It’s all over now and I can’t describe how tired I am. As I type it, my flight from Chicago is delayed by 1.5 hour so far (the third delay already, 30 minutes each). I should say that I hate Chicago airport but I digress.

Last night, I left my presentation in a good state and verified the first batch of demos — all worked fine. This morning turned into a disaster as I found out that the rest of my demos stopped working — my 11g RAC cluster on Ubuntu (I have the reason for such unusual setup) got issues with network connectivity. I should probably blame VMware Fusion 2.0 beta combined with Ubuntu but the net result was failing network connections with weird TNS errors and hanging connection requests. Obviously, I couldn’t demonstrate advanced connection management without *simple* connections working.

Well, I didn’t have any other choice but to add new slides with some demo results. Since I did it in a rush, there were some overlaps and I ended up with way too many slides. Good news that the first demo generated sufficiently enough interest about services automation and connection load balancing so we spent significant time there. Well, nothing comes for free so the rest of the presentation had to be covered too quickly but I did manage to go through the failover scenarios and failover technologies available. Run-time load balancing and load balancing advisory wasn’t left aside either so I did make it till the very last slide!

All in all, today’s session wasn’t as good as yesterday but I managed to avoid a complete failure with the demos so I guess I shouldn’t complain.

This morning I checked how the labs went on the 24th floor and I should say that labs agenda looked very impressive and it seems that lab part was probably the best feature of the event. The amount of material Jeremy Schneider prepared was huge and there would be enough labs for 2 full days, not just one. The attendees could choose the areas they are interested in most and work on different threads with their own pace. Great job Jeremy!

Back to the reality and the airport… The flight Chicago-Ottawa is 3+ hours late and they moved us to another gate. Oh… Do I hate Chicago airport! In the meantime I managed to transfer this text from my MacBook to the Blackberry and publishing it from there. The Blackberry syncronisation utility for Mac is a big shame. Can’t wait for iPhone…

To finish on a good note — I’m very glad I came to RAC Attack! What a pleasure to see old friends and make new ones. I just hope I can actually *leave* this place…

Small local user group meetings have their own beauty because of the special intimate atmosphere. We expected somewhat higher attendance but it seems that people were already in the holiday mode — it’s been a somewhat hot day and school kids had their last classes yesterday — so we’ve got about half of expected 50 attendees.

I should say that it’s been a nice and relaxing day for me. I started the morning reviewing my slides and then continued at the airport and on the flight. My flight to Toronto arrived just a bit late but I had plenty of time so I arrived quarter to one at the Oracle office building in Toronto (technically, Mississauga).

Djordje Jankovic and Carol Legros, who invited me there in the first place, were already there and, being a nice host, Djordje took me downstairs for a quick lunch. When we were back, the audience was almost ready so I just few 5 minutes to hook my laptops up which is more than enough — I know my Mac well enough now to avoid any surprises. Kenotes even managed to display few PowerPoint slides that Djordje used starting the meeting. By the way, he admitted that Keynotes is way cooler than PowerPoint. Well, that’s no brainer!
(more…)

Today I’m doing a presentation at the Toronto Oracle User Group meeting. It’ll be my first time there and I’m really looking forward to it.

My session is called Oracle 11g New Features Out of the Box. It went pretty well at Collaborate 08 and I think it will be the right audience at the TOUG meeting. I’m reviewing the slides at the moment — usual last minute tweaks but it’s time to leave to the airport — my flight is in 1.5 hour.

I have already checked-in on both the flight to Toronto and return. I didn’t know that you can check-in online on the return flight without completing one-way first. Well, I like technology advancing. :)

I finished uploading the backup presentation that I did last Monday at the Boston MySQL User’s Group. It is here: http://www.paragon-cs.com/presentations.

I cover the basics of backup/recovery and disaster planning. Total time is about an hour and three minutes. It was a lot of fun and the Bostonians seem to appreciate it. Thanks, Sheeri for filming and editing!

The Boston MySQL User Group was lucky enough to get Keith Murphy to speak at the June User Group meeting, about backups.

Direct play the video at:
http://technocation.org/node/559/play

Direct download the video (351 MB) at:
http://technocation.org/node/559/download

Links referred to in the presentation:

MyLVMBackup by Lenz Grimmer
http://lenz.homelinux.org/mylvmbackup/

InnoDB Hot Backup:
Prices are at:
http://www.innodb.com/hot-backup/order/
and at the time of this writing are:
1-Year License € 390 USD$ 605 per server
Perpetual License € 990 USD$ 1540 per server

Zmanda
prices are at: http://network.zmanda.com/shop/home.php?cat=1,3
Current prices are between the range of $100-$450, and a license is needed for each server and each client. So if you have 1 server and 3 clients, you need 4 licenses.

