Posted by Vanessa Simmons on Mar 7, 2012
Today was a double celebration for Pythian & founder Paul Vallée (happy birthday again Paul).
We’re thrilled to be recognized for our unique and varied culture of top industry talent. I’m proud to announce our latest award, the 2012 Employer Excellence Award for Retention and Engagement by Hire Immigrants Ottawa, for our achievement in workplace diversity. Read the news, or watch Paul’s acceptance speech.
Looking for a great job opportunity? We’re hiring! If you love data as much as we do make the first move and register with us & check out our latest postings. It will be the best move of your career!
From left: Paul Vallee, Pythian; Adrian Harewood, CBC; and Denyce Daiken, Algonquin College. Photo courtesy of HIO.
Posted by leger on Mar 7, 2012
With this milestone birthday that has now arrived for Paul, it’s time to look back on the years and SOME (there are way too many stories to put them all here) of the Pythian history highlights. By the way, for those of you who aren’t aware, Paul has always been an entrepreneur, and when you have a minute you should ask him about his earlier ventures, there a few good stories to be told there too.
Pythian started in a basement office in the late 90’s. When I joined, I was welcomed to “The Pythian Group” by the ownership team, over a couple of beers. At that point there were no clients, but I had a good feeling about what this company had to offer, and knowing Paul’s drive and business sense I decided that this was a great next step for my career.
To give you an idea of the size of the office, lunch was often spent watching Law & Order and discussing the look and feel for how the original versions of Avail and Support Track would be built. Oh ya, and the punishment for leaving work first in winter, was having to shovel the snow in the owner’s driveway to get your car out. After a rather short amount of time, we started getting some onsite consulting contracts along with our first Maestro managed services contract. For my fellow Pythianites, ever wonder what the acronym MSS stands for in the title of one of our storage scripts? That script came from our first contract and the person who did the onsite work was none other than Paul.
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Posted by goswami on Mar 1, 2012
Microsoft has released one more free eBook, this time it is on SQL Server 2012. This is the second draft of this book. SQL Server MVP Ross Mistry and Stacia Misner has covered Administration and BI part, there are 10 chapters in total divided in two parts, they are:
PART I Database Administration (by Ross Mistry)
CHAPTER 1 Denali Editions and Enhancements
CHAPTER 2 High Availability and Disaster Recovery Enhancements
CHAPTER 3 Scalability and Performance
CHAPTER 4 Security Enhancements
CHAPTER 5 Beyond Relational
PART II Business Intelligence Development (by Stacia Misner)
CHAPTER 6 Integration Services
CHAPTER 7 Data Quality Services
CHAPTER 8 Master Data Services
CHAPTER 9 Analysis Services and PowerPivot
CHAPTER 10 Reporting Services Read the rest of this entry . . .
Posted by Maryanne Birksted on Feb 22, 2012
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.
| Session Title |
Speaker |
Abstract |
| Benchmarking Oracle Performance with ORION |
Alex Gorbachev |
Every time Alex demonstrates charts he produces during IO benchmarks with ORION tool (Oracle I/O Numbers), he hears “Wow! How do you create these?” In this presentation, Alex will provide practical tips and tricks on how to benchmark your storage subsystem and capacity, how to stress test it, and determine the limits. You will learn how easy it is to setup ORION benchmark and collect I/O performance characteristics of your platform and assess scalability of small random IOs, impact of writes on I/Operformance, impact of different RAID levels, how backups can affect your OTLP traffic, performance of outer areas of disks vs inner areas, compare SSD with HDD performance, and etc. Because ORION test scenarios are very repeatable, it’s a great measuring tool in your Measure, Analyze, Change, Measure cycle. |
| Queues, Pools, and Caches: The Right Way to Scale OLTP |
Gwen Shapira |
Transaction processing systems are generally considered easier to scale than data warehouses. Relational databases were designed for this type of workload, and there are no esoteric hardware requirements. Mostly, it is just matter of normalizing to the right degree and getting the indexes right. The major challenge in these systems is their extreme concurrency, which means that small temporary slowdowns can escalate to major issues very quickly. In this presentation, Gwen Shapira will explain how application developers and DBAs can work together to built a scalable and stable OLTP system – using application queues, connection pools and strategic use of caches in different layers of the system. |
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.
Posted by Vanessa Simmons on Feb 14, 2012
To our customers & partners, from the heart
We’d like to take this day of adoration to thank our clients and partners for their loyalty and business. We hope we say it enough: we love your data.
One of the most familiar icons on this day of romance is Cupid, the god of love. And just like Cupid, our roots also go back to the classics – with the Greek priestess Pythia. Commonly known as the Oracle of Delphi, the Pythia was widely credited for her prophecies inspired by Apollo. The Pythia was an esteemed source of wisdom in ancient Greece. We’d like to hold a similar place in your heart—and the hearts of all our clients and our extended Pythian family of partners and community friends—for the insights we can offer into data and applications infrastructure.
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
