Posted by Maryanne Birksted on Jan 25, 2012
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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Posted by Marc Fielding on Dec 5, 2011
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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Posted by Michael S. Abbey on Dec 5, 2011
(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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Posted by Michael S. Abbey on Nov 30, 2011
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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
Posted by Vanessa Simmons on Nov 16, 2011
Pythian continues to have a busy quarter with events right up to the end of the 2011 calendar year.
If you happened to miss us at a past event, email events@pythian.com to reconnect or request a copy of the any of the presentations we’ve made through 2011 or earlier.
Live events
Web events
Posted by Vanessa Simmons on Oct 5, 2011
Better late than never – we absolutely have prizes this year for the Blogger’s Meetup. Alex has been way too busy of late to get this organized (joking, not ALL his fault…). Seriously, we do have prizes. We will have beer and there will be food at Jillian’s in a very short time.
I gotta run and get this organized, so this post is short and sweet. Should be no complaints as this year we have not just two, but THREE prizes. Read on, or you’ll get the scoop at the meetup.
1) Bandana art contest on stylish Pythian & OTN designer bandanas — one lucky blogger will receive an Ipod touch generously sponsored by Pythian (we love this event, can you tell?).
2) For the best, most creative blog post about the meetup itself, OTN is giving away a free registration to Oracle OpenWorld in 2012. But, there are a few small rules:
- the blog post must use as many names of people in attendance as possible.
- the blog post must be readable. It needs to make sense to someone who wasn’t there. It must be a story and not a list.
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Posted by Michael S. Abbey on Oct 4, 2011
After the first day and a half, the show has yet again lived up to all expectations. Oracle has been around for over two decades and this well-oiled machine excels at everything it does … OOW 2011 being a living/breathing example. It all started with the database and everything they have touched since has turned to gold.
There are some definitive themes at the show so far and I am sure others will emerge as the rest of the week unfolds. The expected buzz words are all over the show and the name “Pythian” is on (or poised to be on) the mind of attendees. The highlight of the partners’ general session was our very own Paul Vallee who sounded like a seasoned pro speaking in front of a capacity crowd in Moscone South on Sunday afternoon. It’s just a matter of time until the throngs get wind of Paul’s already-famous words while on stage … get the ODA from Pythian and we will migrate you for free. Read the rest of this entry . . .
Posted by Alex Gorbachev on Oct 3, 2011
Oracle Big Data Appliance (BDA) is being announced at the Oracle OpenWorld keynote as I’m posting this. It will take some time for it to be actually available for shipment and some details will likely change but here is what we have so far about Oracle Big Data Appliance.
A rack with InfiniBand, full of 2U servers similar to Exadata Storage. No flash storage needed so couple sockets and a dozen of disks will do. Maybe more ram than Exadata storage cells themselves. I suspect you could have as many servers as you want in a configuration but since Hadoop clusters are usually dozens and more nodes, full rack seems reasonable with about 20 Hadoop compute nodes to start with. Real deployments should easily go into multiple racks stacked together.
Low latency, high bandwidth communication is critical for fast data loading and later data processing with Hadoop so InfiniBand will be there — same Exadata/Exalogic-like platform.
Oracle should also have its own NoSQL engine — Oracle NoSQL Database. If you know existing Oracle products, Berkley DB seems to be a reasonable foundation to power Oracle’s new NoSQL engine.
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Posted by Vanessa Simmons on Oct 3, 2011
PYTHIAN NEWS
Live from Oracle OpenWorld Pythian is thrilled to share news of our big win: Oracle North America Titan Award for Oracle Exadata solution that was planned, deployed and is currently managed for online marketing corporation LinkShare in New York.
Posted by Vanessa Simmons on Sep 30, 2011
PYTHIAN NEWS
Pythian and Scalar Decisions today announced a formal partnership providing Oracle customers an unparalleled one-stop shop solution provider in Canada. Combined, we can help Oracle customers develop, fulfill, implement, and manage their whole Oracle solution stack.
