Kenny Tilton writes a blog that is mostly about LISP programming, but today he posted about database troubleshooting, and he anecdotally illustrates and elaborates on a law of troubleshooting that I strongly agree with: Always solve the first problem. Based on the way this law is named, I suspect it is his own.

In a nutshell, any time there is a multiplicity of problems affecting an endeavour, simplify mercilessly until you have only one problem left. Then solve that one.

The corollary to his law is that “there only is the first problem.” I’m not sure I entirely agree with that one, but I will admit that that corollary is true at least 90% of the time, which is often enough to make it an incredibly useful insight.

Brilliant stuff! Read it.

Courtesy of our friends at Oracle cost containment company Miro Consulting, I am giving a webinar tomorrow at 1pm EST (click this link for the time in other timezones please.

The subject I’ve chosen is how to apply the best practices around advanced supply management that are extremely successful and mature in the product supply chain world to the equally extremely immature practices we typically find in enterprise IT supply provisioning.

It should be a great presentation; I give an overview of the famous “Toyota Way” and cover some recent findings from the California Management Review as well.

The first point of the webinar is gaining an understanding of what the “supply management promise” really is - in broad terms it means achieving double-digit annual compound cost savings on the resource being supplied. The second point of the webinar is to discuss the methods for achieving this recurring savings and how to apply them to IT services.

This isn’t easy and requires substantial discipline, leadership and often even attitudinal change and leadership from the purchaser, and of course a vendor that is committed to passing on those savings to their customer, something that is culturally de rigueur in the product/manufacturing space, but highly unusually in the IT infrastructure management space (since claiming those savings are typically the vendor’s profit model). Of course, the Pythian approach is highly compatible with the application of advanced supply management strategies, whereas most outsourcing companies in the IT infrastructure and architecture space are very much not. Interestingly enough, the fully-insourced approach to enterprise data and systems management is also incapable of delivering the savings (because of the substantial cost in morale and team cohesion of claiming any should they materialize).

The target audience for this presentation is executives responsible for the IT infrastructure spend, often CFOs, COOs and CTOs who have an oversight role not only for the database licensing cost, but also for the operational cost of IT infrastructure ownership. A technical audience will learn about how Pythian works and how we position our offering to the executive suite purchaser.

I’ll do my best to get the audio and slides up on our website in the coming days.

As I mentioned, the presentation is being hosted and sponsored by Miro, a great partner of Pythian’s, and I blogged about Miro once before, here. You can register for the presentation by following this link: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/204538076. Although the presentation is sponsored by Miro and they focus on Oracle, the presentation is not at all Oracle-specific and the techniques I discuss within it are highly appropriate for customers of Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server or MySQL.

Doug’s got the scoop but I’m not above adding fuel to the fire. Please join me in encouraging Cary Millsap in making regular appearances on his new blog. Cary, my personal story - one of my first and most vivid memories of taking on a DBA role was when my mentor, Guy Arteau, bringing me a copy of your OFA paper with great awe and reverence and suggesting I study it carefully. Last I heard, Guy had become a VP at CGI; I should look him up and catch up. That was January 1994. Best wishes for continued success!

Paul

I’m sorry that I haven’t commented on the BEA acquisition. It’s just been too obvious for too long, I can’t get excited even though it’s really really big. Manifest destiny manifested, that’s it.

On the other hand…

Tip of the hat to Lucas Jellema at AMIS who posts his own commentary on the acquisition and also provides this great find where
Springsource CEO Rod Johnson comments at length on the deal. Rod leads an open-source software company and I agree with Lucas that there is a hint of jealousy hidden inside all that enthusiasm!

Take-away:

Another link between these acquisitions are that Sun and Oracle now appear to be on a collision course. Oracle history shows their utter determination to crush any competitors in the database space, and their ability to do so. Sun is now a competitor in that highly profitable core business. With the loss of momentum from JBoss, the Java EE application server market now looks set to be a two-horse race between IBM and Oracle. Glassfish gives Sun a dark horse in this race, but it’s unclear whether this market category will show the growth to accommodate a new entrant, given the growing predominance of Tomcat as a production platform.

