Oracle
I had a chance to talk to several Oracle Database Appliance users at the annual Collaborate 2012 conference last month in Las Vegas. And a common theme in this discussions, as well as discussions with Pythian clients, is an interest in using the ODA as a large-scale consolidation platform. I found this interesting and decided to dig a little further.
When preparing for the the IOUG Collaborate 12 deep dive on deploying Oracle Databases for high Availability, I wanted to provide some feedback on what hardware components are failing most frequently and which ones are less frequently. I believe I have reasonably good idea about that but I thought that providing some more objective data would be better. I couldn’t find and results of a more scientific research so I decided to organize a poll. This blog post shows the results and I promised to share it with several groups.
While doing my high availability deep dive at Collaborate 12 few weeks ago, I stated that storage replication qualifies for the cold failover licensing rules (see slide #128).During collaborate I spoke to one person at Oracle who definitely knows the rules. Simon Haslam also reached out to me by email pointing out that things might not be that rosy. I will update the slides accordingly. In any case, please do you own homework and don’t trust my conclusions here — don’t take this as a licensing advice by any means.
Our flagship tool, Support Track, is steadily migrating over to use DBIx::Class to read and manipulate our databases. This is a very useful tool, for many reasons which many people explain better than I could. One of those reasons is that — thanks to the magic of SQLite — it lets us write unit test scripts, and other quick prototyping code, without needing to set up a heavy database server to run against. However, Support Track is powered by Oracle, not SQLite, and while DBIx::Class abstracts most of the differences out of our code, it can’t completely eliminate them. How do we overcome the syntactic differences?
I spent last week at Collaborate 2012 in Las Vegas and it was really great experience in many ways. I am a MySQL DBA and have been working with MySQL for most of my career, so Collaborate didn’t seem like an obvious choice. It turned out that there are so many things that I can learn from Oracle professionals and the Oracle community which can be applied in MySQL world as well. For me an indication of a good conference is when you come back inspired and full of ideas.
Pythian’s Oracle Apps DBA team recently upgraded a client’s E-Business Suite system to version 12.1.3, bringing them into compliance with Oracle’s baseline support requirements for Release 12.1 nearly one year ahead of deadline. We’d like to tell you a bit about this project — not to toot our own horn (though that’s nice too, we are kinda proud), but because it provides an ideal illustration of the power of the Pythian service delivery model, particularly as it applies to large enterprise-class projects.
Had a very interesting experience in my “RACing up the Miles” session this morning. There were about 70 people in the room and I hope they enjoyed the session as much as I did. I discussed a wee bit of architecture about RAC and concentrated on a very basic beginner’s primer to management activities with srvctl and crsctl.
Day 2 of COLLABORATE and no distractions like hockey to tend with today. I have seen a nice balance between new technology and the traditional offerings in the Oracle tech space. These user group shows, in some ways, are the bastion of the technologies which, as “old” as they may be, are still in use and of interest to many attendees.
I started my day with a BIG DATA (must be in CAPS please :)) session by the Ian Abramson. I have heard quite a buzz about this topic for some time and the buzz is getting louder. I always love to hear about the multi-terabyte data structures/databases as it reminds me of the first time I went from a 20Mb to a 40Mb hard disk on an 8086.
Whilst we all embark on this magical journey called “COLLABORATE”, keep in the back of your mind what this conference is all about. This event is driven by volunteers … 100% in their spare time; logging hundreds of hours altogether to make your experience as education-centric as possible. It is a powerful way to spend your volunteer time-working alongside others with the single goal of making the event as worthwhile for the attendees as possible.
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