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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The website for Oracle Database Cloud Services at cloud.oracle.com is now online, in conjunction with Larry Ellison’s announcement during the Oracle OpenWorld keynote going on now. It’s a hosted database service running Oracle 11gR2. The database can be accessed using a hosted Oracle application server, via JDBC across the Internet, or their own RESTful API a la Amazon. Notably lacking is Oracle’s own TNS network protocol.
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With all the buzz in OOW about the big data machine, there was also a lot of non-sense flying around. I love it that the Oracle community is finally interested in Hadoop and NoSQL, but I hate it when people sound authoritative without having an actual clue. I’ve left a few presentations with smoke coming out of my ears.

Here are few things that people got all wrong:
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Oracle announced the Big Data Appliance on Monday morning keynote. Many people, me included, were long waiting for this to happen. Others didn’t think it will ever happen. So naturally, there is a lot of buzz and excitement around the new device in Open World. The keynote announcement was very short on details and certainly did not satisfy my technical curiosity. So I went to a few presentations to hear what exactly is included in the offering.
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It’s a busy summer at Pythian, with our continuing wave of speaking sessions at upcoming community and regional industry events.

Coming to a city near you, watch for Pythian presenting hot Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server database topics:
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Collaborate 2011, Orlando, Florida – April 10-14, 2011
Pythian is happy to welcome Michael Abbey back to our team. He joins our list of distinguished speakers below. Keep an eye out for Pythian founder Paul Vallee who will also be making his annual appearance at the show.
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Welcome to Log Buffer. The weekly roundup of posts, and news of what’s happening in the database world.

At Pythian, we’re pretty much recovered from a hectic Oracle OpenWorld 2010, and I’m no longer an OOW virgin. What an experience! I had the pleasure of meeting many of you Log Buffer readers and contributors at the Annual Blogger’s Meetup at Jillian’s. Great to put faces to names. And I now officially feel like “Vanessa from Log Buffer”, as many of your t-shirts will show.

Many thanks to Marc Fielding for providing the hot items for this week’s post, in Log Buffer #203. Enjoy.
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It’s Sunday morning early in San Francisco and the biggest ever Oracle OpenWorld is about to start. It looks like it’s also going to be the busiest ever OpenWorld for me — my schedule looks crazy and I still need to do the slides for my Thursday sessions (one on ASM and one on cloud computing). Fortunately, my slides for today’s presentation are all ready to go.

OK. Don’t let me carry away — I started this post with the intention to write about what I expect Oracle to announce at this OpenWorld and it seems like the most important announcements happen at tonight’s keynote. I hasn’t been at the Oracle ACE Directors briefing so unlike them, all I can say is pure speculation-based and my wishes of what should be covered. Actually, unlike them, I actually CAN say at least something. :)

1. Oracle Exadata Database Machine v3 (x2-8) — well, that shouldn’t come as a surprise to anybody by now. I fully expect upgrade of the hardware — new Intel CPUs (probably with more cores), more memory, possibly more flash (this technology moves really quick these days). Maybe 10GbE network can be introduced to address some of the customers demands but I don’t think it’s needed that much. InfiniBand might just stay as it is — I think there is enough throughput but Marc Fielding noted that moving InfiniBand to the next speed level shouldn’t be very expensive. Other then cosmetic upgrade, I believe that hardware architecture will largely stay the same — it works very well, it’s proven and very successful. Maybe something should be done to let customers integrate Exadata better into their data-centers — folks keep complaining of inflexibility (and I think Oracle should stay firm on this and don’t let customer screw themselves up but who knows).
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If you’re attending Oracle OpenWorld 2010 in San Francisco, Sept. 19-23, 2010, be sure to stop by one of Pythian’s many sessions.

We’ll be all over the show, with experts Alex, and Marc speaking as listed below. Or, you might find Paul, Alex and others attending the bloggers meetup, participating in Oracle ACE/ACE Director activities, or at some of the User Group or OPN sessions on Sunday. Drop us a line on twitter @pythian while you’re at the show to connect with Pythian.
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On June 17th, Pythian hosted the June of meeting of OVSAGE. This month, there was a presentation by Bill Stuart, CEO and VP Engineering , Karoly Molnar of Eseri. Eseri is a local Ottawa company that has integrated a full organization IT solution from the best of the world’s open source, from hosted Intranet to desktops to applications, and host it in the cloud for access on virtual desktops.

Essentially, Eseri provides an “office in a cloud”. Within the organizational cloud, clients have access to a wide range of tools, like wiki, documentation management and e-mail. All of the software used is proven open source products such as Ubuntu for the operating system, Evolution as the e-mail client and Mediawiki for the wiki.

The meeting focused on the technical aspects of Eseri’s offering. Eseri uses Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud as the basis for its architechture. Access is provide using NoMachine client software.

There was much discussion about security, with Eseri emphasizing that each organization is a completely separate entity, with all data being kept with the organizational cloud. Access to the cloud is protected by multiple firewalls. In addition each server/desktop has it’s own firewall enabled.

There was also a great deal of discussion about the tools Eseri applications and how these applications are upgraded. There was much interest in this area since some of the applications that Eseri provides (i.e. Drupal) have complex upgrade paths.

OVSAGE’s next meeting is scheduled for July 17th.