Pythian Group

I’m traveling quite a bit in the next few weeks, here’s where you can find me:

• On February 14, I’ll present an Exadata war story and big data introduction to OSWOUG (Oregon and South Washington Oracle User’s Group). If you are in Portland, drop by and say hello – I will be educational and entertaining.
  Read the rest of this entry . . .

Gentlemen (and no Ladies),

Let’s go hairy!!

The 60s are NOT back but during the month of November , some gents , including myself, will grow a stache to raise the awareness of prostate cancer, an insidious disease that afflicts one in seven males.

Movember

Movember (a slang word “Mo” for moustache and “November”) is a worldwide movement in which men, known as Mo Bros, start November clean-shaven and then grow a mustache to bring awareness to prostate and testicular cancer.

The goal is to get family , friends and others to donate money to your Movember cause, which is then donated to the Prostate Cancer Foundation, LiveStrong and other men’s health research and awareness programs.

According to the American Cancer Society, one in every six men will get prostate cancer during his lifetime, and one in every 36 will die from the disease. Behind lung cancer, prostate cancer is the second leading cause of cancer death in men.

There are around 14 countries participating and you can participate through your region or country website.

It’s rather simple: register online as either an individual or a team, start inviting others to participate and maybe create a team then ask others “SHOW ME THE MONEY” . There are prizes for those who raise the most funds.

Grooming is the key

Initially ,the registered participant must start November 1 clean-shaven. Second, maintain your mustache: Grooming is key.

You don’t want to look ridiculous for an entire month or anything, you can do Mexican, Dali, Imperial, Fu Manchu, Pancho Villa, Handlebar, Pencil, Chevron, Walrus…etc.

Here’s a summary of some moustache styles and you can pick one, one of them is NO longer wearable though (You can get arrested in some countries for it)!!

You can go further and even get a copy of The Moustache Grower’s Guide for $9.95

MO Sistas are in too

Although,some say not necessarily, the gents are the ones who grow the MOs but the women play a role too. Some become team captains ; they recruit the “Bros” , endorse them and encourage them grow moustaches.

Statistics shows that lots of donors , up to 60%, of donors are women so ladies you are TOTALLY IN.

Where donations go

The money is used to fund great research projects around the world to fight prostate cancer and other male diseases.

In USA ,$7.5 million were raised for Movember. Worldwide, $174 million were raised and, according to Movember, this makes the group the largest non-government funder of prostate cancer research in the world.

A geeky Movember

I was just looking around for something to welcome Movember and then came something in mind that SQL server 2008/2008 R2 made possible (2005 doesn’t).

SQL server folks, could you please run the attached query in any 2008/2008 R2 SSMS and see what you get in the “Spatial result” tab? you may need to zoom in a bit to get something like this

Now, can you tell me who’s that famous Stache ??!!

Link to Code

Happy Movember,

(Mo)hamed

I’ve attended the Strata conference in NYC last week. Its been many years since I’ve last attended a conference without presenting in it. On one hand, attending only makes for a far more relaxed experience. On the other hand, I missed having random people come up to me and talk about my presentation. I decided to attend the conference since it is considered the foremost data science conference. And I was very much interested in what those data scientists are up to.

Good data scientists  combine the abilities of business analysts, statisticians and software engineers. They have the skills, the tools and the mandate to mine and analyze all the data the organization collects to deliver valuable insights to the business and data-based features to the customers of the business. In addition, it is considered the hottest job around. Of course, it is data scientists who mined job postings and job moves to come up with this conclusion, so maybe take it with a grain of salt.

Data-scientists normally work with very large amounts of data, both structured (the enterprise data warehouse) and unstructured (web server logs, blog posts). Since I’m a big fan of big data, I was very curious to see what those data scientists care about.

So, in no particular order – stuff data scientists like:

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We have incident reporting procedures at Pythian. This incident report was sent just recently internally at Pythian. We learned some good lessons from it so I hope it would be useful to the community as well – copying it below as is…

As part of our incident management process, you will find below a summary of the details from the incident that occurred on July 29th at 3PM EDT.

Overview:

  – Pythian employees were de-motivated by the lack of refreshments on Friday afternoon
 
Impact:

  – Bruce didn’t get his beer and had a bad start to his vacation

Root Cause:
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There has been quite a bit written about Oracle Mix Voting (let me refer to it as OMV for short) this year and I don’t think I should waste your time restating any of this. What I wanted to do is to take a step back and try to list “stakeholders” of OMV.

Before I continue, here is some of the relevant blog posts on this topic:
Oracle Mix: OOW11 voting, a race against time – Australia speaks up through votes
Data Science Fun with the OOW Mix Session Voting Data
Has Oracle MIX “Suggest-A-Session” Jumped the Shark???
Suggest-a-Session 2011 follow-up: What worked, what didn’t, and how can we improve?

Let’s see who the imaginable stakeholders are and what their primary needs are from the Oracle Mix Suggest-A-Session project. I hope I don’t sound too cynical but I think it’s a reasonable objective…

1. Oracle Corp

Primary need — attract as much attention as possible to OOW, positive media splash around OOW.

Was it successful? Of course, twittersphere and blogosphere were boiling around OMV. You could argue that there were some other needs but for the company as business — marketing was number one reason to support OMV, IMHO.
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Well day two here at PgEast has drawn to a close and it was another
very informative day.

Today I concentrated on the more common tasks of a Pg DBA so I attended three
talks (four if you count mine) that where rather heavy on the technical side of being a Pg DBA

Keven Kempter drew me back again with his excellent talk on Backup and recovery methods
this time giving some very good advice on how to use and abuse of pg_Dump_all and
PG_restore. He also touched on three different recipes PITR on ProstgreSQL and gave some handy
advice on when and why to use it.

