Posted by Gwen Shapira on Dec 1, 2010
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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Posted by Alex Gorbachev on Dec 1, 2010
Right now I’m sitting in the speaker lounge with Jeremy Schneider after hacking some RAC ASM stuff as a follow up to my last presentation. We were testing some failure scenarios but that’s a topic for another blog post.
Dan Fink cheated with his tiny blog post which was more like a twitt-long (and so did Christo.) so I thought to write something properly.
Monday started early for me — 6am. Quick run through my demos again and early breakfast. Registered before 8am while it was still empty and then joined Tom Kyte in the speaker lounge. We both had our sessions starting at 9am but Tom is a Pro when it comes to presenting — while I was taking the last minutes to go through my slides and do minor adjustments, Tom was calmly replying AskTom questions. Oh well, such is life.
My 2 hours presentation was a little slow and I wish the audience was a little more engaging but maybe it was just because all the locals hit the hibernate mode following “extreme” cold weather and didn’t quite wake up after the weekend (of course, there is not chance that it was bad presentation material or speaker…. no, no!). This was the same presentation as I’ve done at the OpenWorld but I included demonstrations of 11gR2 Grid Infrastructure and that was the tricky bit. In the end, everything pretty much worked with one small surprise. My last demo was troubleshooting of startup and I decided that I will screw up 3 things and troubleshoot online *first* time. I.e. I decided deliberately not to practice it. The latter wasn’t very smart as I had less then 10 minutes left. After few minutes of shame I had to move this demo in the list of homework. :) The good news, that I did go through my last slides briefly and I wanted to be brief there as Frits Hoogland was covering this area in more details later that day in his own session.
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Posted by Alex Gorbachev on Nov 28, 2010
Hello Birmingham!
It’s past Sunday midnight and I’m stuck in my room in the last couple hours finishing my slides for my masterclass tomorrow. Turns out that I’m presenting the very first session of the conference at 9am. I wish there is a keynote instead so that I could grab one more hour of sleep (it’s going to be deep into the night back home in Canada). Strange that the keynote was moved to Wednesday — I hope UKOUG has really good reason for that!
My two hours masterclass will start at the same time as Tom Kyte’s a-la keynote session — what a competition. On the other hand, there is no other sessions in server technology so I expect that folks without interest of database development will automatically end up in my session. I’m in Hall 5 – quite large room. Is it the second biggest room after the Hall 1?
I will need to work hard to keep the audience… maybe I shouldn’t plan for any breaks to make sure I don’t let folks slip out to the next sessions like James Morles’ Sane SAN 2010 or Jeremy Schneider’s Large Scale ASM.
My masterclass is based on the slides that I presented at the Oracle OpenWorld few months ago which, in turn is reworked session on Oracle Clusterware internals that I’ve done number of times as long session with demos. I thought updating this material to 11gR2 would be easy… Boy was I wrong!
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Posted by Gwen Shapira on Nov 22, 2010
I give a lot of thought of what makes a DBA awesome as remote DBA, or a consultant. Many DBAs are very proficient technically and are very successful as in-house DBAs, but I can’t imagine them working with customers. I spent some time thinking what would make someone awesome as a consultant, based on my experience as a in-house DBA working with consultants we hired, on my experience as remote DBA for Pythian and on my observation of the amazing guys working for Pythian Consulting.
Here’s the secret: You need to give the customer a warm fuzzy feeling.
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Posted by Gwen Shapira on Sep 18, 2010
MOTS is over and tomorrow morning I’m flying back home to OOW.
This was my first conference where I presented as a Pythian employee. Its been a good experience. People would ask me who I work for, and when I answer “Pythian”, their eyes would light up, and they’d say something like “Wow! So, what’s it really like working for them?”. I never got this reaction when I worked for HP.
I just spent two days telling people how awesome it is to work for Pythian. Some time was also spent talking about Networks and NoSQL, but not nearly as much.
My favorite part of the job is that I learn a lot. Starting from the big topics – RMAN, ASM, DataGuard (remember when I was complaining about not knowing those basic technologies?), but also little things – how to find specific information I need from Oracle, solve specific problems, work around specific error messages.
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Posted by Gwen Shapira on Aug 11, 2010
I’ve spent over a decade managing various production systems. After spending so much time with systems that are mostly not working as they should, one develops certain outlook on life. Like the deep belief that the only way to keep civilization functioning is by taking backups and testing them.
Recently I had few discussions with developers, and it turned out that ideas that I consider trivial can be viewed as deeply insightful by someone with different experience. Call that ideas arbitrage – goods that are common in one environment are valuable in another. Good hummus costs around 2$ in Tel-Aviv, while in Palo Alto I’ll be happy to pay many times that price if anyone would sell it!
Problem:
I’m tired of spending time chasing pseudo-bugs that are actually problems in configuration. Things keep changing in QA, staging and production servers and I have to keep figuring out why my code no longer works
Solution:
Figure out what your program needs in order to run properly. Memory, permissions, settings in files, etc. Then write a script that verifies all that.
This has 3 benefits:
- Sysadmins can check that the environment is correct before installing the software and before calling you for help.
- If something goes wrong, you can ask the sysadmin to run your script and send you the results – assisting in faster resolution.