The only criticism of the deal I could possibly give is that MySQL is still on the early phase of an exponential adoption curve and I think they’ve got lots of growth yet to come.

But really, a billion dollars has a lot if not most of that growth factored into the price already.

Think of what they get: huge mindshare in a 30,000 person company with an established presence and sales channel throughout the world. They get that mindshare because that same company is one that has struggled to find the next big thing, the next huge thing that is going to change the landscape of enterprise IT. Well they’ve found it. And they’re going to get to work on making it happen.

Not to mention that while Sun has not always open-sourced as early as they should have, once they do open-source software they’re pretty much always done the right thing by the community of users.

Not to mention that the nice thing about open-source is that we don’t really have to worry too much about it; it’s Sun’s problem to get ROI on a billion buckaroonees but if they give up at any point, we can fork it and take back over. We can actually do that now if we need to. I remember when Oracle bought RDB and then proceeded to kill it gently with neglect. The only way they could get away with that is because they owned the source. MySQL is not vulnerable to that kind of strategy.

And if I were a founder, I’d much rather go to Sun than to Google or to Yahoo, the other likely targets (mostly because of their vast adoption of MySQL coupled with deep pockets). Sun is a product company, a software company, and a support company, that actually sells these things, knows how to sell them successfully and take them to market long-term. And it’s filled with geniuses who are dying to hook to the next big thing.

In my opinion, a great move by MySQL.

P.S. I have started to reflect on how this changes the challenge posed by MySQL to Oracle. I think it changes it a lot, and in fact makes it a much more difficult challenge. I may post on that subject too if I can scrounge the time.

I was blog-tagged by Doug Burns - his post is here: I *hate* chain letters ….

I hate them too, I literally never pass them on no matter what vile fate that condemns me to (so far nothing has happened so maybe those are idle threats). But this one includes a chance to talk about myself without seeming too self-involved, and there wasn’t even a threat of eternal damnation if I don’t do it. So let’s proceed then!

8 things about me that aren’t common knowledge:

1. I was born in Windsor, Ontario, Canada, which is just south of Detroit, Michigan. I celebrated my thirteenth birthday in Montpellier, France, where my entire family relocated for a year. I moved to Ottawa for school when I was 17, and lived in Minneapolis Minnesota for a year in 1996-97 where I worked for a great company called Pragmatek. I am a French-Canadian, but my English is unaccented. Unless you count my outrageous Canadian accent, eh?
2. I was 17 years old when I started my university education. This has everything to do with how much I hated high school, and nothing to do with me being “smart”. Even though I hated high school, I was voted most likely to succeed at my graduation ceremony to my incredible shock and embarassment. Since that award is by any definition a popularity contest, I am still and always will be puzzled as to how that happened.
3. I’ve always loved UNIX or UNIX-like operating systems, and UNIX servers. No, seriously, from a young age. When I moved to Ottawa for University, my father co-signed a loan for me (around $3500) to buy a used Sun workstation for my dorm room (this was an upgrade from a CP/M box, guess which!). Everybody else had PCs. I traded in that Sun for a NeXT a few years later.
4. My heroes are Carl Sagan who more than anyone else inspired in me a sense of wonder and awe for the universe we live in, and ingrained in me a deep love for science and the scientific method; and Steve Jobs, who more than anyone else inspired in me a sense of appreciation for excellence, appreciation for genius, and the importance of generating passion and excitement in your work (that excitement and passion must always start with yourself.) That’s a favourite Steve Jobs article linked there, which was especially influential to me.
5. I am a sucker for a good analogy. I think with them, I love them, and I use them all the time when trying to explain or convince. My staff and customers tease me about that continuously.
6. My first real Oracle exposure was in a project on Oracle 5. Not because that was current, it was incredibly obsolete already (I’m talking about 1993 here!). But it was what we had. That and a current version of SAS. We wrote most of our stuff to SAS. I started working with Oracle in earnest in 1996, doing a huge Oracle 6 to Oracle 7 migration on VMS.
7. I was 25 years old in 1997, when I co-founded Pythian. At the time, we had to bundle Internet services and VPN hardware (and even leased-lines) with our services since our customers typically didn’t already have Internet. My how times have changed.
8. We post family pictures here. That beautiful family is composed of my partner of 12 years Nicole, my 3 year-old son Felix and my 16 month old daughter Clementine. I’m going to wrap this post up and go home to them now.

