Posted by Alex Gorbachev on Feb 26, 2010
A couple weeks ago I did a short blog post about SAN storage failures and how people are blinded by all the bells and whistles that are supposed to make storage arrays 100% reliable and failsafe. My conclusion was that there is no way to avoid storage failures, and that a better way is to anticipate those failures and be ready to handle them with minimal service impact.
I referenced a wake up call from a CTO of an Australian hosting company. Let me quote it again:
The outage, blamed on an IBM storage array, saw the company’s chief technology officer promise “significant changes to the way we deploy and manage our storage environment”.
Today, I stumbled across another article that demonstrates their solution of the storage reliability problem. From Melbourne IT on $18m Oracle revamp:
… to improve the reliability of its operational support systems at a cost of $7 million over three years, which has also seen it switch storage vendors from IBM to EMC. Data corruption that had occurred on its IBM storage systems were blamed for a several day outage experienced at the company’s WebCentral web-hosting business.
So we see that, instead of learning the right lesson, they conclude, “This IBM storage stuff isn’t reliable, EMC sales folks convinced me that they are better. Now my storage will not fail.” The “significant changes to the way we deploy and manage our storage environment” were mere vendor change.
Well, data recovery services will be flourishing!
Posted by André Araujo on Nov 4, 2009
It’s only one week to go now and the program for the AUSOUG National Conference Series 2009 is out. I’ll be presenting on the first day in Perth (Nov 10th) about Oracle Flashback technology.
I’m looking forward to attending the conference in Perth, not only because I’ll be presenting there but also because it’s my first time in Western Australia. All going well my presentation will be honed before the weekend and I’ll be arriving in Perth still this week, on Friday, to enjoy an extended weekend in Perth and Margareth River wine region with my wife before the conference begins.
Posted by Alex Gorbachev on Aug 23, 2009
What: SMUG#9 – In-depth MySQL with Arjen Lentz
When: Monday, September 7, 2009 5:30 PM
Where: Please make sure to RSVP (even “Maybe”) so that we know how many are coming!
Sydney Mechanics School of Art
Level 3, 280 Pitt Street
Sydney
02 9262 7300
I’m very excited to announce a very special guest at this user group meeting!
Arjen Lentz is in town doing his Sydney training program 7-Sep to 9-Sep and kindly agreed to drop by and talk about something interesting in the MySQL world – be it a technical topic or the state of the MySQL community eco-system.
For those of you who are relatively new in the group – Arjen has actually kicked-off the Sydney MySQL User Group few years ago. Arjen has been Australia’s earliest MySQL AB employee. He lives in Brisbane and is visiting Sydney for just few days so this is a unique opportunity to meet him personally unless you are a lucky student enrolled into his training program classes that week.
We are starting at 5:30pm with pizza and beer and some mingling around. Around 6:00pm, we should be in the condition to move into a more formal discussion led by Arjen. The finish should be by about 8:30pm.
Please don’t forget to RSVP and answer the question at the RSVP form on what topics would you like to discuss the most.
Looking forward to see many of you there!
Posted by Alex Gorbachev on Jul 17, 2009
I’ll be in Canberra next week presenting at the ACT Oracle User Group Developer and DBA Seminar Day on Thursday, 23 July 2009. If you are in Australian capital city, I’d be very much looking forward to see you there!
The topic I will be presenting is 11g New Features Out of the Box. I presented it few times already but originally, it’s based on Christo Kutrovsky’s presentation from Oracle Open World 2007. Unlike many presentations on 11g new features, this session will be focused on the enhancements that often go unnoticed and not marketed widely but boost DBA productivity and are available out of the box without much implementations efforts.
I’m most likely coming in Canberra the day before and will do some sightseeing with my family so all suggestions are welcome. That reminds me… Need to book the hotel!
Posted by Alex Gorbachev on Jul 14, 2009
What: Sydney Oracle Meetup #8 — Exadata Extravaganza
When: Friday, July 17, 2009 5:30 PM (please, make sure to RSVP yes/no/maybe)
Where: Sydney CBD Join meetup for the detailed location.
The topic for this meetup is quite exciting – Oracle Exadata and everything about it. David Centellas, Senior Database Consultant from Oracle will do technical presentation on Exadata and, after the break, we will have a open forum discussion where two Oracle’s Enterprise Architects, Tim Rubin and Chris Jones, will answer our questions and share thir real-world experience.
Schedule:
- 5:30pm – 6:00pm — Networking with food and refreshments
- 6:00pm – 7:00pm — Presentation on Exadata by David Centellas
- 7:00pm – 7:30pm — Break and informal networking
- 7:30pm – 8:30pm — Open Forum based on real-world Exadata experience with David Centellas, Tim Rubin and Chris Jones
- post even — optional gathering in the nearby pub – it’s Friday night in the end!
