Pythian Group

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. The session was intended to give attendees a startup understanding of RAC with little more. I mentioned a bit about separate SGAs, block ownership, and cache fusion. That’s it … I then moved on to a brief introduction to managing the RAC database and associated suite of services.
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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.

Pythian’s own Yuri Velikanov and Christo Kutrovsky both on today at 2pm at COLLABORATE 12. It is so refreshing to see these Pythian giants tailoring their material to include the traditional Oracle CORE DBA audience.

Ah yes, the comfort of being around my second family … the user group and fellow Pythianites. 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. In one of my text books in school, the front of the book said:

If there had been as many advancements in automobile technology in the last 20 years as there have been in computers, one would be able to buy a Rolls Royce for 20 cents and it would last a lifetime.

If only that were true … suffice to say, the amount of data running around the internet and so many corporate web sites.repositories is staggering. As per this URL, an internet minute is made up in part of:

• more than 204 million emails are sent
• Amazon rings up about $83,000 in sales
• around 20 million photos are viewed and 3,000 uploaded on Flickr
• at least 6 million Facebook pages are viewed around the world
• more than 61,000 hours of music are played on Pandora
• more than 1.3 million video clips are watched on YouTube

And, to quote Ian, this is only the beginning. I heard some unfamiliar buzz words which are now part of my technical appetite to become familiar with. Bravo Ian.

Whilst we all embark on this magical journey called “COLLABORATE”, keep in the back of your mind what this conference is all about. JFK said it, and my take on that is

Ask not what your conference can do for you, but what you can do for your conference …

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. I started working conferences in the early 1990′s and have spent many years enjoying the fruits of my labour. 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.

If there is anything about the show that needs fixing … fix it! Feedback is the life blood of user group events and participation in the delivery of an event is the best way to fix something that may have ticked you off about this and any other event. Apply for the conference committee when the call goes out. As you fill out your session/conference evaluations, ensure you keep in the loop and find out how you can become a volunteer.

I am not going to claim that COLLABORATE12 will be the biggest and best yet! I find that (in my opinion) belittles the successes of the past. They all are/all have been/will be the best. Each show stands on its own as a solid offering of top-notch education in its day. COLLABORATE is about content not glitz and networking not marketing. See you in Vegas … as per that now famous saying about that town … “What you learn in Vegas does NOT stay in Vegas” … or something like that :).

The thirsty attendees at this latest IOUG/OAUG/Quest show are keen. The registration lines were long, but no significant Oracle wait events. The show officially kicks off today but the education has began yesterday. Our very own Alex Gorbachev discussed HA all day in prep for a full week of education sessions. Yury has traveled all the way from Australia and we’re glad he did. COLLABORATE often fights with one of my other passions – NHL playoff hockey. When you look deeper into both of these pastimes, they are remarkably similar:

• Hockey – a hat trick is scoring 3 goals in the same game; at COLLABORATE, it is giving 3 or more presentations, a common occurrence with some of our seasoned and strongest presenters
• Hockey – a 10-minute misconduct is often given out for poor behaviour; at COLLABORATE, going 10 minutes overtime does not lead to a trip to the sin bin, but is frowned upon
• Hockey – boarding is a penalty given to players who launch an opponent inappropriately into the boards surrounding the rink; at COLLABORATE, drop the “a” and the “d” and it becomes boring; something all presenters try not to do to their devoted attendees
• Hockey – tripping is an infraction that involves taking the legs out from underneath an opponent; at COLLABORATE, presenters avoid tripping up their followers by encapsulating an organized, well thought out presentation delivering hard-core education to enhance the knowledge of their conference companions
• Hockey – icing is clearing the puck down the playing surface, crossing the two blue lines on the way down; at COLLABORATE it is what you put on the cake, so to speak, topping off a well-written white paper with a methodical presentation with value to one’s attendees

There are so many Pythianites at COLLABORATE it’s like an epidemic, a good one at that. Some of the biggest names are presenting here, as always … Velikanov, Kutrovsky, Fielding, Zubrivsky, all with the blessing of our leader Paul Vallee not to mention Vanessa who sees value to Pythian with our presence at this tier 1 event.

Adjective:
Involving many carefully arranged parts or details; detailed and complicated in design and planning.
Verb:
Develop or present (a theory, policy, or system) in detail.