So… now who to tag? I think I’m going to spread this out somewhat from the Oracle-only blogosphere. I’m not sure about tagging 8 people - can that really be how it works? Here goes…

1. Christo Kutrovsky
2. Yasin Baskan
3. Radoslav Rusinov
4. Sheeri Kritzer
5. George Trujillo
6. Craig Mullins
7. Adam Machanic
8. Ronald Bradford

I try to do a decent job of advocating for caring about good backups and business continuity strategies in my 7 Deadly Habits article.

But this one beats them all:

Just too funny and great not to share. Found via this reddit article, where there is a lively discussion underway.

Hello everyone,

We have several MySQL DBA openings, one in each of our offices in Ottawa, Boston, or Hyderabad, India. (Our Sydney office is doin’ fine.)

Working at Pythian is different than working in-house or as a consultant, because you’ll be making your contributions available to each of the customers assigned to your team, allowing you to see more use cases, more technologies, and work with more and varied environments, all the while building interesting and long-lasting working relationships with your peers. I will gladly sponsor a work visa for the right candidate anywhere in the world.

We support some of the most interesting internet-scale MySQL environments in the world, including major environments for Fox Interactive Media, Videoegg.com, Electronic Arts, and Renkoo.com.

Top Criteria

• Outstanding MySQL production administration and server tuning skills, bonus points for cluster, partitioning, and major implementation and upgrades experience
• Exceptional troubleshooting, problem-solving and learning skills
• Superior productivity per hour and overall getting-the-job-done-right abilities
• Fluent communication skills in English, both written and oral, are mandatory. Second or third languages are also a plus (we have customers all over the world and are always eager to add a language to our repertoire)
• Stored procedure, trigger, view and nonstandard storage engine experience a plus (such as SoliddDB, the Amazon S3 engine, Falcon, etc.)
• Interest or experience in publications, blogging, and presentations a plus

Job Highlights

• Work on an elite team of DBAs for an elite and growing group of customers; you’ll learn more here in a year than in any in-house DBA job no matter how long you stay; I personally guarantee it.
• Work and gain valuable experience on every mainstream platform, including AIX, HP/UX, Solaris, Linux, Tru64, Windows, etc. We many not run MySQL on all of those platforms, but we certainly run enterprise infrastructure on one team or another on each of those and more. If you’re interested in technology, there a lot of it in use here and that makes it a great place to be.
• Learn and support every mainstream technology and feature, including cluster, advanced replication, GIS, etc. etc.
• Work across multiple industries including health care, manufacturing, media, dot-com, education, retail, services, and many more.
• Work in a company that values hard work, not long work.
• Work in a company that allows you to research and write articles, presentations and blog posts on company time, and pays for you to present your research at just about any user conference worldwide.
• There is also the obvious opportunity to learn Oracle and SQL Server, if you don’t already know those platforms. We here at Pythian are about the data, first and foremost. So keep your platform advocacy for the conferences, mmmkay? We love ‘em all ’round these parts.
• Consult for high-profile customers all around the world without leaving the office. This is really the most awesome part; almost any other job on the planet that remotely lets you see this much tech has you traveling like mad. Not us.

To Apply

Send us an email with a one-paragraph introduction of who you are and why you are exceptional at hr@pythian.com. Feel free to attach your résumé in any format — text, Word, PDF, RTF, ODT, whatever makes you happy.

If this post seems a bit like an “advertorial”, please believe me — it’s not. Well, at least it’s not an advertisement for Pythian in any way. What it is, however, is a post about a longstanding business partner of Pythian’s who run a very useful service I think more of you should know about. Rest assured there is nothing “in it” for me or for Pythian for writing this. (Doug, I look forward to hearing you out on whether this post was appropriate or not!)