Read the rest of this entry . . .
Posted by Alex Gorbachev on Jun 26, 2009
Reanimating the Sydney MySQL User Group!
What: Sydney MySQL User Group meetup #7 – The Reboot
When: July 16, 2009 5:30 PM (please don’t forget to RSVP yes/no/maybe)
Where: Sydney, CBD – join the meetup for exact location.
We are back! After 3 years of being silent, SMUG (can I call it so? I know there are conflicts with other acronyms) resurrects the meetings.
The logistic of the meetup is the following:
- 5:30pm — the gathering starts and we have pizza and beers and talking your peers
- 6:00pm — we start the presentation
- 7:00pm — break and peer networking consuming the leftovers
- 7:30pm — we have an open (but slightly moderated) discussion. Topic is TBC. Perhaps, we can talk about future of MySQL now that Oracle’s bought Sun?
Read the rest of this entry . . .
Posted by Alex Gorbachev on Jun 22, 2009
What: Sydney Oracle Meetup #7 – Advanced Queuing in E-Business Suite
When:Tuesday, June 30, 2009 5:30 PM (please, make sure to RSVP yes/no/maybe)
Where: Our standard location in Sydney CBD
Welcome to our meetup #7! This meetup will be focused on Oracle Advanced Queuing (AQ) feature and its usage in Oracle E-Business Suite.
For inexperienced SOM members, we are starting with the meet & greet and pizza+drinks at 5:30 pm and move to smart things at 6:00 pm. We will be there until about 8:30pm (some are sticking around a bit longer while some might take off a bit earlier) and will have a break in the middle. The second half is generally more open-ended as most of you already know.
So what are the goodies at this meetup?
Read the rest of this entry . . .
Posted by Alex Gorbachev on Jun 10, 2009
What: Sydney Oracle Meetup #6 — storage for Oracle databases
When: June 17, 2009 5:30 PM. Please RSVP Yes/No/Maybe.
Where: Our usual location at Sydney CBD. Level 3 this time!
Details:
We will start at 5:30PM with pizza and drinks and roll on from there as usual.
Note that we are meeting at the level 3 this time!
This meetup will be focused on storage technologies for Oracle database. It looks like a short presentation on Oracle Automatic Storage Management is in order – quite a few people are missing the concepts of the Oracle flagman storage storage solution and it’s useful to understand the approach whether you use it now or not.
So the presentation is – Oracle ASM 11g – the Evolution by Alex Gorbachev:
Read the rest of this entry . . .
Posted by Alex Gorbachev on Jun 1, 2009
I think it was the smallest group so far which is not surprising considering that Monday has been the least popular day in our internal poll. We had a tad less than 20 people but very good size for the informal discussion of Oracle 11g adoption that took place at the second half of the meetup.
Turned out that there are very few people running 11g in production. Besides us at Pythian with number of clients on 11g, we’ve had only couple people I think including Carl Young from Metcash. Carl shared their experience of running a multi-terabyte data-warehouse on Oracle 11g and how the migration happened. Thanks a lot Carl for your insights!
If you haven’t seen the case study from Oracle about this migration — see what benefits Metcash had with 11g migration. I myself took note of few areas — Query Cache helped a lot on dimension tables lookups and some popular reports, Materialized Views invalidation problems reduced, CBO becomes smarter.
Some of the things to pay attention to in 11g — Oracle Warehouse Builder 11g (11.1.0.6) has actually less features than the latest OWB 10g release. If you look at 11.1.0.7’s list of bugs fixed (Metalink Note 601739.1), you would see a few dozen bugs on “Wrong Results” Read the rest of this entry . . .
Posted by Alex Gorbachev on May 25, 2009
What: Sydney Oracle Meetup #5 – Oracle Database 11g adoption
When: Monday, June 1, 2009 5:30 PM. Please don’t forget to RSVP – whether it’s Yes, No or Maybe.
Where: As usual in Sydney CBD. See SOM#5 event page for the location.
This meetup is focused on Oracle 11g adoption. We will have one presentation followed by (or combined with) the discussion of Oracle Database 11g release, who is using it currently – what are positive and negative moments.
Apologies for Monday – it’s a rather unpopular day but this is when the room is available next week (except Friday again).
The presentation for this meeting is “Oracle 11g New Features Out of the Box” by Alex Gorbachev. Unlike many presentations on 11g new features, we will try to focus on a more subtle enhancements and less known new features. Read the rest of this entry . . .
