Pythian Group

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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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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Michigan OakTable Symposium (MOTS) is a unique event taking place just before Oracle OpenWorld — 16-17 September. Why unique? This is the first conference (is it not?) where all presenters are members of OakTable Network, a group that gathers number of like-minded IT professionals with scientific approach to Oracle database technology and to the life in general.

It happens in Ann Arbor, Michigan — a place I wanted to visit for a very long time. For those of you who are cost conscious and don’t have much in their education budget, this conference is a great value priced at a third of the Oracle OpenWorld pass and I can assure you that quality of presentations is on par with or higher then the top Oracle OpenWorld sessions. The conference is organized by volunteers from OakTable Network and few good friends as a non-commercial event so you will hear no marketing crap whatsoever.

Unlike, huge OpenWorld crowd, which has always intimidated me a little bit, MOTS is going to be a cozy event with strictly limited cap of only 300 participants – ideal size to support peer networking and opportunity to mingle with some of the folks you’ve been dying to talk to.

I especially enjoyed this video promotion: Read the rest of this entry . . .

I’ve never attended the North California Oracle User Group Conferences even though they are organized every quarter. However, I’ve been always jealous of the great agenda they put together. A couple months ago, Chen Shapira reminded me once again that the next NoCOUG conference was coming up and asked whether I would be able to come to present. What a chance, I thought, easy to plan as I have no other conferences in May.

So, at NoCOUG Spring Conference 2010 in just 10 days, I’ll be doing my two hour long presentation — Demystifying Oracle RAC Workload Management. If it’s your local conference, I hope you can attend and say hello. You might also want to download the whitepaper that I put together few years ago for Hotsos Symposium — Oracle RAC Workload Management.

The conference is free to members of NoCOUG and only $50 to non-members but it would make more sense to just join the user group as its annual fees are unbelievably low — I couldn’t say it better than Iggy Fernandez did:

How much does a NoCOUG membership cost? It doesn’t cost $400, as you might expect to pay for so much educational value. It doesn’t cost $300 and it doesn’t cost $200. It doesn’t even cost $100. Yes, a calendar-year NoCOUG membership only costs $95! Won’t you join today?

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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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Update 9-Feb-10: Want to schedule a meeting with Pythian folks? See Pythian Events page.

I’m so much looking forward to the next conference in my schedule — RMOUG Training Days 2010. It would be only my second time I’m presenting at the RMOUG but it was enough to go there once to understand that it’s one of the top rated Oracle User Group conferences in the world. Some of the great speakers are presenting and registration fees are very low compare to other events of comparable quality. If your conference budget is low this year — that’s the conference you don’t want to miss!

Two of us from Pythian are going to speak at RMOUG Training Days 2010 that starts in just 4 week. I present the following session:

Alex Gorbachev: Oracle ASM 11g — The Evolution.
Oracle Automatic Storage Management has proven to be one of the most widely adopted new features in Oracle Database 10g and it has been dramatically improved in the later 11g releases. This presentation will explain what changes are solved by ASM, how these challenges are solved, what barriers there are to ASM adoptions, and how 11g Release 2 addresses these barriers.

My colleague, Christo Kutrovsky is presenting the following:
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Hi All!

This year, the International Free Software Forum celebrated its 10^th anniversary. It happened last week in Porto Alegre.

Pythian presented a session on Thursday called 8 Rules for Designing More Secure Applications with MySQL.

As promised, here are the slides we used on that session: 8 Simple Rules to Design Secure Apps with MySQL (PDF).

Cheers!