As background, supply management as a discipline has grown leaps and bounds for managing the quality and cost of parts. I was reminded of this today as I was reading this outstanding analysis by the Boston Consulting Group of Toyota’s supply-management process and its related successes.

Supply management for services is a different matter altogether, and has not really achieved this level of discipline. I will save a blog posting on that subject for another day, as it turns out that the Pythian model actually enables some more advanced supply management methods to apply to infrastructure-management services. But as I’ve already said, this article isn’t about Pythian.

It turns out that there is a way to apply sophisticated supply management techniques to your database licensing costs in quite an efficient, turnkey manner, and that way is simply to outsource this work to Miro. I recommend this to Pythian customers all the time.

(more…)

Hot on the heels of my publishing our Applications DBA opening in Ottawa, Canada earlier this week, we now have an apps DBA opening in our office in Hyderabad as well.

Needless to say, we are seeing rapid uptake of our outsourced E-Business Suite 11i management services.

I have a senior Oracle Applications DBA opening at Pythian’s office in Hyderabad, India. This opening pays on an international payscale, meaning that I am ideally looking for an elite candidate working for a compensation plan in the 25-35 lacs range TCE. Remember, Pythian is not in India to save money on payroll, Pythian is in India to staff an elite workforce in that timezone. Feel free to apply if you aren’t at the 25+ lacs pa range yet in your career and let us decide.

The candidate I am looking for is delighted and excited with the apps dba workload and does not have aspirations to managing a big team. If you are my ideal candidate, you are the kind of person who thinks implementing Apps on RAC is exciting, or moving a large company’s Apps from Solaris to Linux would be super fun, or even just doing a massive 12i upgrade or installation sounds just dreamy. You will actually be doing these things. You will not have a team of 5-7 people doing them for you.

Working at Pythian is different than working in-house or as a consultant, because you’ll be making your contributions available to each of the customers assigned to your team, allowing you to see more use cases, more technologies, and work with more and varied environments, all the while building interesting and long-lasting working relationships with your peers.

The Hyderabad office is ideally situated in the Somajiguda district of Hyderabad, pretty much right downtown, or as downtown as downtown can be in a city that has a lake smack dab in the middle of it.

We support some of the most interesting and mission-critical Oracle Applications environments in the world, including one that is FDA-regulated in support of a global biosciences company. Meaning lives are at stake. It doesn’t get any more mission-critical, or more personally rewarding, than that.

Top criteria:

• Outstanding Oracle Apps DBA on UNIX skills, bonus points for Apps RAC and major implementation and upgrades experience
• Exceptional troubleshooting, problem-solving and learning skills
• Superior productivity per hour and overall getting-the-job-done-right abilities
• Fluent communication skills in English, both written and oral, are mandatory. Second or third languages are also a huge benefit (we have customers all over the world and are always eager to add a language to our repertoire)
• Core DBA skills are a prerequisite for Apps DBA at this level, but you know that already
• Publications, blogging and presentations experience and interest a plus
• Experience with Oracle Applications Server and Portal a plus
• SAP, Peoplesoft and other ERP experience a plus

Job highlights:

• Work in an elite team of Apps DBAs for an elite group and growing of customers; you’ll learn more here in a year than in any in-house DBA job no matter how long you stay; I personally guarantee it.
• Work and gain valuable experience on every mainstream platform, including AIX, HP/UX, Solaris, Linux, Tru64, Windows, etc.
• Support every mainstream database technology and feature, including Oracle RAC, advanced queuing, advanced replication, every flavour of dataguard, RMAN, streams, etc. etc.
• Work across multiple industries including health care, manufacturing, media, dot-com, education, retail, services, and many more.
• Work in a company that values hard work, not long work.
• Work in a company that will allow you to research and write articles, presentations and blog posts on company time, and pay for you to present your research at just about any user conference worldwide where it gets accepted.

Learn more about Pythian and see our customer list at http://www.pythian.com.

To apply:

Send me an email with a one-paragraph introduction of who you are and why you are exceptional to me at vallee@pythian.com. Feel free to attach your resume in any format (Word, PDF, RTF, ODT, whatever makes you happy.)