Oracloid Blog

Some of you might know that for more than two years we have had an office in Sydney, Australia. Last year, I had the pleasure to travel there to present at the AUSOUG conference and work from our office in Sydney. It’s been a huge pleasure, especially if you consider what was going on back in Ottawa at that time.

Long story short — I’m moving to Australia. My flight from Ottawa leaves in three hours and I’m all packed and ready to go. Today we had a kiss-goodbye lunch at here at the Pythian office in Ottawa, and I was presented my new role Down Under. Hmm . . .  to be honest, I expected it to be somewhat different:

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I’d like to share some great news — The Pythian Group and Open Query have become partners!

Open Query is a leading provider of high-quality MySQL and PostgreSQL training in Australia and New Zealand. They offer consulting services too, and are also know for their MySQL Graph Storage Engine. Feel free to browse through Open Query web-site for more info.

Open Query was founded by Arjen Lentz, who was employee number 25 at MySQL AB. If you follow the MySQL community then I’m sure you already read Arjen’s blog.

Since you’re reading this blog, I guess you probably already know what Pythian does, but if you want to learn more, please click through to our home page.

Together with Open Query, we are going to extend our service offerings and strengthen our positions in outsourced database management services, consulting, and training.

If MySQL DBA from Pythian goes to Oracle Open World, it would be a shame not to send an Oracle bloke, so there I am — presenting a 90-minutes session on the first day of the OOW 08 entitled Under the Hood of Oracle Clusterware.

I gave it during RAC Attack in Chicago and I’m pretty satisfied with how it went, so there should be no significant changes to the presentation. The session is in “User Group Forum,” thanks to RAC SIG and Dan Norris.

Interesting results you can see from some low quality news aggregators Looking at this page you might think that I’m awarded with the Liberty Medal:

I’ve got this link while browsing the search results for RAC Attack. I guess should ask my granddad to pass my best wishes to Mr. George H.W. Bush.

It’s all over now and I can’t describe how tired I am. As I type it, my flight from Chicago is delayed by 1.5 hour so far (the third delay already, 30 minutes each). I should say that I hate Chicago airport but I digress.

Last night, I left my presentation in a good state and verified the first batch of demos — all worked fine. This morning turned into a disaster as I found out that the rest of my demos stopped working — my 11g RAC cluster on Ubuntu (I have the reason for such unusual setup) got issues with network connectivity. I should probably blame VMware Fusion 2.0 beta combined with Ubuntu but the net result was failing network connections with weird TNS errors and hanging connection requests. Obviously, I couldn’t demonstrate advanced connection management without *simple* connections working.

I should say that I had interesting experience this evening — a tornado warning in downtown Chicago.

The alarms went off as soon as we tried to get out of the restaurant. Below is a year old example but it sounded exactly like that + it was much darker — like if the skies fell on us:

We had to turn back and were stuck in the pub for another hour or so sipping Guinness while the mother-nature had some fun around us. Funny, looks like it decided to come back now — skies are falling again with heavy rain, clouds and lightnings everywhere. The thunder is very loud and sirens went off again — can’t even sleep. But I digress so let’s get back to the overview of the day…

I love small classes! I mean small rooms with all chairs taken when people are close to me as I present and close to each other. The audience today was exact fit for the room — 20 people could fit on the chairs around the desks and few more (organizers and presenters) next to the back wall. What I like about small classes is the intimate atmosphere in the room. I also like live speech where my voice delivered natively without electronic distortion keeping all the beauty of the Russian accent (some people *still* noticed bits of German influence there).

The only small problem was the location of the stand where a speaker hosts the laptop — it was in the middle of the room. That felt somewhat odd and I kept running between the middle of the room and the stage (well, or the place where it’s supposed to be). I used to the fact that I have another view on my laptop screen — speaker’s view with next slide/motion and my reminders. I also had to do several demo’s on my RAC cluster and I obviously needed the keyboard badly for that. I should apologize that 8 people had to observe my back instead of my face for some time and I also couldn’t see how they were taking the material but I tried to look back from time to time and as soon I did that — I could see confirming nods so thanks for that!
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Just a quick note that I’m going to present two sessions on the RAC Attack! event in Chicago next week — 4-5 August 2008. The event is organized as two threads — one for advanced RAC DBA’s and another one for beginners. Each thread will have one day of hands-on labs and one day of lectures. Another option would be to choose two days of lectures. More details on the RAC Attack event home page.

I’ll be presenting on both days. The beginner’s presentation will be “Under the Hood of Oracle Clusterware” and the more advanced session is called “Connections! Connections! Connections!”. Now, I’m terribly busy preparing for it — working on the slides (yes, I started earlier than some might expect…) and setting up the live demo.

RAC Attack is organized by IOUG and RAC SIG and, as far as I know, the attendance will pretty good but there are still few places left so you have a chance to register.

What’s for me? Great opportunity to catch up with few old friends and, hopefully, meet some new ones. In addition, I have never been to Chicago so it’s something I really keen to experience while I have a chance.