Oracloid Blog

A couple weeks ago I did a short blog post about SAN storage failures and how people are blinded by all the bells and whistles that are supposed to make storage arrays 100% reliable and failsafe. My conclusion was that there is no way to avoid storage failures, and that a better way is to anticipate those failures and be ready to handle them with minimal service impact.

I referenced a wake up call from a CTO of an Australian hosting company. Let me quote it again:

The outage, blamed on an IBM storage array, saw the company’s chief technology officer promise “significant changes to the way we deploy and manage our storage environment”.

Today, I stumbled across another article that demonstrates their solution of the storage reliability problem. From Melbourne IT on $18m Oracle revamp:

… to improve the reliability of its operational support systems at a cost of $7 million over three years, which has also seen it switch storage vendors from IBM to EMC. Data corruption that had occurred on its IBM storage systems were blamed for a several day outage experienced at the company’s WebCentral web-hosting business.

So we see that, instead of learning the right lesson, they conclude, “This IBM storage stuff isn’t reliable, EMC sales folks convinced me that they are better. Now my storage will not fail.” The “significant changes to the way we deploy and manage our storage environment” were mere vendor change.

Well, data recovery services will be flourishing!

RMOUG was over last week but I haven’t got back until earlier this week and I finally managed to clean up the backlog of things I missed so I could write the conference wrap up. After the RMOUG, I went skiing with a bunch of good friends and discovered a great skiing resort of Breckenridge. This is me at the peak 8 summit:

These were great times except one day with the questionable results of an experiment to find a recipe for the perfect hangover that I and Mogens Nørgaard have conducted. Well, the science does require sacrifices…

Back to the conference…

I have really enjoyed few technical sessions that I managed to attend. I want to mention couple that I liked especially. I managed to attend the full session by Robyn Sands about adopting variance to performance troubleshooting and performance acceptance — lots of interesting goodies. I have also enjoyed High Performance Oracle on NFS from Jeff Needham. Jeff has been instrumental helping me in number of projects and I think anybody who is thinking to run Oracle on NFS should attend Jeff’s session and learn “The Formula” covering all the basics of a successful Oracle on NFS storage stack.

I have been honored to participate in the opening keynote amongst other Oracle ACEs and ACE Directors including Stanley. By the way, if you haven’t read yet Stanley’s report from Oracle ACEs Sharks Dive at Denver Aquarium, read it.

Actually, I think there were number of Oracle ACEs and ACE Directors on the floor that deserved to be on that stage far more than I did but I digress. One of the most interesting topics we touched was cloud computing and Oracle. I should say that I have already planned the whole line up of blogs on cloud computing so stay tuned — they are coming.

My own presentation was on the second day of the conference, closer to the end, and I estimated close to 50 attendees. It was good attendance I think but the hall did felt somewhat empty-ish as it was the largest hall at the conference (triple size). The presentation went very well — even experiences folks learned some lessons and generally folks showed good level of interest. I have uploaded the slides if you want to review them.

Since this blog post has so many photos, I want to finish with another one from Denver Aquarium — it’s me not freaking out of sharks around. They were very friendly.

Oracle ASM 11g Release 2 – The Evolution

Oracle Automatic Storage Management has proven to be one of the most widely adopted new features in Oracle Database 10g and it has been dramatically improved in the later 11g releases. This presentation will explain what changes are solved by ASM, how these challenges are solved, what barriers there are to ASM adoptions, and how 11g Release 2 addresses these barriers.

I shall say that the slides alone are not that helpful without my commentary but if you didn’t manage to attend it on one of the previous conferences, we will be releasing it as a webinar soon so stay tuned.

RMOUG Training Days 2010 are in the full swing today with the University classes ongoing and that’s also the day most of my friends arriving here at Hyatt and when all the fun begins. Now that my stomach is full and Debra is off to her hotel room and Lisa is sleeping, I can finally do a quick blog post.

The flight Ottawa-Denver was quite enjoyable as it’s one of the rare direct flights from Ottawa. RMOUG volunteers pick up their guest speakers personally, which is a very nice touch, and with all this my travel to Denver feels just like a short drive to work. And that’s important if you know what we are up for tonight…

Few Oracle ACEs divers are going to jump into the pool with sharks at Denver Aquarium and show them who’s the boss. I’ll pretend to be a diving ACE as well (sh-h-h-h… don’t tell anybody I’m not). Unfortunately, it does mean that we will be late to the RMOUG speakers reception but we have to sacrifice something.

I’m sure you are dying to know what happens to us and if anybody gets eaten. If so, join us tomorrow, Wednesday 17-Feb, at the Denver Convention Center at the Oracle ACEs and ACE Directors Breakfast at 7:50am. This is your chance to ask any questions you want and get honest answers on anything from Oracle databases and Fusion Apps to diving with sharks and anything in between.

Also consider dropping by the OakTable / Apress booth to have a more private conversation with members of the OakTable Network. Traditional OakTable Challenge begins again tomorrow so if you think you have a tricky question around Oracle databases — by all means let us know. You can also tweet it using #oakrmoug. This is also a chance to get your book Expert Oracle Practices: Oracle Database Administration from the Oak Table signed by number of authors that attend the conference.

