As the the Icelandic volcano ashes are clearing out and we finally have high hopes of flight home, I want to post the slides of the two presentations I did.
My first presentation was a double slot session about Oracle Clusterware internals. Presenting first thing in the morning on the first day is not easy at this event. Miracle Open World traditionally organized as 160% conference with 80% of technical content and 80% of networking and social interactions. Of course, the last 80% go deep into the night. Needless to say that 5am wake up call was tough — I had to craft few more slides to add some 11gR2 information and publish the first production of We Do Not Use TV Studio.
But I felt surprisingly well and fresh. The presentation itself was quite dynamic and all demos worked as planned except pausing OPROCD — 50/50 that eviction happens during my actions and it took me 10 time to repeat it. I couldn’t recall that I was lucky more than twice in a row until that session but… things happen. You can see the slides below for the reference. However, without the text and demos behind the slides, they are not very useful I’m afraid.
The second presentations was way more difficult for me to carry — not only because it was the topic that I much less proficient with but because the previous night was even longer and more intense with waterpark adventures (and I tell you, it was the best waterpark ever — well done!). The good news is that both I and Graham Wood went to bed at the same time and we had our presentations at the same slot (and I think we consumed comparable amount of magic liquids). Of course, we woke up synchronously and been in sync the whole day including our conditions that we managed to significantly improve before 11:30am when our sessions started. I was afraid that it may turn into disaster but it turned out to be reasonably well especially that I had an excuse if I couldn’t remember what I was talking about — I just reached out for the water and everyone could understand. :)
So my second presentation was about how we designed and run 1TB MySQL database in high availability setup. I’m not a hardcore MySQL DBA but learned enough about it to talk smart things and thanks to my special interest in everything HA, I actually could talk real deal. Slides are here for your reference.
Perhaps, I manage to publish more details and photos from that fantastic conference later so stay tuned. For now, I could tell that it was the longest Oracle conference ever.
I’m in Denmark these days at the wonderful Oracle conference organized by Miracle A/S — Miracle OpenWorld 2010. This is the sort of 80/80 conferences that we all love — we spend 80% of our time on technical content and 80% on networking with your peer. Of course, you have to sacrifice something like sleep but such is life.
Opening session was something special this year (as if it’s non-special any other year) — Jonathan Lewis was talking about something that he admitted he is not an expert in! He was presenting about Microsoft SQL Server and whether it’s and Enterprise-ready RDBMS. His conclusions were positive.
The opening was rounded up with a new film production demo from We Do Not Use TV Studio.
Of course, the strongest continued in the party house as usual. This year it was Mogen’s house and I still didn’t see him this morning. Because my presentation starts at 9am in the morning I had to leave the party early but we still managed to stick around past 1am sipping very nice and smooth tequila brought by Graham Wood.
Time to grab a bite and get ready to my dual-slot presentation — Under the Hood of Oracle Clusterware which is the very first presentation of today. More to come — stay tuned.
I’m excited to announce that Chen Shapira has started with Pythian this week. :) Chen is no stranger here and many of my colleagues already know her and were in touch — she just naturally fits in.
Chen is the world class production Oracle DBA. She has been maintaining a popular Oracle blog and is a great addition to Pythian bloggers — Chen posted on Pythian blog before her actual official join date authoring Log Buffer last week. She is also on Twitter and you can follow her @gwenshap. Turns out that even Pythian SQL Server DBA’s are frequent readers of her blog — who knew?
Welcome Chen to the Pythian team! I’m sure you are already working on acceptance testing of that new Oracle 11g RAC cluster that is slated to go live… eh… this weekend? ;-)
Update 9-Apr-10: The documentation was pulled out from public which is expected. Looks like someone “leaked” it hoping that it won’t be discovered without being referenced from the OTN. Guess, what? How many of us who expected it and downloaded it locally just in case? ;-) – documentation is back.
There you can find the list of EM 11g new features. After I quickly skimmed through it I could mention few areas:
Full blown Fusion Middleware management support
More complete support for RAC, Grid Infrastructure and ASM
Integration with My Oracle Support
Improvements in provisioning (I hope it really works now and can actually start saving us time and not make us spend more time troubleshooting failures)
Better virtualization support (must be focused on Oracle VM though)
Here is the surprise you might not have expected — you now need to install Oracle WebLogic Server 10.3.2 (Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g Release 1 Patch Set 1) as a pre-requisite to Oracle Grid Control installation. It doesn’t come pre-packaged with an application server as was the case with iAS in EM 10g release. I fully expected that EM 11g will run on WebLogic Server infrastructure but installation might a bit less straightforward for some of you.