- If the script doesn’t catch an issue and you have to spend hours debugging a broken configuration, you can later modify the script to catch the new issue and you’ll never have to spend those hours again.
Problem:
I’m designing a new search system. Should I use Oracle or Voldermort?
Solution:
Since you are asking me for advice, my guess is that neither of these solutions have a single compelling feature or limitation that make the decision clear-cut.
Therefore, go with the technology you understand better. Imagine yourself, a year in the future and the system just returned a wrong result. Which system you’ll find easier to solve the problem? Obviously the one you understand better, and the one that has troubleshooting tools you are more comfortable with.
Go with that one.
Problem:
My users complain about a performance problem. My system is memory bounded and I believe that adding more memory will solve the issue. I opened a ticket for our sysadmins to add memory, but they have been ignoring my ticket and nothing was done. Now I’m blamed for not solving the performance issue!
Solution:
Here are several possible solutions, ordered from recommended to highly risky:
- Update the ticket and ask for ETA.
- Use whatever internal process you have to escallate the ticket or make it higher priority.
- Make friends with a sysadmin and ask your friend to check the ticket and help you.
- Complain to your manager
- Complain to the manager of the sysadmin
- Go to the sysadmin cube and ask him nicely when the ticket will be ready
- Go to the sysadmin cube and yell
- Ask for a meeting or conference call involving more than 2 managers.
Posted by Sheeri Cabral on Jul 30, 2010
Today marks my last day at Pythian. I have been at Pythian for almost three years. In those three years, Pythian’s already thriving MySQL practice has grown even more. I have worked with big and small clients alike, across many industries, managed a team of up to 4 DBAs, and learned a lot not just about MySQL, but what my goals are in general.
Though I am leaving, everything I said in the blog post I made when I announced I was coming to Pythian still holds true. Pythian is a challenging environment and one I would recommend to anyone who finds their current DBA environment boring that they should come to Pythian and experience what it is like to work here. I had lunch with Paul Vallee yesterday and we even discussed possible future collaborations (hence the title, a joke that I am “forking” off of Pythian).
So if it is so great, why am I leaving? It’s simple, really — Pythian is growing by leaps and bounds. I started when Pythian was about half the size it currently is. There is a lot of change happening within Pythian, and I believe it is very good change. However, I enjoyed the environment Pythian was when I started almost three years ago, and personally I am not ready to go with Pythian on the journey it is taking.
So where am I going next? For starters, I will take the month of August off paid work. I have an idea of where I might go for paid work in September, but you will have to watch Planet MySQL for the announcement. During August I will be doing some conference planning and organizing, for OpenSQLCamp in Boston in October first, and then for conferences in 2011. I will also be moving apartments, which is a big task. And I will be focusing on some personal goals, such as spending more time with my husband and becoming more active.
I am excited about having a month off, even though I have a lot to work on in that month.
Posted by Sheeri Cabral on Jul 20, 2010
Yes, you read the title correctly — there are three editions of MySQL available, according to http://www.mysql.com/products/enterprise/server.html. Well, that page names two, and then of course there is the community edition….
From the manual page:
MySQL Enterprise Server is available in the following editions:
* MySQL Enterprise Server – Pro is the world’s most popular open source database that enables you to rapidly deliver high performance and scalable Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) applications.
* MySQL Enterprise Server – Advanced is the most comprehensive edition of MySQL. It provides all the benefits of MySQL Enterprise Server Pro and adds horizontal table and index partitioning for improving the performance and management of VLDBs (Very Large Databases).
How is “horizontal table and index partitioning” different from the regular partitioning available in MySQL 5.1?
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Posted by Alex Gorbachev on Jun 28, 2010
Updated: 29-Jun-2010, 30-Jun-2010.
For me, ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2010 started on Friday with the ACE Directors briefing. Best practices topic was touched there slightly and I twitted about it. I decided that the feedback deserves a blog post so I’m simply quoting the conversation here. If you have anything to add, you know where to find the comment box.
Posted by Alex Gorbachev on Jun 25, 2010
It is time… Time for one more very special conference for me. Why special?
- I have never been to ODTUG Kaleidoscope before. I always like new conferences — new experience.
- Unlike Sheeri, I do not speak! This is one of those rare conferences where I come to slack off, meet old friends and make new ones, go to lots of sessions and actually learn stuff.
- Coming from the DBA background, it’s not often that I come to development oriented conferences and I think I should do more of that.
- It’s in Washington, DC. I lived there for some time and have number of good friends there. I’m really excited to see them again!
So what am I going to do there? I just arrived and right in time for the Oracle ACE Directors’ briefing that will run for the whole days of Friday. This is a super secret meeting where Oracle’s super secret plans are shared. Nobody can talk about that after this meeting or their tongues are cut off on the spot. For those of you who didn’t realize I’m joking, the ACE Director’s briefing is where Oracle shares the roadmap of its products — some of it is long term strategy and some is about the upcoming releases. There are few things that we are asked not to share in public but, frankly, there is nothing really sensitive. One of the most interesting parts of the briefing are the Q&A moments when all kind of questions get asked (sometimes tough ones) and, to the most parts, gets answered.
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