Pythian Group

This blog post covers day 0 of UKOUG 2011 — Sunday, 4th of December, 2011.

Since there were so many of us from Pythian at the conference, I’m adding my name in the blog post title. I think I will be doing it for all conference posts as I think I’ve been doing for some time. This year, there were ten Pythian folks attending UKOUG Conference and we did twelve sessions including multiple presentations, masterclass, RAC Attack workshop, round-table and 10 minutes OakTalk. I think it’s the record number of session Pythian folks did at a single UKOUG conference and the record number of Pythian peeps attending. A dozen of Pythian people in Europe and now even a sales guy in the UK mean that Pythian penetration in the UK database services business is close to the infliction point. This is ultimately a good news!

Most of Canadian Pythian representatives arrived on Sunday morning to London Heathrow. The flight was quite empty so some of us managed to get a good nap in comfort of three empty seats. Since AirCanada has power outlets in most long haul flights, I was planning to work on my slides all the way in as I usually do. However, this time I was sitting next to Christo and he kept me involved in the conversation and at some point I was getting sleepy and finally took a nap as well so I’ve done literally nothing on my slides. Oh well, at least I had some rest and it was good because I was up for almost 20 hours after we landed except a quick nap in the car from London Heathrow to Birmingham. By the way, if you travel two or more from Heathrow, hiring car transfer service makes more financial sense than train or coach and is also quite convenient.
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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

• Ottawa, ON – Nov. 16, 2011 – The HRPA presents it’s 2011/2012 CEO Dinner series and kicks off the season with a rare appearance by Pythian CEO Andrew Waitman speaking with his unique insight on “Perspectives on Business Success and The Critical Role of HR”. If you missed this rare opportunity to hear Andrew and are interested in the subject, reach out to us to connect with him.
• Birmingham, UK – Dec. 5-7th, 2011 – Find Pythian experts at the UKOUG’s Annual User Group Conference. Founder Paul Vallee will be in attendance, along with our sales and local UK team members. Catch sessions by:
• Alex Gorbachev: Database I/O Performance, Measurement, Planning & Amazon RDS, EC2 and S3 for Oracle Databases
• Christo Kutrovsky: Oracle Exadata Hybrid Columnar Compression – Leveraging it Fully
• Marc Fielding: Oracle Exadata I/O Resource Management, Ideal Technology for Consolidation
• Maris Elsins: Concurrent Processing Performance Analysis for Apps DBAs
• Michael Abbey: RMAN Setup Best Practices & Using a Physical Standby to Minimize Downtime for Database Release or Server Change

To meet with Pythian at UKOUG send a note to us.

Web events

• Nov. 2011 – Movember Campaign: Team Pythian, both individually and collectively are adding to the “mo”mentum of the Movember “mo”vement in support of men’s health issues. Go Mo’s go!
• Nov. 22, 2011 – “Register – Introducing Oracle Database Appliance with Alex Gorbachev“
• Nov. 23, 2011 – “Register – Under the Hood of Oracle ASM – Fault Tolerance with Alex Gorbachev“
• Nov. 30, 2011 – “Register – Peering Through The Cloud – The Straight Goods on Oracle Exalogic with Marc Fielding“

Watch for Pythian across North America presenting our experience with Oracle Database Appliance in various cities and at various user group and local Oracle events in conjunction with your Oracle field sales team. If you missed us recently at TOUG, and NoCOUG – send us a note at oda@pythian.com and we’ll share our beta experience and details of the free migration offer we announced at Oracle OpenWorld 2011 where Pythian will upgrade or migrate you to ODA free of charge. Get all of your ODA questions answered candidly by our expert team, and learn how to take advantage of all Oracle Database Appliance has to offer and get upgraded to Oracle Database 11g in the process.

Before I left on vacation (now almost a month ago – can’t remember when I had such a long vacation if I ever had), Mark Fontecchio organized a short video conference between myself and John Appleby. The idea was to compare Oracle Exadata with SAP HANA in a shot video discussion. Unfortunately, video part didn’t really work but we did end up with at least a podcast — thanks Mark for organizing it.

