Pythian Group

Those of you who have seen me present about GoldenGate will know that I recommend using a heartbeat table to monitor GoldenGate lag. The heartbeat table is a great way to monitor GoldenGate replication because it can follow a single SQL insert through each major GoldenGate replication process, and report the replication lag attributable to each. And if you haven’t seen my presentation, I’m getting a revised and updated version ready for Collaborate 2012 this April.

However, this monitoring script relies on triggers, so if you have DBOPTIONS SUPPRESSTRIGGERS enabled, it will cause the entire replicat to error out with primary key violation errors. The issue prompted me to look into how this option is actually implemented.
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Pythian continues its streak of events and speaking engagements in 2012 with HOTSOS 2012 on March 4-8, 2012, at the Omni Mandalay Hotel in Irving, TX. HOTSOS is the most important conference dedicated to Oracle system performance and we are honoured to have two great speakers representing us there.  Alex Gorbachev and Gwen Shapira‘s abstracts are listed below and a full list of conference abstracts is available on the HOTSOS site here.

If you happened to miss us at a past event, email events@pythian.com and we will be happy to give you a copy of the any of the presentations we’ve made through throughout the year.

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.
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Pythian is very excited to return to the much-awaited RMOUG 12 held in Denver, Colorado from February 14-16, 2012. Keep your eyes open for Alex Gorbachev, Marc Fielding, Don Seiler and Gwen Shapira in attendance. We have a fantastic line-up of speakers this year featuring a total of seven papers presented by Alex, Marc, Don and Gwen. If you have any feedback on our sessions, please send your comments directly to the speaker or to Vanessa Simmons, Pythian Director of Marketing. Please also follow this link to sign up to receive notice of future speaking engagements, webinars or Pythian news.

Be sure to stop by our booth (#3,6,7,10) to say hello to our friends from the OakTable Network, and enter our draw to win the new Amazon Kindle with software provided by Cary Millsap (MR-Trace, MR-Tools & Method-R Profiler) and a pack of digital e-book downloads courtesy of Apress. Also slated is the RAC Attack workshop, which was first offered at Oracle Open World and UKOUG, and is now in its second year at RMOUG. Pythian is co-sponsoring this event with Apress and it’s a fun and informative way to learn from our experts how and when to properly build a RAC environment.

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The 2012 edition of RMOUG Training Days in Denver less than a month away, running February 15 and 16 at the Colorado Convention Center in Denver. Although it’s only two days, there’s a lot of technical content there, and a refreshing reduction in marketing-oriented presentations from “product managers”. It’s not too late to register, and it’s a pretty nice excuse to get to the Rockies in ski season. I’ll be doing two presentations, and am polishing up whitepapers and presentations for the submission deadline tomorrow:

• Exadata I/O Resource Manager: Ideal Technology for Database Consolidation, Wednesday 1:15pm in room 4B
• Peering Through the Cloud: The Straight Goods on Oracle Exalogic, directly after, Wednesday 4pm in room 4C

They’re right after each other in the grid, but I do get a short break for the dedicated exhibit hall time and paid vendor presentations (yes there are still a few; they have to pay the bills somehow).
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For the final day of UKOUG there are quite a few Pythian presentations. Unfortunately a lot of them happen at the same time, so it won’t be possible to attend them all live.

Using Oracle GoldenGate to Minimize Database Upgrade Risk

10:10, Media Suite
Marc Fielding

Even the best-planned database upgrades can leave nagging questions: what happens if my upgraded system performs unexpectedly? Is there a way I can go back to the previous version without downtime and data loss? Oracle GoldenGate allows DBAs to give affirmative answers to these questions. Drawing on upgrade experiences ranging from mid-sized databases to a large 10TB 90-CPU OLTP system, this session will show how to optimally configure Oracle GoldenGate, minimize downtime, maximize replication performance, and integrate Oracle GoldenGate into existing infrastructure such as Oracle ASM and storage-based replication.

Learn the various deployment scenarios where GoldenGate can minimize upgrade risk and delivery business value. Find out how GoldenGate can help not only during the upgrade, but after the upgrade as well. Learn how to use GoldenGate in medium- and high-volume environments. See real-world, tested GoldenGate configurations. Find out lessons learned and pitfalls to avoid.

The Answer to Free Memory Swap and Everything

10:10, Hall 8A
Christo Kutrovsky

Do I have enough memory? Why is my free memory so low? Am I swapping to disk? Can I increase my SGA (db cache) size? Can I add another instance to this server? Are my system resources used optimally? These are all questions that often haunt DBAs. This presentation is The Answer. It covers in detail the different types of memory, how to monitor memory, and how to optimally use it with Oracle. Multiple examples in the presentation demonstrate how certain actions on the database side cause different memory areas to be allocated and used on the OS side. Key underlying differences in operating systems approaches to managing memory will be highlighted, with special attention given to Linux and Solaris. Using Linux as an example throughout, this presentation explains how to effectively use tools such as “top”, “vmstat” and “/proc/meminfo” to look into into a system’s allocation and use of memory.

