Pythian Group

Video fragments of my session posted at the end — read on.

I arrived at Omni Mandalay Hotel on Sunday evening with Dan Norris. I was flying through Chicago and it turned out that Dan was on the same flight and only few rows behind me. Small world.

Preparations for the conference were very chaotic on my part and, of course, I didn’t have either of my presentations ready. I was very stressed and getting sick as well — it looked like a complete disaster waiting to happen. I’d like to say that I was feeling like Doug Burns as he often managed to get sick just before a conference. Of course, I worked on my slides for the last few days as well as on the flight and presentation was slowly getting there but boy was I tired!

I quickly said hello to the crowd in the bar on the way to my room and rushed away to do some more damage to my slides. And then I had a brilliant idea — I could still see one of my best mates and do something good about my presentation! I asked Doug if he was interested in the preview (he probably wasn’t interested but he couldn’t say it to me) especially that my session wasn’t on his original agenda. Of course, that would mean that he had to leave a bunch of other good friends and spend some time tete-a-tete. Knowing Doug, this is some of the hardest thing to ask from him but it shows how good of a friend he is! (Plus, everyone thinks that he is anti-social anyway. Shhhh!)
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RMOUG was over last week but I haven’t got back until earlier this week and I finally managed to clean up the backlog of things I missed so I could write the conference wrap up. After the RMOUG, I went skiing with a bunch of good friends and discovered a great skiing resort of Breckenridge. This is me at the peak 8 summit:

These were great times except one day with the questionable results of an experiment to find a recipe for the perfect hangover that I and Mogens Nørgaard have conducted. Well, the science does require sacrifices…

Back to the conference…
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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 . . .

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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This is a call for topics for the upcoming Server Manageability Roundtable that I will be running at UKOUG Conference 2009 Technology and E-Business Suite. I should have probably blogged earlier about this but better later than never…

The Server Manageability Roundtable is on Monday, 30-Nov, at 16:25 in the foyer on the 5th level. It’s a bit late and I should have probably proposed to change the venue to the nearby pub but it’s too late now so let’s make it the last effort for the day and then…

The topic is quite broad so we will obviously need to focus on the most relevant areas for the attendees and this is the chance to state your interest so please comment away!

Here are the topics that I think might be particularly interested:

• Oracle Enterprise Manager — experience, deployment issues, success stories, strengths and weaknesses.
• Impact of virtualization and cloud computing — does it make it easier to manage our infrastructure?
• Costs cutting by manageability improvements — myth or reality?
• Managing highly available environment — human factors.

Make sure to leave a comment below whether you have something to say on the topics above or something completely new. Sharing your experience would be fantastic! Thanks in advance for all contributions and I promise I’ll write up the report on this round-table.

Now that our new web-site is live I’d like to do the first blog post on it!

You shouldn’t be surprised if you notice that it’s difficult to locate your DBAs in the first week of December (i.e. in just two weeks from now)! And you know why? Because you need to be looking in the right place to find them.

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Yes, it’s almost that time of the year when one of the best Oracle conferences in the world opens its doors to attendees in Birmingham — UKOUG Conference 2009: Technology & E-Business Suite. The lineup of speakers will be fantastic as usual and agenda is full of juicy bits — You will have usual troubles scheduling sessions to attend and hate to make compromises between presentations you want to see badly but that’s kind of problems you’d rather have at a good conference.

The past year was very eventful so I feel like I haven’t been at the UKOUG Conferences for years even though I did come to the UKOUG Conference 2008. This conference is something special for me — it’s the first conference I attended and presented on so it’s set the tone for the whole conferencing experience of my life and I’m very grateful for that! So far, I haven’t missed a single year since my first UKOUG conference and I hope I keep it this way for years to come.
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Most of this week I spend in San Francisco — I arrived on Wednesday with couple other Aussie Oracle ACE Directors, Chris Muir and Marcel Kratochvil. This year I have my whole family traveling with me so it should be fun.

The first few days we spent by sleeping off our jet lag and I was also working on my presentations for the Oracle Open World (I’ve got to do 5 sessions this year. I also managed to finish a chapter that I’m contributing for one book (and I was terribly late) so those couple days were very productive.

I’ve also managed to visit Oracle headquarters on Thursday and meet with few Oracle Enterprise Manager product managers as well as said hello to some of the “Russian mafia” at Oracle HQ. It’s always a pleasure to finally meet people face-to-face after knowing them online for a while.

Of course, I managed to snap a few pictures of Oracle HQ.

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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!