Download MP3 — Oracle Exadata vs. SAP HANA
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Are you considering Oracle Exadata as a data warehousing or consolidation solution for your organization? Before you go any further, be sure to join Alex Gorbachev, Oracle ACE Director & Pythian CTO at noon tomorrow (EST) as he outlines where Oracle Exadata is the best fit.

• Register Now & More Webinar Details
• Read about LinkShare’s success with Oracle Exadata
• More Oracle Exadata resources
• Hear the project details of Pythian’s successful deployment of Oracle Exadata at LinkShare Corporation in New York, delivering 10x results
• Find out about more upcoming webinars

Please join Pythian for our next series of live and recorded webinars for Q2, 2011.
• Building A 2TB Highly Available MySQL Database
  Thursday, June 23, 2011 12PM – 1PM EST
  Register now
• Is Oracle Exadata for You?
  Thursday, Jun 2, 2011 12:00PM – 1:00PM EDT
  Register now
• Peering Through the Cloud – The Straight Goods on Oracle Exalogic
  Thursday, July 14, 2011 – 12:00PM – 1:00PM EDT
  Register now.

Joining live gives you the chance to ask questions directly of our DBA experts.

If you miss a session, you can always check out select recorded webinars below:

Pythian Recorded Webinars:

Is Exadata For You?
Oracle Ace Director Alex Gorbachev, Pythian CTO, looks at Oracle Exadata’s suitability for various environments and what problems it can solve for IT and your business.
Watch now.

Exadata Project Results & Details: LinkShare Implementation
Pythian successfully deployed Oracle Exadata at LinkShare Corporation, and is responsible for the ongoing management of the system. Marc Fielding, Pythian Senior Consultant, and technical lead on the implementation shares the project details in this webinar. Read the related success story.
Watch now.

Implementing Oracle Exadata – Strategies for SuccessMarc Fielding shares business and performance advantages offered by the integrated technology of Oracle Database Machine and Exadata including reduced costs, shorter deployment time, superior performance, increased functionality and streamlined support.
Watch now.

HOWTO: Implementing ASM Successfully:
Oracle ASM has been one of the most successful new features since Oracle Database 10g but migrating data to another storage platform represents number of challenges and ASM adds new flavors to DBA responsibilities. For those evaluating this technology, or are on the migration path, in this session, Alex Gorbachev helps plan your migration without having to discover of ASM from scratch.
Watch now.

Implementing Exadata? Attend Getting Ready for Oracle Exadata: Strategies for Success from Miro & Pythian

Join Pythian’s Marc Fielding for this free webinar on Tuesday April 5, at 1pm ET with Miro Consulting to learn about the significant business and performance advantages of Oracle Exadata including reduced costs, shorter deployment time, superior performance, increased functionality and streamlined support based on real-life experience. This session will lend valuable insight as you begin your Oracle Exadata implementation project.

Pythian has proven experience with Oracle Exadata at LinkShare Corporation in New York. LinkShare is running a multi-site active-active data warehouse using Oracle Exadata, delivering real-time analytics to both internal and external clients. Marc will walk through the highlights of the implementation process, from the initial business case and vendor selection to the final go-live. Topics will include vendor selection, data migration strategies, high availability, data compression, performance tuning, backups, and monitoring. You’ll also hear about implementation issues encountered, their solutions, lessons learned as well as the results of the project, and 10x performance improvements realized by LinkShare.

Register today.

Considering Exadata?

Then join Alex Gorbachev on Thursday April 7 at noon for “Is Oracle Exadata for you.”

Oracle Exadata has become the fastest growing Oracle product in history and every IT manager is curious how it can help their business. In this session we will look at Oracle Exadata suitability for various environments and what problems it solves for IT and business. Based on Pythian’s Oracle Exadata
experience, we will go through the benefits of Oracle Exadata in different deployment scenarios to help you justify the technology for the right projects – data warehousing, OLTP, database consolidation as well as
hybrid environments.

