I’m so much looking forward to the next conference in my schedule — RMOUG Training Days 2010. It would be only my second time I’m presenting at the RMOUG but it was enough to go there once to understand that it’s one of the top rated Oracle User Group conferences in the world. Some of the great speakers are presenting and registration fees are very low compare to other events of comparable quality. If your conference budget is low this year — that’s the conference you don’t want to miss!

Two of us from Pythian are going to speak at RMOUG Training Days 2010 that starts in just 4 week. I present the following session:

Alex Gorbachev: Oracle ASM 11g — The Evolution.
Oracle Automatic Storage Management has proven to be one of the most widely adopted new features in Oracle Database 10g and it has been dramatically improved in the later 11g releases. This presentation will explain what changes are solved by ASM, how these challenges are solved, what barriers there are to ASM adoptions, and how 11g Release 2 addresses these barriers.

My colleague, Christo Kutrovsky is presenting the following:

Christo Kutrovsky: RAC+ASM — Three Years in Production. Stories to Share.
This presentation will cover Migration via LUN re-assignment; migrating online migration from EMC to 3par; removing ASMLIB and using EMC multipathing; gotchas when building ASMLIB devices with multipathing; corrupting your production database beyond repair with duplicate database on ASM; overwriting your data with ASM due to incorrect naming convention; corrupting your production database with NETAPP/NFS due to Oracle bug; two nodes RAC is not HA; performing network maintenance; and RAC + SAME = LAME.

Coincidentally, out topics are very close. However, they don’t overlap but rather complement each other when it comes to ASM. While my session covers more the history of ASM, why it arrived in Oracle stack and, of course, why ASM 11g versions is so much better in many respects compare to ASM 10g, Christo delivers a more practical speech with some interesting real world scenarios.

Actually, there are four sessions around ASM at the conference and all of them are back to back starting at 11:45 on the second day of the conference. Christo’s session is the first followed by Marshall Presser from Oracle presenting on ASM Cluster Filesystem (ACFS). I’ve had a pleasure to meet Marshall literally couple weeks ago here in Ottawa during a joint workshop on Oracle RAC (well, Marchall was actually running the show and I contributed some examples of real-world experience with Pythian customers). Marshall has long history with Oracle and definitely knows what he is talking about. He is also a very entertaining speaker so I recommend you attend his session if you are interested in the topic.

My session is on next and I’ll make sure not to cover much of ACFS — I have way more to go through during my slot. In addition, there is a dedicated presentation on Oracle ASM 11gR2 new features from Jay Caviness so my job will be to cover enough to warm up the audience for the Jay’s session that is up next according to the schedule. I haven’t met Jay yet but I’ll try to get in touch and coordinate to avoid significant overlaps in our presentations.

See you in Denver soon and, if you are a skier, make sure to catch the ski lift somewhere around Loveland Pass — great slopes there! The photo below was taken couple years ago after the conference (courtesy of Tim Gorman) — there is interesting story behind so ask me or Tim at the conference.

That’s all for now. Time to feed my new dog:

She is a 10 weeks old puppy (mix of Bull Mastiff, Doberman and Rottweiler). She is usually a good girl but, sometimes, throws surprises like this when she is left on her own for too long:

It’s not the worst that happened so far and I’m sure more to come!

This achievement took us lots of efforts before the launch to get recognized as one of the first platinum level partners but we’ve made it through. Now, we are working on updating all of our specialization areas. It’s still a bit cloudy on how to navigate in the new OPN Specialized interface but I guess in these days of cloud computing cloudiness is becoming a norm, especially early on!

The OPN Specialized Program was designed as the result of numerous acquisitions completed recently and over time the old Oracle Partners Network structure couldn’t accommodate all the different kinds of partnerships that Oracle inherited. The Oracle/Sun merger was going to make a tough situation untenable, and as a result Oracle designed OPN Specialized to simplify the search of a partner for Oracle internal staff and Oracle customers on one hand while it also lets partners distinguish themselves amongst the rest by technical areas and types of services and products. Congratulations and good job to the OPN group at Oracle for what we at Pythian believe is a much improved vision and structure for partnering with the vibrant Oracle ecosystem.

Our VP, Biz Dev and Strategic Alliances, Peter Ling, should take all blame for this as he’s been working on this non-stop. Well done Pete — you are a rock star, indeed

More details to come as we go through available options and build our profile so stay tuned — lots to learn still.

The seminar title is “How to Write Correct SQL and Know It: A Relational Approach to SQL“. It’s focused on writing reliable SQL. While SQL has been designed as a simple access interface to relational data, it turned out to be quite complex and requires your to follow a certain disciplines to produce truly reliable SQL code — relational discipline.

From my experience, I find that many database problems (and that’s probably underestimation) could be avoided with better design and better SQL so I’m genuinely interested to have people do that better and better and better — managing well written applications is so much more fun!

See the course outline for all the glory details. The pricing is very fair and $600 per day is a bargain if you ask me.

The Server Manageability Roundtable is on Monday, 30-Nov, at 16:25 in the foyer on the 5th level. It’s a bit late and I should have probably proposed to change the venue to the nearby pub but it’s too late now so let’s make it the last effort for the day and then…

The topic is quite broad so we will obviously need to focus on the most relevant areas for the attendees and this is the chance to state your interest so please comment away!

Here are the topics that I think might be particularly interested:

• Oracle Enterprise Manager — experience, deployment issues, success stories, strengths and weaknesses.
• Impact of virtualization and cloud computing — does it make it easier to manage our infrastructure?
• Costs cutting by manageability improvements — myth or reality?
• Managing highly available environment — human factors.

