For those of you who didn’t see the Larry Ellison’s keynote here it is courtesy to Sheeri.

We cut out the HP part but I don’t think anyone will complain. It’s not the best angle but we didn’t get there early in advance to secure the right location for the camera.

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Here’s a cool video of Alex Gorbachev commenting on the Ellison announcements today to Oracle corporate communications, just moments after the end of the keynote:

It’s my first Oracle Open World so I get a bit frustrated by the magnitude if the event. I think I’m getting used to it now and it’s easier to find my way around and orient in what I want to see.

First, few words about my presentation on Sunday — Under the Hood of Oracle Clusterware. The hall was packed full and, unfortunately, few people were not even let it as I learned later. The session went very well and I should, perhaps, send you to other blogs with responses instead of my subjective perspective.

This conference, I’ve spent more time than usual hanging around instead of sitting on the presentations. My favorite place is OTN Lounge — it’s nice and quiet. It also seems to be a de facto place for many folks to meet — no tough time seeking for old friends and good chances making new ones.

On Monday, I gave a short interview (truveo youtube) about Oracle entering cloud computing after the Andy Mendelson’s keynote. Andy had tough job on his keynote as he didn’t have much new-features-ammo but I enjoyed couple demos from Mark Townsend. In the first dome I liked OEM’s GUI to the real time SQL monitoring — nice visual representation of the the progress through the execution plan.

Backup to Amazon S3 storage service was quite amazing to see. Obviously, there will be many concerns over security but what a great way to take your backups off-site!

Lots of buzz about the X key note that will be just in couple hours and even non-OOW attendees are rumoring about it.

Well, what can I say? This about the following:
- Oracle acquisition strategy is quite clear
- There are some “small” fish providing interesting data warehouse solutions
- ASM is there for a reason and must be a good layer for tight integration with storage
- IO is the ultimate performance bottleneck these days (if everything else done right)
- You would enjoy this public document - Projects at Oracle

Alright, stay tuned — I’ll take the advantage of my blogger credentials to have a good sit during the X keynote and plan to have the blog posted right away…

If you track the database world outside of MySQL, you know that Oracle is having a conference this week. It’s called Oracle Open World. Drips with irony doesn’t it? But this post isn’t about Oracle being open or otherwise.

This post is about the announcement being made Wednesday. It seems Oracle has a surprise. A pretty well kept surprise. It’s such a big deal that Larry Ellison himself is making the announcement.

Some people, including some of my colleagues at Pythian, are speculating that this is going to be an announcement about a share-nothing clustering solution.

In the first quarter of 2007, I interviewed with a company in Atlanta, seeking my first full-time job as a MySQL database administrator. They were an online company building a social-networking website with a virtual world interface (kind of like Second Life, from what I understood). They were using an (at the time) fairly unstable version of MySQL 5.1 only because it offered clustering with the ability to store data on disk while keeping the indexes in memory. Previously, in version 5.0, everything had to be stored in-memory. Much has improved with MySQL clustering since that time.

While I don’t know for certain that Larry is going to announce in-memory clustering, I kind of hope that is what it’s all about, because it would demonstrate this: Oracle is walking a trail blazed by MySQL.

Gavin Newsome, mayor of San Francisco, and Ed Begley, Jr. talk about being green, and commend Oracle and Oracle OpenWorld for being green.

Watch the video online or download the 19 Mb flash video file

Watch the video online or download the 18 Mb flash video file

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Larry Ellison is announcing a major new feature this Wednesday at Open World. For the first time in a while, his keynote is dedicated to the “database” as opposed to the usual high level ERP/Apps/Fusion. Even the title of his keynote is catchy — “Extreme Performance”.

Oracle has been keeping the new feature a secret. Even the 11gR2 beta program had very few participants to prevent information leaking out. It’s, “Something’s coming, but I am not telling what.”

Okay, it worked on me, I’m excited about it. Let’s think what it could be. What single database feature is so major, that Larry himself will announce it during OpenWorld?

What do we know so far?

• Starting with the obvious, Larry’s keynote is “Extreme Performance”, so it’s related to performance.
• We know Kevin Closson has worked on it - he had a blog entry saying “I am working on something big” that got pulled off the web. (Here’s Google’s cache.)

Given these two point, let’s further think about it. What do we know about Kevin?

• He worked for PolyServe — a company whose main product is a cluster file system.
• He worked for Sequent on NUMA systems, which in today’s world is pretty close to cluster software with a very fast, low latency interconnect.
• He is an expert in storage systems and disk performance.
• He joined Oracle recently, possibly to work on this secret project.
• He must be really excited about it, to post anything on his blog under radio silence.

I think it’s something related to storage, something new and revolutionary about storage. But what?