I also caught another Mongo talk this time by Steve Francia it was on the application of Mongo
in a real world web retail store. He presented a very convincing argument for the NoSQL side of things in
the retail realm namely that RDBMS works great when you have but a few similar products
such as books, CDs and movies but what if you are a retailer who sells Jeans, Watches, Fresh fruit as well.

Mongo allows for a completely flexible schema and his fits the diverse retail model well.
Another good point he made is in the archiving pf transactions. Taking a product return
as an example one has to keep a recoded of all the details of the sale and you have to have some sort of mechanism to reconcile data points such as the price which might be stale they the time of the return. In
the Mongo world one just keeps the original sales record. A rather elegant solution.

I rounded out the day with two technical Pg talks the first by Magnus Hagander gave a very informative talk on the differing approaches to the ‘caching problem of web applications’ with PostgreSQL. By leveraging PostgreSQL notification system one can easily build a very robust and scalable cache with another open commercial product called Varnish.

I rounded out the day with an talk on Migrating from MySQL to PostgreQSL given by Paul Gross. This was an interesting case study of his experience where he was constrained by a 0 down time requirement. His solution was to use the ORM he was familiar with ‘ActiveRecord’ and use that to solve the many problems with data conversion he was encountering using just Ruby on its own. He used an iterative approach where he ran a script over and at each pass gathering up any changes in the originating MySQL into the PostgreSQL until they where exactly the same. This was successful with only a 30 second blackout time during the switchover to the new DB.

Well that is about it for day.

Last week brought great news to Pythian — one of our DBAs in Pakistan, Fahd Mirza, has become an Oracle ACE. Fahd joined Pythian in September 2010 as the very first Pythian employee in Pakistan and thanks to his skills and ambitions ended up on the team supporting Exadata environments. Fahd is a long standing active community member, frequent blogger and passionate Oracle technologist evangelizing for Oracle technology in Pakistan. No wonder he got nominated as an Oracle ACE and was accepted.

I should also mention that another Oracle ACE DBA joined us recently Read the rest of this entry . . .

The days are cold and wet. The nights are long and dark and full of beeping pagers. It is time to look back and reflect on the past year and plan for next year.

Accomplishment of the year: I still can’t believe I’m a member of the Oak Table.
Big change of the year: Started working for Pythian. Databases are the same everywhere, but the work environment couldn’t be more different.
Obsession of the year: NoSQL. Fortunately, the hype is slowing down and the field is slowly maturing. Making everything more interesting and less franctic.
Overblown concept of the year: CAP Theorem. Everyone talks about it, but most of it makes not sense and is absolutely useless.
Contribution of the year: Another successful and profitable training day for NoCOUG
Proud of this year: Several customers who were upgraded to 11g successfully. Two customers with new dataguard. Automated weekly restore script.
New Expertise: I’m now very good with RMAN and DataGuard, competent with ASM and Solaris and much better than I ever thought anyone could be with vi and ssh.
Worst moments: Getting paged on a serious issue for a customer you are not familiar with, at 4am, while you are working on another urgent issue, your backup is not reachable and both customers want progress reports every 5 minutes.
Best moments: Mountain biking in Downieville. I’ll be doing lots more of this in 2011.
Guilty pleasure of the year: Either Twitter or Oban 14.
Programming Language of the year: Perl. I knew it for a while, but this year I used it more than in the last 10 years combined.
Presentation of the year: Everything a DBA needs to know about TCP/IP networks. Its far more useful for more people than I ever dreamed.
Startup I wish I started in 2010: Database as a service. Its becoming the next big thing but no one is doing it well (yet). After you outsourced your DBAs and sysadmins, just letting them own the servers at their own datacenter and VPN there is the next logical step.
Next year I will: Upgrade my OCP to 11g, video blog, and do a webinar.
I want to but probably won’t: I miss having the time to dig deeply into OS problems. Sometimes spending few days collecting data, traces, reading source code.
Mission for 2011: Convince people who never presented before to give a presentation. Because its a great experience and everyone has something important to share.
Unexpected 2011 Plan: Presenting at MySQL Conference. I sent an abstract because I love the MySQL community and want to enjoy them more. I’m still shocked it was accepted despite my bio that says “Oracle DBA”. I’ll try hard not to disappoint.
2011 Prediction: I’m betting on 2011 being the year of the cloud integration services. SaaS solutions such as SalesForce  are gaining traction with enterprise IT, and in enterprise IT, integrating with existing systems is the name of the game. I foresee great future for connector solutions and the consultants who can make them useful.
Far fetched 2011 Prediction: Oracle will buy Netapp. After HP got 3Par, that just makes sense.

Have an excellent 2011!

Give Me Freedom, Give Me Fire
Give Me Reason, Take Me Higher

Database administrators can get rusty pretty much quickly, and then they fall in a routine. In a typical company, they install and manage the same set of database servers. Soon they know the ins and outs of those databases. They know the pulse of their databases. They know what to ignore and what to fix and what not to fix. They then start loving the status quo. The same alert logs, backup logs, traces, error messages, and so and so. Soon the time comes, when they even stop looking at the logs and traces and backup verifications. They stop reviewing their system. Worst, they stop learning new things. They start hating upgrades and introducing new features and optimizing the existing data stores.

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North California Oracle User Group are planning their 2011 conferences and are looking for good presentations!

We are a very friendly local user group, so if you live in NorCal and never presented before – this is a great place to start! We love seeing new presenters and we even have a public speaking expert on our board who loves giving feedback when requested. Of course, we are nice to seasoned gurus too.

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