Amazon RDS, EC2 and S3 for Oracle Databases

11:20am, Hall 10B
Alex Gorbachev

This technical session focuses on specific recommendations and guidelines for leveraging the Amazon Web Services platform to host Oracle databases. We will looks into traditional database hosting using EC2 platform as well as recently introduced Amazon RDS on Oracle. We will look into how to configure, provision, backup, restore, monitor, and secure your databases in AWS. We will also look on how you can leverage S3 cloud storage for hybrid cloud deployments, particularly for backup and archival storage.

Backup and Recovery Roundtable

11:20am, Roundtable Area
Michael Abbey

A discussion of backup and recovery technology, problems and solutions. We will poll the attendees for an agenda on the day and proceed with an informal discussion not limited to:

RMAN, OSB, Sans, Data Guard backups, RAC backups and other topics of interest.

Concurrent Processing Performance Analysis for Apps DBAs

2:25pm, Hall 10B
Maris Elsins

Concurrent processing is one of the key elements of Oracle E-Business Suite, that’s used by most of modules for scheduling and processing background jobs. Keeping this functionality healthy is important to get maximum performance out of it. The paper describes the key metrics to estimate the performance of the concurrent managers, discusses approaches and techniques that can be used to understand how well the concurrent processing is set up, what are the bottlenecks and delays in processing of concurrent requests and provides tips on how to deal with each of the identified problem. This paper is targeted for Oracle Applications DBAs and technical consultants.

On tap for Tuesday is a 2-hour master class from Michael Abbey, along with an all-day drop-in RAC attack workshop with Alex Gorbachev and the RAC SIG.

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For those of you attending UKOUG today, there is a healthy dose of Pythian presentations on tap this afternoon. Actually, you can do it wall to wall 2:30pm to 6:30pm if you like.

To note:
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(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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A mere 1 week until one of the treats of the year … off to Birmingham for the UKOUG show Monday the 5th through the 7th. My third time at this show and it was quite a treat each time. Brighton 1992 was my first voyage to the Mother Land and I was fascinated. I especially appreciated the painting on the crosswalks that reminded one to look right too before leaving the curb.  We stayed at the Metropole which was beside the Grand. There were small remnants visible in the front of the concrete that made up the facade of the Grand … October 12 1984 and thankfully Maggie (aka The Iron Lady) was ok after a bomb went off. October 1984 I was just getting started with Oracle (yes I first saw it when I was 8 :)).

My first venture into Europe was followed by a bevvy of trips into the continent in 1993, 1994, and 1995, ending up at the EOUG in Florence Italy where I gave a handful of papers. My presentations in Vienna in 1994 were a real eye-opener. Never before did I realize how quickly I speak and how poorly I tend to enunciate. Not until I had the opportunity to present to non English-language native attendees did I realize I had to slow down, speak clearly, and avoid idioms and colloquialisms.

As the mid 1990′s gave way to the soon-to-be new century, the Oracle tech space was teeming with techies and I had the pleasure of rubbing shoulders with early gurus such as Lewis (yes JL … none other), Niemiec, Millsap, Shallahamer, and Ellis. You could not go to the corner store without bumping into one of these techs. I have had the pleasure of giving more than 100 presentations over the past 22 years and keynoting for a handful of user group events in North America.

One of my first adventures into keynoting was a closing session at user group day which happens Sunday before Oracle Open World starts. I discussed little known facts about Oracle, the software we have come to know and love; for example:

1. There was once a time when Oracle had 2 versions of their server offering … one for the VAX cluster and the other for all other platforms. In early 1990′s, the version of the former was at 6.2 whereas the latter still at 6.0. Around the time 6.0.34 was released, Oracle “married” the 2 versions into something like 6.0.36. Thus the VAX cluster install base got the pleasure of upgrading from 6.2 to 6.0.
2. The terminal release of a very popular SQL*Forms 2 was called 2.3. A while after 2.3 came out, there was a major new release called 3.0. The user community was informed that they should upgrade to 3.0 as soon as possible as 2.3 was the terminal release. Quite some time after 2.3 was discontinued, the Applications customers noticed they were running an as-of-yet unheard of release called 2.4.
3. Oracle V6 was released in 1988 and had an add-on called TPO (transaction processing option). It contained, amongst other things, a procedural extension called PL/SQL. A few years after V6 hit the streets, Oracle realized Pl/SQL was the answer to the implementation of stored objects that appeared with Oracle7. TPO was retired and PL/SQL bundled with Orace7 at no extra charge.
4. The foundation of the PL/SQL implementation was (and still may be) for many yearsa handful of packages called PIDL, DIUTIL, STANDARD, and DIANA. Ok, who was Diana? As it turns out it was an acronym, of which the first “A” stood for “Ada”. Ada was used primarily by the US Department of Defence DoD), an extension of Pascal and a plethora of other languages used by DoD.
5. SCOTT/TIGER? Bruce Scott, an early developer at Oracle had a cat named Tiger.

I anticipate seeing people from all over the continent at UKOUG. The attendance over the past few years has been growing and nothing short of astounding. I am giving two papers at the show … one on a dear friend of us all called rman and the other on a close second … the physical standby. For me, even in the midst of emerging technology solutions, there’s still nothing like the old-fashioned Oracle CORE database arena.