Today I’ve read the following email on the mailing list of Sydney Oracle Meetup. I thought that this question is asked many times in attempt to find a silver bullet to learning Oracle so I wanted to publish my reply here on the blog, especially, that I’m a firm believer in one silver bullet that exists — there are no silver bullets.

Hi everybody,

My name is Sebastian and I’m new in the group. Yesterday I arrived late because I had a problem at work at the very last minute. However I found the meeting super interesting.

I’d like to see if someone could give me some piece of advise… I have ZERO experience with Oracle. I’m a Software Engineer and I’ve been working for more than 7 years in development (open source technologies basically). When it comes to DBs, I have some good knowledge about MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQL Server (the only MS product I like). As OS, at the moment I’m working with Linux Ubuntu 9.04.
So, my question is what would be the best way to start working with / studying Oracle?? What can I install to actually have the DBMS running in my laptop and start writing PL/SQL?? Oracle XE??

Then, do you consider I can get any change of getting a internship position (I don’t have much free time) or what would be the best way to get started in this field? I see that ALL the positions require a lot of experience.

Sorry for writing to the whole list about a personal issue. Feel free to write me to my personal email address and thanks everybody.

I look forward to seeing you in the next meet up.

Kind Regards,
Sebastian

Sebastian,

If there is a silver bullet on how to get into new technology field than I don’t know about it. It all depends on personality and what works for you.

What I know is that I often prefer a quick learner to hire with no experience in the field but he or she must be a good thinker, analytical person and etc rather than someone with 20 years of experience in the field but not able to learn anything new in a reasonable amount of time.

On the technical side:
If you want to get into Oracle database development (and I understand it’s development you are interested in rather than administration) – Oracle XE (with APEX potentially) would do the trick. You might want also to use SQL Developer (a free tool from Oracle).

Now, installing and playing with things alone won’t make you any good so START READING good books. Also, start participating in online communities (but be careful to trust what people write there). Joining Sydney Oracle Meetup is one right step you’ve made already.

Good luck.
Alex

How many times have we heard the assurance of storage administrators (fueled by the SAN vendor’s claims) that their top-of-the-shelf SAN arrays simply cannot fail. Unfortunately, reality proves this wrong and we see it regularly with our customers.

At the moment of this writing, one of our DBA teams has just completed failover to the standby database as a result of a database crash caused by a SAN issue. A few hours have passed, and parts of these databases are still not available on the formerly primary host, but traffic is being handled just fine on the standby. This customer provides SaaS type of services. Imagine what hours of downtime would do for them and their clients?

Unfortunately, people get bitten by this overestimated (god-like I’d say) SAN reliability. It must, however, be said: SANs do fail!

Do you want such a wake up call for your executives?

The outage, blamed on an IBM storage array, saw the company’s chief technology officer promise “significant changes to the way we deploy and manage our storage environment”.

Since I mentioned one Australian example, here is one more storage failure scenario described by our friends at Open Query. There are many cases from literally any industry, and some of them are rather complicated while others are just plain obvious.

Is there a silver bullet? Well, not as solution but as a concept, yes — simply admit that SANs do fail — this what should drive infrastructure design for business continuity. Actually, I should extrapolate it to another design principle — everything fails, but that’s another story.

Time is flying and it’s hard to believe that less than a month left until the start of the next Hotsos Symposium. If you are reading this blog, there is no chance that you don’t know what Hotsos Symposium is — it’s the most authoritative conference focused around Oracle performance.

As a special thanks to Pythian customers (you do know that Hotsos is a Pythian partner, don’t you?), there is a $100 discount so please get in touch with us to receive it.

What should you expect coming to the Hotsos Symposium 2010? It’s 3 days packed with sessions on all aspects of Oracle performance optimization whether it’s design, troubleshooting, development, methodologies and processes. Legendary Tom Kyte — who else can you expect for the keynote?!

If you take an optional training day with Tanel Poder then you are likely to learn at least as much about troubleshooting Oracle database performance as you do during the conference and probably even more. Every presentation by Tanel has been an eye opener for me. If you’ve seen his material, you’d know what I’m talking about. Now, imagine that it’s not a one-hour session but the whole day! It will fry your brains so this day is for the strongest! :)

By the way, from my past experience I recall that majority of attendees stay for the optional training day and as far as I know it’s the same year after year. They can’t all be wrong again and again.

Back to the general conference, the agenda is packed with top caliber speakers this year — no surprise. There is quite a bit of new blood — seven new Hotsos speakers in addition to twenty “old-timers”.

You might have noticed my name on the list as well. That’s right. I’ll do two presentations at the symposium – “Battle Against Any Guess” and “Run-Time Load Balancing in Oracle RAC”. You probably know what the first session is about if you read the latest book by the cool bunch of OakTable Network members or joined The BAAG Party. My second presentation is the expansion of my previous Hotsos presentation on RAC workload management but this time I’ll focus exclusively on run-time load balancing.

One special thing about Hotsos Symposium is the special atmosphere at the conference:

• new unique (and sometimes crazy) ideas start at Hotsos
• old ideas are run by your peers and validated (or not)
• toughest questions gets answered

Of course, one of my personal targets at the conference is to meet good ole’ friends and hopefully make some new ones. Please do come at say hello during the symposium — I’d be glad to shake the hands of the blog readers. You could even make a more formal meeting request if you feel like it.