You should come into this session with a general idea of the platform. The session will be structured by presenting a business or IT problem and whether Oracle Exadata can solve it and how. As examples, Alex will review several cases when Exadata is a great solution and when it doesn’t fit well.

Following the session you should be able to assess your own situation and the potential for an Oracle Exadata deployment, learn the scenarios in which Oracle Exadata is an especially good fit, and learns situations where an Oracle Exadata implementation might not be justified.

Register now.

WHO SHOULD ATTEND: CIOs, VP of Ops, Directors of IT, DBA Managers, anyone migrating to Oracle Exadata or a looking for a high performance data warehousing, consolidation solution. Oracle employees who are working with clients implementing Oracle Exadata will also find the above sessions of value.

More information on Pythian’s Oracle Exadata services & further resources can be found at www.pythian.com/exadata.

Watch this short video to hear firsthand from Jonathan Levine, LinkShare COO on LinkShare’s experience with Oracle Exadata or read the related customer success snapshot.

It’s a brand new year, and the Pythian Team is hitting the ground running with more speaking engagements than ever!

Check the schedule below for a list of Pythian appearances at various user groups and conferences for Q1 2011.

We’d like to hear from you. If you have any feedback on our sessions, please send your comments directly to the speaker, or to Vanessa Simmons, Pythian Director of Marketing.

Follow this link to sign up to receive notice of future speaking engagements, webinars or Pythian news.

RMOUG Training Days 2011, Denver, Colorado, Feb 15-17, 2011

Pythian will be at RMOUG in full force. Look for Alex Gorbachev, Kellyn Pedersen & Don Seiler. Be sure to stop by our table (#10), say hi to us & our friends from the OakTable Network, and enter our draw to win an Amazon Kindle, and software provided by Cary Millsap (MR-Trace, MR-Tools & Method-R Profiler) among a few other surprises. While you’re at it, visit our neighbours Apress and pick up your copy of 10 Tips to Make Database Consolidation a Success. Take advantage of free Exhibit Hall passes, and be our guest (bring your peers!). Email events@pythian.com to request a pass.

Pythian is agressively hiring top DBA talent. If this is you, register on our Career Center, or request a time for a short intro chat with Pythian. Alex, Kellyn or Don will be more than happy to give you the inside scoop on the company & share why they love working for Pythian.
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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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Time is flying and it’s hard to believe that less than a month left until the start of the next Hotsos Symposium. If you are reading this blog, there is no chance that you don’t know what Hotsos Symposium is — it’s the most authoritative conference focused around Oracle performance.

As a special thanks to Pythian customers (you do know that Hotsos is a Pythian partner, don’t you?), there is a $100 discount so please get in touch with us to receive it.

What should you expect coming to the Hotsos Symposium 2010? It’s 3 days packed with sessions on all aspects of Oracle performance optimization whether it’s design, troubleshooting, development, methodologies and processes. Legendary Tom Kyte — who else can you expect for the keynote?!

If you take an optional training day with Tanel Poder then you are likely to learn at least as much about troubleshooting Oracle database performance as you do during the conference and probably even more. Every presentation by Tanel has been an eye opener for me. If you’ve seen his material, you’d know what I’m talking about. Now, imagine that it’s not a one-hour session but the whole day! It will fry your brains so this day is for the strongest! :)
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Take a look at this! The January/February edition of Oracle Magazine features an interview with The Pythian Group’s Vice President East Asia-Pacific, Alex Gorbachev. Congrats, Alex!

It must be said here that Alex is no Christo Kutrovsky, a fact that the editors of Oracle Magazine have underscored by publishing a very small picture of Alex with his face obscured by shadow. Don’t be too hurt, Alex—what you lack in coverboy style and sass, you more than make up for in Oracle acumen.

In the background looms either the dome of the famous Sydney Opera House or one of Australia’s Great White Sharks.