Online Backup
This is interesting reading about online backup, an article about how the online backup works at: http://blogs.mysql.com/peterg/2008/05/19/mysql-60-feature-2-online-backup/

This page (at the bottom, under “Replication”) states that the desired behavior is that the binary log does not log the restore or the backup. However, it does state that this is not implemented yet, nor even decided upon.

There’s also a great page on Online Backup at the MySQL Forge: http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/OnlineBackup

And if you’re short on time, the manual has a short page at http://www.nongnu.org/rdiff-backup/
duplicity: http://duplicity.nongnu.org/

It was mentioned that some people use a code repository to backup their database: http://krow.livejournal.com/593424.html

In the recent month there were several Oracle community web sites created. Well, I remember I registered on one or two but I couldn’t really keep an eye on many so I decided to wait and see which one wins. Turns out that Oracle Mix came out as a winner. Maybe it’s just my impression.

But I digress… I just wanted to make a quick note that Oracle Mix organized an interesting hybrid between call for papers and abstract judging. Anyone registered at Oracle Mix can propose a session abstract to present themselves or as an idea for others. Everyone can give their votes to the proposed sessions. At the end of the voting deadline (25th of June) Oracle will select the top sessions to be included in the Oracle Open World schedule.

So what? Well, I did send mine few days ago — Demystifying Workload Management with Oracle RAC based on my Hotsos Symposium 2008 presentation. I’m not sure how wide is the potential audience for this session — it’s far from beginners session and is specific to RAC. However, I do believe that this topic is often misunderstood and there is very good potential to spread the knowledge. So if you are coming to the Oracle Open World and interested in that topic - go ahead and vote. If not mine, there are plenty of others.

PS: I managed to do 2 (!) typos in the title and can’t edit it anymore. I don’t have any error on update but the title comes back unchanged. I have already filled in a bug report - let’s see if it gets fixed.

I have already blogged about this keynote at http://www.pythian.com/blogs/948/liveblogging-who-is-the-dick-on-my-site.

If you are interested in actually seeing the video, the 286 Mb .wmv file can be downloaded at http://technocation.org/videos/original/mysqlconf2008/2008_04_17_panelDick.wmv and played through your browser by clicking the “play” link at http://tinyurl.com/55c5ps. This is not to be missed!

I guess I have only one and a half posts about COLLABORATE 08 this year. It’s a bit unfortunate that I couldn’t make the whole conference, but only last day-and-a-half. In addition, I’ve been speaking at the two lasts slots of the conference so it’s been quite busy for me.

As I mentioned already, the scheduling for my presentation got a bit screwed-up due to the last minute call to participate in the speaker panel — “To RAC or Not To RAC: What’s Best for HA”. Thanks to Dan Norris, my session was finally moved to 11:00, which is right after the panel. On the other hand, 11:00 slot is the last IOUG session of the conference. This fact, coupled with last minutes re-scheduling, brought the number of participants down. Even though there were about 30 people and the hall (Korbel 1C) was small enough not to seem empty.

Back to the RAC speaker panel, I enjoyed the discussion and especially the fact that speaker’s opinions on how wide RAC adoption should be were a little different. I took the liberty of starting the discussion with a quite provocative quote — “complexity is the enemy of availability”. Interesting that the other panel speakers seemed to disagree to it to some extent by countering it — use knowledge to fight complexity. Not that I don’t agree with it (on the contrary) but my point was rather, “why make it complex when you can keep it simple?” Some of the reasons for over-complicating systems can be found here.

(more…)

Yesterday’s keynote panel on “Scaling MySQL — Up or Out?”

Directly download the 310MB wmv file (not if you are on the conference wireless please!), or watch it in your browser via streaming — simply click the “play” link on this page.

Keith Murphy managed to take painstaking notes with all the facts and figures. As well, Venu Anuganti presents a chart with the results as well as notes on the more detailed answers. Ronald Bradford has a brief summary of the 20 seconds of wisdom from each panelist.

I’m at Collaborate 08 in Denver these days. I arrived yesterday evening so I haven’t had a chance to see any sessions yet but I did have a nice dinner with a bunch of OakTable folks. The steak wasn’t great but the best part was that I could enjoy my time with people I don’t get to see very often.

Today started with some confusion. My presentation, Oracle 11g New Features Out of the Box, was originally scheduled on Thursday at 9:45 AM but due to participation in the speaker panel ,”To RAC or Not To RAC: What’s Best for HA?”, it was rescheduled to today, Wednesday, at 4:30 PM. However, this change didn’t make it to the printouts with latest changes so the options right now are either re-schedule my session to a later time tomorrow or keep it at the original schedule and pull me off the panel. I’d really enjoy that panel as it goes right along my alley but I need to make my session as well so we’ll see how it works out.

I’m off to the Carol Dacko’s presentation about DBMS_XPLAN now and looking forward to show up at the RAC SIG Birds of a Feather later today. Stay tuned - more to come…