Make sure to leave a comment below whether you have something to say on the topics above or something completely new. Sharing your experience would be fantastic! Thanks in advance for all contributions and I promise I’ll write up the report on this round-table.

Christo has been an active blogger on our blog and has made numerous top-class presentations at Oracle Conference world-wide. He has also been an active contributor on the Oracle-L list.

Christo has been always representing an independent voice in the community and it’s a pleasure to have him on board. I’m looking forward to his contributions to the Oracle ACE program and the Oracle community at large.

Welcome Christo!

You shouldn’t be surprised if you notice that it’s difficult to locate your DBAs in the first week of December (i.e. in just two weeks from now)! And you know why? Because you need to be looking in the right place to find them.

You are likely to know already that I’ll be going to the UKOUG Conference Technology & E-Business Suite 2009 and present few sessions. Few more people from Pythian are actually coming as well:

• Christo Kutrovsky is coming to present with a smashing topic — “RAC + ASM: 3 years in production – Stories to share”. It’s on Wednesday at 12:50pm.
• Paul Vallee is coming to cut some slack. Last year it’s been his first UKOUG conference and you bet he liked it so much that he couldn’t afford to miss it this year. It happens to many… Did I tell you that I didn’t miss a single one since I first came in 2006?

That’s all for now folks. Make sure you say hello to us if you are at the UKOUG. The simplest way to reach us is Twitter — @alexgorbachev, @paulvallee and @kutrovsky.

The past year was very eventful so I feel like I haven’t been at the UKOUG Conferences for years even though I did come to the UKOUG Conference 2008. This conference is something special for me — it’s the first conference I attended and presented on so it’s set the tone for the whole conferencing experience of my life and I’m very grateful for that! So far, I haven’t missed a single year since my first UKOUG conference and I hope I keep it this way for years to come.

The conference is different this year and I support the changes very much. Oracle family of products has become so large over the last few years that UKOUG conference kept growing and growing every year. This year, it was decided to split the technologies and leave only the core Oracle Server and E-Business Suite Technology with the conference scaling down to 3 days. In the past, anything more that 3 days was quite difficult as those days are very intense and the last day I felt quite tired which is really unfortunate considering that masterclasses are running during that last day. I think it might also be a timely decision in the light of current economic conditions when most organizations had to cut their educational budgets — attending a 3 days conference is easier to justify than a whole week.

I’m doing few sessions this year:

• Mon, 30-Nov 11:50 — Oracle ASM 11g – the Evolution.
• Tue, 1-Dec 16:50 — Managing Oracle Connection in WebLogic with RAC and Data Guard.
• Mon, 30-Nov 16:25 — Server Manageability Roundtable

I have already done the presentation about ASM few times but it was always incomplete (especially when I got access to 11gR2 beta program and learned new ASM features) so now I can include all the new cool stuff that’s come with Oracle Database 11gR2.

You might know that I’ve been doing few presentations about connection management with Oracle RAC but this time I decided to focus on a specific application tier. I think WebLogic server and its specifics in connection handling with Oracle RAC has not been covered at all so why don’t I try that?

Finally, it will be the first time that I’ll be organizing a roundtable at UKOUG conference — Server Manageability Roundtable. I’m really looking forward to it and to contributions from the attendees. The success of any roundtable depends on the interest of attendees and hitting the right topics. I encourage you to attend and post here what are the hottest issues you experience in server manageability area and what are the areas you would like to hear most about.

Early bird registration finishes on 30th of October so don’t miss that if cost is a big factor.

That’s all folks. See you in Birmingham!

I have already blogged about my Sunday’s interviews but I created a Youtube playlist where you can see them all (use arrows on the sides).

So far I interviewed Justin Kestelyn, Richard Foote, Stanley ACE Director, John Kanagaraj, Marko Gralike, Jacco Landlust, Chris Muir, Tim Hall, Steven Feuerstein, Gareth Llewellyn, Doug Burns, Marcel Kratochvil and Gary Goodman. There is one more day left so I’ll trying to do few more.

The original location was a smaller area with a larger outdoor balcony but due to the weather concerns, it was moved completely indoor in the bigger banquet style room and it worked extremely well. We had more than 50 people showed up — probably around 70+ — as 51 t-shirts I printed for that occasion has completely gone.

The idea with t-shirt is to collect signatures from bloggers you meet and talk to. The most valuable result is that you get totally cool and unique t-shirt that you will want to wear after day (or maybe not wear and put it under the glad instead of the painting on the wall and demonstrate in your living room). The least all bloggers are going to do is to post a photo of their t-shirts — make sure you leave some feedback later.

Here is mine:

Doug Burns did a way better job than me with his review of the event.

Visitors of the bloggers meetup as well as you, fellow readers of this blog, have unique preview opportunity for the new Pythian logo and slogan if you keep your eyes open:

Btw, it’s Justin Kestelyn who is buying beer on the photo above.

As I’m moving from Australia back to Canada, this photo with fellow Aussie Oracle ACE Directors is one of the most valuable for me as I’ve had fantastic time down there.

You can find more photos in Bloggers Meetup Flickr tag.

So thanks all the bloggers for coming and sponsors for sponsoring! If you were on that meetup – make sure you blog about it, post you photos and publish the photo on *your* t-shirt to the community (yeah, you can take it off the wall this one time).

You just need to look for a large Metreon label on the building — adjusted to Moscone South.

See you all there!