In the era of consolidation, storage has not been left out. Different systems are made to share the same storage boxes, fiber-channel switches and networks. Inside a typical storage box, we have front-end and back-end controllers, cache, physical spindles shared amongst different applications, databases, backup destinations, and so on.

The impact of backup on normal database activity . . . batch processing in one database impacting transactional processing — these are two real life examples of the consequences of storage consolidation known to almost every DBA. Of course, it’s easy to suggest separating databases to different physical disks, but what about SAN box controllers and shared cache? And don’t forget about the cost factor and ubiquitous consolidation that forces storage administrators to pack as much data as possible into a single SAN or NAS storage device.

Some of our customers use hosting services — they outsource hardware hosting just like they outsource DBA work to Pythian. In such scenarios, hosting service providers usually have storage hardware shared amongst different customers to provide higher utilization and on-demand storage capacity at a lower cost.

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Mind you this was actually written more than a week ago but I didn’t have time to review and upload the photos on time so sorry for this delay.

I’m on the plane back to Canada and I’m extremely satisfied with the conference this year. I should say that I found it harder to keep up in the evenings with some slightly non-sober DBA’s around and get up “early” in the mornings to visit several good morning technical sessions. You might blame age but I shouldn’t complain… not yet, at least!

Enough whining… This is my final UKOUG 2007 post as you might have figured already so let’s get to it.

The last day was the shortest but the most difficult. I set my alarm at 8AM and it worked, unfortunately. I got up but couldn’t find my way around bouncing from the walls and bumping into the corners so I had to catch another couple hours of sleep. I could only wake up after 10 and by the time I took a shower, packed my luggage and checked out, it’s almost the middle of Doug Burns’ presentation and I didn’t want to disturb his speech which was very good I heard. Christo’s presentation was over by that time but I saw it already anyway in a full 60 minutes format so I didn’t really need a 45 minutes refresher. In addition, I can always shout in the office if I need an answer to a memory questions.

I waited in the speaker lounge until Doug’s session is over and used this opportunity to chat with few other speakers and later bumped into Lisa Dobson (or did she bump into me?). I had an interesting observation that we both were whispering and my explanation would be that we didn’t want to bother several other speakers who were focused on work, presentations and emails. There is another theory as well but I like this one more. ;-)
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This message is for our readers mostly located in UK and Europe but keep reading even if you are far away geographically - nothing is impossible in our digital age and you might actually consider traveling there in case of desperate interest. Your feedback would be useful, either way.

What I want to draw your attention to is that Jonathan Lewis has posted a call for attendees for a special event dedicated to virtualization technologies with Oracle. This event is considered by UKOUG and whether it happens or not depends on you.

I had a brief discussion with Jonathan at the UKOUG Conference in Birmingham last week and shared significant interest about virtualization that I can see from our customers as well as a fear cloud around it. From my point of view, an event dedicated to virtualization technologies would be very timely now to satisfy quickly growing interest and provide real world experience in addition to publicly available marketing-like information from different vendors. Knowing high quality of UKOUG events, I’m sure that this would be a great forum to share ideas and learn what others do with virtualization.

Have a quick look here if haven’t done so already especially if you are closer to managerial role or wear architect’s hat rather than DBA’s one. It’s not only about host virtualization but also network, storage and other resources.

Yesterday morning, I let myself to sleep longer — I had to be rested before my presentation as the previous evening went quite late. I also had to review my slides and, finally, complete them with couple finishing touches. That means I couldn’t make couple morning sessions. I decided to go to a presentation about Enterprise Manager. Not that I was aiming to learn something new about the product but I was interested to compare my experience with others and the sessions served the purpose quite well.

My own presentation went probably well as far as I could judge following up with people later in the day. The session was in Hall 5, which is a relatively large room — it fits 300+ people. However, the problem in the room was that the light on the speaker (me) was very bright and the light on the audience was dimmed so I couldn’t really see the faces! That meant I couldn’t see the nods, whether the audience is following me as well as their reaction so I couldn’t be sure that my jokes worked (I think I heard few snickers) and this made me even more worrying. According to the information from a reliable source, I looked more worried than usual. I’m afraid this time I couldn’t hide it well enough - I’m always tense at my presentation.

Just before my session I bumped into Jonathan Lewis during lunch time and he asked me if it’s true that I fell asleep in the middle of his session. To give you some background, (more…)

ORA-600 [42].

Well, this was a nice Oracle Bloggers Meetup this year. It was less crowded compare to last year which is a bit surprising if you think about it — there are more and more Oracle bloggers around. On the other hand, it let me focus more talking to participants of Oracle blogosphere and other social networking Oracle related crowd and I met quite a few new faces.

On the other hand, I liked more last year’s blogging gathering when there were 3 events clashing together with larger crowd. I also think that few key personalities were missing this year but that’s life.
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As you probably guessed I didn’t have a chance for a nap yesterday as I mentioned. All the usual suspects gathered in the Jury’s Inn pub sipping beer. Some of us went for dinner in the Indian restaurant after which I ended up in All Bar One and then later in Tap and Spile with more traditional old style atmosphere and nice selection of ales on tap. Even though they had Guinness, I decided to enjoy London Pride premium ale — very smooth with interesting combination of flavors. Indeed, “the sensation of angels dancing on the tongue” as described by Stephen Cox, a famous beer writer. But that was yesterday so moving on…

Unjustifiably early start today at 6:30 (your fault Christo). After registration, we tried to find some breakfast across the bridge from the rear entrance to the ICC but no luck. I always wanted to have a breakfast on the boat that is parked on the canal below the bridge and this morning we decided to wait until 9AM when it supposed to be open for breakfast according to the ad on it. No luck - it was still closed and looked dead at 9:05 and 15 minutes later I saw the boat leaving.

We had interesting speaker gifts — motion powered torch and radio:
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Christo Kutrovsky and me arrived in Birmingham today - just 6+ hours direct flight from Ottawa to London and two and a half hours on the bus - not too bad compare to 30+ hours travel from Melbourne to Ottawa earlier this week. It’s cloudy with sporadic rain drops but warm. We couldn’t checking at 11 AM and leaving our luggage behind, went for a short walk and some lunch.

I was very surprised to find German-style Kristkindlmarkt in Birmingham - Christmas Market:

Birmingham is very nice. Christo loves its European neatness and style — he enjoys “walking” cities. After lunch (it was OK) we checked in Copthorne Hotel and I asked for a room with internet — not every room has it, apparently. The internet cost is just £9.95 for the duration of the whole stay. It ACTUALLY says £20 for 24 hours DURING online registration but the hotel staff assured me it’s a mistake. I hope they know it better on reception.
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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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