Pythian Group

This Friday, at noon, Paul Vallee and Andrew Waitman, Pythian’s owner and CEO, respectively, have an exclusive lunch with Larry Ellison at the Oracle head-quarters in San Francisco, CA.

As you have already guessed, Mr. Ellison has personally invited Paul and Andrew as a recognition to an unparalleled heroic efforts by Pythian to motivate and support 42 (forty-two) of its most talented DBAs to receive recognition as Oracle ACEs and ACE Directors, due to their wide contribution to the Oracle and MySQL communities around the world.

The Pythian executives will be accepting the awards on behalf of the 42 DBAs from the hands of Larry himself. The agenda of today’s meeting also includes the random selection of 13 of those 42 DBAs; the lucky ones will have the pleasure to enjoy an afternoon of sailing on Larry’s boat later this month. They have committed to go sail around the globe 42 times.
Read the rest of this entry . . .

I’m very excited to announce this somewhat old news — we have a brand new Oracle ACE at Pythian — Yury Velikanov. Fantastic addition to Pythian’s team of ACEs and ACE Directors — Fahd Mirza, Gwen Shapira, Jared Still, Christo Kutrovsky and myself. If you want to know more about Oracle ACE Program, the latest issue of Oracle Magazine has an article written by the fellow Oracle ACE Mike Riley — Everything Is Coming Up ACEs!.

I’ve known Yury for a while as I met him online on Oracle-L many years ago. The world is small and after living on different continents (North America and Europe), providence put us together on the third continent — Australia. As I was building our Australian business in Sydney, it took me a year to convince Yury to join Pythian. But I tell you it was worth the efforts!
Read the rest of this entry . . .

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 . . .

RMOUG Training Days 2010 are in the full swing today with the University classes ongoing and that’s also the day most of my friends arriving here at Hyatt and when all the fun begins. Now that my stomach is full and Debra is off to her hotel room and Lisa is sleeping, I can finally do a quick blog post.

The flight Ottawa-Denver was quite enjoyable as it’s one of the rare direct flights from Ottawa. RMOUG volunteers pick up their guest speakers personally, which is a very nice touch, and with all this my travel to Denver feels just like a short drive to work. And that’s important if you know what we are up for tonight…

Few Oracle ACEs divers are going to jump into the pool with sharks at Denver Aquarium and show them who’s the boss. I’ll pretend to be a diving ACE as well (sh-h-h-h… don’t tell anybody I’m not). Unfortunately, it does mean that we will be late to the RMOUG speakers reception but we have to sacrifice something.

I’m sure you are dying to know what happens to us and if anybody gets eaten. If so, join us tomorrow, Wednesday 17-Feb, at the Read the rest of this entry . . .

I recently nominated my colleague and good friend Christo Kutrovsky for the Oracle ACE program. Today, I’m excited to share that he has been accepted and is now part of the community of 200+ Oracle ACEs and Oracle ACE Directors.

Christo has been an active blogger on our blog and has made numerous top-class presentations at Oracle Conference world-wide. He has also been an active contributor on the Oracle-L list.

Christo has been always representing an independent voice in the community and it’s a pleasure to have him on board. I’m looking forward to his contributions to the Oracle ACE program and the Oracle community at large.

Welcome Christo!

This is the 137th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs. Dave Edwards is enjoying a week off, and so as part of my plot to take over the world, I am writing this week’s Log Buffer.

First, the fun stuff: Josh Berkus tells us that the American English Translation of the Manga Guide to Databases is available in Japanese Fairies and Third Normal Form.

Then, the basics:
Giri Mandalika points to an article on Using MySQL with Java Technology. This is a basic article on how to connect, and does not go into all the wonders that Connector/J can really do. Speaking of basics, Decipher Information Systems has an article on Back to the Basics: Refreshing a Regular View Definition in SQL Server and Oracle. Chet Justice, the Oracle Nerd, writes about transactions in ORA-8177 Can’t Serialize Access For this Transaction. There is theoretical information about isolation levels that applies to all database systems. Mats Kindahl explains some transactional theory when talking about why Mixing Engines in Transactions in MySQL can get you into trouble.

It’s hard to get more basic than what data type to use for a single character Read the rest of this entry . . .