Pythian Group

One of the hot topics at the UKOUG 2011 Technology and E-Business Suite Conference last December was the upcoming release of Oracle e-Business Suite R12.2. The new release will bring us lots of new features, usability improvements and new versions of technology stack components (Oracle Database 11g R2 and Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g R1 as the application server), but the most important and impressive new feature of course will be online patching. Online patching is supposed to change the game completely. All owners of E-Business Suite environments know that patching requires downtime. Although it can be reduced with various techniques (e.g. staged APPL_TOP), some downtime is still required to apply a number of changes. Online patching will not eliminate downtime completely, but will reduce it significantly by using  “Edition Based Redefinition” (EBR) at the database level and using a secondary applications file system for online patching. In fact, all patching activity will be an online operation; downtime will be required only to switch from one version to another. Read the rest of this entry . . .

Another December has started and you know what it means right? It’s the Christmas time? NO! It’s time for UKOUG Technology and e-Business Suite 2011 conference! There are not many things that can make a passionate Apps DBA more excited than that. UKOUG Tech & eBS conferences are the only ones in Europe that have such a rich content for Application DBAs and this year it will not be different. Read the rest of this entry . . .

“Hello World!” I guess that’s the most appropriate way to start my 1^st blog post under pythian.com domain. I’m going to start slow, but hopefully will pick up speed and have at least couple of posts each month to share with you. I’ve been blogging at http://appsdbalife.wordpress.com until now and I haven’t decided yet what the future will be for my previous blog, I wouldn’t like it to become some kind of a zombie page that’s been long dead but still wandering around the internet world.
Enough intros, let’s get to business! I hope this blog post doesn’t get lost in the huge amount of posts related to OOW 2011.

A few days ago I was asked to estimate how much space needed to be added to the ASM diskgroup to handle the database growth for one year without additional need of adding disks. Obviously, to estimate the disk space that needed to be added I had to know what the DB size will be in one year from now. It looked like an easy task as I knew we were recording the size of the database every day. Read the rest of this entry . . .