But worry not — managing WebLogic Server is generally easier than managing iAS. Plus you all wanted to learn Oracle Fusion Middleware. Didn’t you?
So my conclusion is that EM11g is not a breakthrough in terms of re-design, navigation in the user interface and functionality. However, it has the new engine under the hood which I’m personally very excited about.
If you answer anything else but something like “last month and every month before that”, then you are probably in troubles. Learn from Wikipedia’s Data Center Overheating.
It doesn’t mean that they didn’t regularly test their disaster recovery process. Maybe they did but the failover mechanism was broken after the last test.
A regular DR procedure validation is designed to minimize the risk of a broken process to go unnoticed. If the failure is detected during a regular switchover process, you are prepared to handle it way better (or potentially just leave services on the currently primary site) than during emergency failover when you get to the “Oh shit!” moment under the tremendous pressure to get services back.
The business has to find the balance between switchover frequency, the risk they are prepared to take and change management processes (the more cowboy-style you operate, the higher the risk and more often you need to test your DR scenario).
Most of our customer leveraging regular DR switchovers, do it every month or two and run for a while on either site as a primary. This is ideal scenario and I wish everyone can adhere to the similar business continuity strategies. Do you?
I see that some don’t even know the difference between OpenSolaris and commercial Oracle Solaris (former Sun Solaris 10)!
Wake up people! Oracle did make commercial Solaris 10… eh… commercial, that is. They (well, Sun but Oracle paid big $$ for it) have invested lots into Solaris IP and they have full rights to actually charge money for it and they probably should. Struggling Sun made commercial Solaris free to use in desperation to maintain their rapidly shrinking market share. Oracle doesn’t need that – they are not desperate. You’ve made the right decision Oracle – keep Solaris commercial and use these funds to continue developing this great operating system (or whatever makes business sense).
Having said all this, what does it have to do with OpenSolaris? Nothing!
OpenSolaris was and is free. I have just quickly skimmed through the licensing (Binary License and CDDL) and there are no caveats that I can see like 90 days limitation or whatsoever. All the OpenSolaris goodies are still available to everyone for free.
Whining starts that Oracle will not contribute to OpenSolaris anymore. Come on people! Couldn’t you just appreciate what’s been done already and what a great product OpenSolaris is? If you forgot what open-source is about, it’s about community contributions and not about a single vendor giving away it’s IP so that everyone around can scream how great open-source movement is what great products it produces. If one vendor pulls out and community can’t sustain product development, then the product cannot live its normal open-source life.
Get over it! Want a high quality software with great support without any fuss? Pay $$. Want a high quality free open-source software? Make it happen!
I’m excited to share the news that Oracle ACE program has been extended to cover MySQL community now and Pythian’s Sheeri Cabral has become the very first Oracle ACE Director in MySQL expertize area. It’s a special privilege for me to blog about it because I had a pleasure to nominate Sheeri in the first place. Being an Oracle ACE Director myself and knowing what’s involved, I believed that if Oracle ACE program is extended to MySQL, Sheeri must be the number one candidate.
It’s impossible to overestimate Sheeri’s role in the MySQL community — her advocacy for the technology and commitment to building and supporting the community. She’s been presenting about MySQL countless number of times and been actively involved in several community projects and organizations. She blogs frequently and with passion. It’s no surprised that Sheeri has been awarded MySQL’s Community Advocate, Communicator and Facilitator of the Year for two years in a row (2007 and 2008).
Sheeri has already been engaged in Oracle ACE activities when she co-presented with Oracle ACE Director Dan Norris during Oracle Open World 2008 — So You Want to Be and Oracle ACE?. Back then, Sheeri shared what it means to be a truly community advocate and contributor, regardless which technology you are using. Now that Oracle and MySQL database technologies live under the single umbrella, I’m very excited to see that communities are uniting as well.
I know that there are more excellent candidates for Oracle ACE program so if you think of someone, read the guidelines and nominate that person. Oracle ACE program does look for more MySQL participants. Remember that Oracle ACE program is about recognizing community contributors and advocates — see Oracle ACE program FAQ for more details on how nominations work.
Sheeri, congratulations and welcome to the Oracle ACE program.
I’m excited to share the news that 
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