COLLABORATE is all about quality and content, presenters elaborating based on their specific areas(s) or expertise. The show may be elaborate, but “show” is secondary to education. A handful of tier 1 shows throughout the calendar year do just that … primary focus is on the user community, the people who live the software from day-to-day. A few facets of technical presentations that have always fascinated me are walking away from a session:

1. with an “I did not know you could do that!” feeling
2. with a solution to a technical issue that has been plaguing me for some time
3. with my understanding of a piece of technology ramped up one or more links in the chain of knowledge acquisition

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Many readers of these BLOG posts are seasoned attendees/presenters at this IOUG/OAUG/Quest collaborative event held every spring. User group events are the one of the best stomping ground for hungry IT specialists, thirsting for news on late-breaking solutions and more traditional technologies. During my tenure as the Events Director for the IOUG (circa early 21st century), two common item delivered in evaluations from attendees were:

1. not enough presentations targeted to beginner’s
2. we need more focus on the traditional technologies

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It sure seems from seeing and hearing about GoldenGate that it is the Cadillac (or Genesis if one is so inclined) of replication engines. It appears to offer anywhere between significantly and dramatically less overhead than many other engines. What remains to be seen as it gets more widely adopted is the features that catapult it to the front of people’s minds when considering how to replicate what and where (how far from the master site). I attended the Pythian/Western Union presentation at Oracle Open World in October, featuring Pythian’s own Shervin Sheidaei and  Western Union’s Ron Mashrouteh. There was a lot of attention and chit-chat about this solution and I for one am looking forward to experiencing it first-hand.

I have experienced a handful of Oracle’s replication solutions as far back as version 5 of the database in the mid to late 1980′s. Will GoldenGate be the golden gate? If one ends up answering in the affirmative to most of the following questions, I think so:

1. Are the mechanisms at the administrator’s disposal for conflict resolution intuitive and repeatable between interventions?
2. Is it easy to administer throughout the complete life cycle of change-capture detection on the source repository to application of data changes on the remote site(s)?
3. Are the performance gains achieved by not relying on the more traditional replication engine’s dependency on the archived redo stream dramatic?
4. Is the price point for the product capable of attracting SMB’s that now implement the existing replication solution (streams) that is off-the-shelf with the Enterprise Edition offering?
5. Can a portion of the product’s day-to-day management tasks be executed by non-technical (and sometimes less costly) personnel?
6. Is Oracle support poised to provide as robust and strategic support to the product, at a level of expertise along the lines of the more traditional solution they have been supporting for many years?

Only time will tell … I for one would look forward to the opportunity to get my hands dirty with this technology and come to grips with some of its challenges. Challenges need not always be fraught with sessions of frustrating crisis intervention. Sometimes, in a roundabout way, these very challenges provide opportunities for seasoned database administration personnel to hone their skills with new products … onward and upwards.

My recent forage into RAC-on-the-laptop-land proves a point that I have been making all my adult life—stuff one has never done before is only hard until it isn’t. I would not consider myself to be a fluent RAC techie (yet) but I sure know a lot more now than I did then. It almost reminds me of one of my favourite sayings from the famous Samuel Langhorne Clemens—when I was 16 my parents didn’t know anything and by the time I turned 21 I could not believe how much they had learned. I once did a ring job on a Ford with a mechanic friend of mine. Since then I have been able to speak the lingo and remember bits and pieces of what we did—expert? No way. Familiar—way. I am doing RAC attack today at UKOUG as well as giving a 2-hour exert technical session at 11:25am. The show so far? Sweet!

The sessions I have attended have been educational and for the most part enjoyable. There are supposedly 2,000 people here but I have not figured out where they are all hiding. This conference centre handles lots of people well. It reminds me of the year there was a-bomb scare at Moscone and the vendor holding an event there had reported over 40,000 attendees. The San Francisco fire marshal reported of the 40,000+ people there, all 8,500 were successfully evacuated. The buzz words, according to what I have heard so far this week (no surprise; actually a buzz word) is Exadata. From what has bled into my psyche from musings about Exadata … it is a dream come true. Naturally it comes with a price. Companies able to spend money to make money should meld well with the technology as it has a hefty price tag. I have not heard a lot about the Cloud, but I do know it’s hovering over the ICC. Read the rest of this entry . . .

(editor’s note: the author is talking about UKOUG, the UK’s major Oracle conference, happening this week in Birmingham)

And so it should be :). The flight over was uneventful, save for my excitement about having 3 seats to myself. Then the big challenge surfaced … a 5’8″ human trying to recline in a 4’10″ horizontal surface. I woke about a bit later with a stiff neck but the shut-eye was worth it.
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