ahead of the traffic and not everyone drives as aggressive as Portuguese do.
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While I have another blog post in drafts, I should quickly update on the sessions I’m going to visit in the next two days of AUSOUG 2007 in Melbourne. This was a result of a quick look at the agenda and also couple blog posts from Jeff Kemp.

I arrived to Melbourne today and I took Babette for a walk. This tour deserve a separate entry so I postpone it until I have more time to empty my camera and sort it out so back to the schedule…

===== Monday =====

* 9:00 — Opening and keynote

* 10:30 — “RHEL 5 Advanced Platform: Virtualised Oracle 10g instances in a High Availability configuration” by Luie Matthee

* 11:30 — my own “RAC Load Testing Adventure” (otherwise, I would have gone to “Capacity planning in an Oracle10g Database” by Megh Thakkar)

* 13:00 — APPS KEYNOTE - Are You Ready for Fusion? (I might choose a longer lunch instead)

* 13:45 — “Understanding RAC Performance” by Roy Rossebo

* 15:00 — “Understanding Oracle’s Histogram” by Tony Jambu

* 16:00 — “High availability options with Oracle10g” by Megh Thakkar but it sounds a bit too beginner level and overview type so it might be Babette’s session on LDAP.

* 4:45-6:00 — exhibition hall tour

* 7:00 — Dinner in Melbourne Aquarium - don’t know if I make it and whether I actually want it at all. I haven’t registered for it yet and it might be full already anyway.

===== Tuesday =====

* 9:00 — Opening and keynote if I’m up early

* 10:30 — my own “Oracle 10g Block Change Tracking Inside Out” but, again, I would rather got to “RAC to the Extreme” by Kevin Crowley. Why good presentations conflict with my slots?!

* 11:30 — “Partitioning Oracle Data Warehouses for optimal performance” by Megh Thakkar (if I like his previous sessions)

* 13:00 — both keynotes are about Fusion so it might be long lunch again

* 13:45 — “Logical Standby or Oracle Streams: which one is right for you?” by John Garmany

* 15:00 — “Real Application Clusters: Clusterwide Monitoring” by Ramesh Naidu (there are two parts and I will take the second if I like the first one)

That’s about it. I might have missed something interesting on the agenda as I’m planning that in a hurry.

It’s time for a dinner now and then few beers with Paul Moen later on. Stay tuned - more to come…

I’m going to present couple sessions at the Australian Oracle User Group Conference in Melbourne next week. It’s the first time I’m presenting Down Under and I’m looking forward to it, although I’m still not sure if I should start from the last slide and proceed backward . . .

Since it’s more than a day of flying only one way, it wouldn’t be smart to go for only two days, so I’m taking the opportunity to spend this week with my Sydney colleagues — Paul Moen and Andrey Goryunov. I should mention that Australia is the first country I ever visited. I fell in love with this country seven years ago when I came from Russia in February. Culture shock and dramatic weather change set the tone for how I feel about Australia for the rest of my life. So hello Sydney — I’m back!

I was supposed to fly Ottawa-Vancouver-Honolulu-Sydney, my flight leaving from Ottawa at 8:00AM on Saturday. I was packing until very late and finished only by 3 AM. No surprise that, although I set my alarm clock to 6:00AM, I forgot to switch it on for the weekend days. The net result: Olga woke my up at 7:30. Anyway, Air Canada was very nice to re-route me through Toronto so that I still could make my connection in Vancouver . . . so $50 for an additional 1.5 hour sleep — not a bad trade at all!

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I have recently stumbled upon V$SESSION_CONNECT_INFO view and discovered that it provides interesting information about client-side software and settings.

Using this view in Oracle 11g you can simplify collecting some statistics about database clients. Here is what can be extracted:

• Version of client libraries
• Type of OCI library used (standard OCI, different instant clients and etc.) but no JDBC support it seems
• Client characterset (new in 11g – doesn’t work for pre-11.1 clients and for JDBC thin)
• Authentication type (username+password, OS based, proxy and etc.)

How many times have you been in the situation when you need to know certain attributes of your clients to evaluate impact of a coming change of a bug you just hit? Unless the environment is very simplistic or just recently setup, there is usually no easy way to discover every client driver used to connect. This view can workaround absence of standard policies and documentation, procedure violations and you can confidently determine which client versions are where. You can even setup monitoring and pro-actively generate an alert when violations are detected which would be my preferred way.

If you decide to use this feature, you might want to create an AFTER LOGON trigger – sampling of could be not enough to catch short-living sessions.

I haven’t used this view myself and I’m writing this on the plane as I’ve just come across it in the documentation and though that this rather unknown feature would be useful on the blog.

It’d be nice to have that info available in audit views but I couldn’t find it in DBA_AUDIT_SESSION and DBA_AUDIT_TRAIL. DBA_AUDIT_TRAIL has just column COMMENT_TEXT where we can see authentication type for session records.

Oh… which plane am I on? That deserves a separate blog post. Stay tuned!

PS: Oh… I’ve seen a ghost of Dave Ensor now on the plane… It’s probably not such a good idea to read Oracle manuals on the plane - it was just a man with very similar face profile. Yeah, I better switch to a movie then!

PPS: Actually, it took me few days to post this entry. Shame on me but better sooner then later… Oh… I mean better later than never!

Today I found some interesting software pieces available for download from Oracle TechNet.

“Oracle Outside In Technology” represents a set of SDK’s for various content management operations. Basically, those are excellent building blocks for content management applications and tasks. See Outside In Technology data-sheet:

Oracle Outside In Technology enhances hundreds of software applications from the world’s leading technology companies for search, e-mail, e-discovery, text mining, content management, legal, security, compliance, archiving, data forensics, collaboration, and many others. Oracle Outside In Technology provides software developers with a comprehensive solution to access, transform and control the contents of over 400 unstructured file formats. From standard business documents to specialty formats and legacy files, Oracle Outside In Technology turns unstructured files into accessible information.

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