We already know, from leaks on certain websites, that ASM will become a cluster filesystem which will allow storing OCR files, as well as user files, on the ASM disks.

But is this big enough? It’s definitely significant. Now you get a “free” reliable, cluster file system with Oracle. I don’t think it’s big enough though. Oracle already had OCFS and OCFS2. So it’s not something new to release a filesystem. And even if ASM becomes a true filesystem, that would not provide such a significant performance boost to warrant a keynote called “Extreme Performance”. An ASM filesystem would be a major manageability feature, not so much a performance feature.

That being ruled out, what could it be?

Recently, when setting up a new 11g database on a server with 128gb of RAM, I was setting up hugepages as usual, and thinking about how big my cache would be. It struck me that the cache will be bigger than the database for quite a while. Why do we even need the SAN/Datafiles?!

Then it hit me.

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To start off the conference, the first keynote at Oracle OpenWorld took a break from technology and veered into the world of politics. The official conference description says:

Washington’s best-loved political couple Mary Matalin and James Carville entertain the crowd with a bitingly humorous look at the world of politics.

Indeed, there was humor, and politics. For a light-hearted yet factual look at US politics, watch the video by streaming directly in your browser or download the 176 Mb Flash video file.

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Next week, Dan Norris and I will collaborate on a presentation at Oracle Openworld 2008. Our presentation, entitled So, You Want to be an Oracle ACE?, will be on Monday, 9/22, from 11:30 am - 12:30 pm in Moscone South, room 310 — that’s the very first conference slot.

We’ve already put together our presentation, with input from many Oracle ACEs and Oracle ACE directors, complete with some great video clips. I’m excited and honored to be presenting with Dan. The official description of our presentation is:

The Oracle ACE program recognizes those who provide sustained community contributions, among other criteria. An Oracle ACE director, this session’s speaker emphasizes the value of community involvement and spends much time volunteering. It can be hard to know where and how to start. An intro to what community means (especially to Oracle) and specific volunteer activities may be all some people need to start. The session covers benefits of becoming involved in the community–so you can convince your manager to let you do so on company time.

We will also be presenting Tuesday afternoon as part of the unconference at 3 pm in Overlook I.

As I am a first-time Oracle Open World attendee, I’m a bit overwhelmed — there are over 1700 presentations! I’ll have my coworker, Alex Gorbachev as a guide, but if you see me, say hi — don’t let the speaker badge fool you, I will likely be pretty lost. :)

If a MySQL DBA from Pythian goes to Oracle Open World, it would be a shame not to send an Oracle bloke, so there I am — presenting a 90-minute session on the first day of the OOW 08 entitled Under the Hood of Oracle Clusterware.

I gave it during RAC Attack in Chicago and I’m pretty satisfied with how it went, so there should be no significant changes to the presentation. The session is in “User Group Forum,” thanks to RAC SIG and Dan Norris.

When the session was first added to the agenda it was misspelled as “Under the Good of Oracle Clusterware.” That’s hilarious and I thought I should have left it as is. Too late now — it’s been fixed.

I’m pretty sure that many of you will be at the OOW as well, so I’ll be glad to meet you in person. I’m getting back on Twitter slowly, so it might be a good way to track me down in SF. No guarantee I’ll keep it up to the minute if it takes too much effort, but I’ll try.

So, we have all heard that Billy Joel played a concert at Oracle’s OpenWorld in 2007.

What follows is an actual IRC conversation among Don Seiler, Dave Edwards, and myself:

(4:02:46 PM) don: ha @ Billy Joel at OOW
(4:03:38 PM) dave: “We didn’t fire the startup…”
(4:07:53 PM) don: “we didn’t start the backup”?
(4:12:53 PM) dave: “Don’t go changin’ . . . your slave and master”
(4:20:19 PM) ***sheeri shoots Dave
(4:20:49 PM) sheeri: “I don’t want clever replication, we never could have come this far”
(4:24:05 PM) sheeri: “And the server sounds like an aero-plane, and replication chugs along as it must…and the inserts go on, replication corrupts, and I say “Man, now I’m workin’ all night!”

(4:24:29 PM) dave: “I said ‘ls -u’ . . . that’s for access”
[”I said I love you . . . that’s forever”]

(4:24:30 PM) don: UP-TIME GIRL
(4:34:09 PM) dave: “Say it’s not wrong, execution plan!”
(4:43:39 PM) sheeri: Where’s my execution plan, oh man?
[Sing us a song of a piano man]
(4:45:52 PM) sheeri: Go ahead with your schema, leave me alone!

Comment here with your own database-themed parody of a Billy Joel song. Perhaps if we get enough MySQL-themed entries, we can get him to come to the MySQL Conference in April.

That and maybe thousands of dollars………..