Posted by Raj Thukral on Apr 12, 2012
An exciting and busy day yesterday – lots of good talks, good conversations and good beer! Back at the sessions this morning and the first keynote of the day by Sam Ghods of Box: “MySQL: Still the Best Choice for Mission-Critical Data”
The usual story of a (file sharing) application that started out on one MySQL instance to store metadata and ran into scaling bottlenecks. Interestingly, NoSQL did not work out for them and they ended up sharding MySQL. “If you use a NoSQL store, but need any advanced featuers in your data store, you end up building them yourself. If you’re willing to partition your data yourself, you can use MySQL’s fancy features”
Now on to specific MySQL features that Box uses, not directly provided by NoSQL:
Inter-row Consistency (aka Unique Key) to ensure unique filenames in folders
Transactions maintain integrity on file/folder renames where the whole tree needs to be updated
Transactions also help maintain consistency when modifying denormalized data
Indexes guaranteed to be consistent, fast, gets you only the required data, requires no maintenance
Tools (or – whats happening in your data store), Metrics, Benchmarking
Maturity and Reliability (of MySQL)
And just to prove that he’s not anti-NoSQL, Box is using NoSQL as well, just for different applications. In other words, choose the right tool for the right job and be sure to consider all the pros and cons of a solution
Don’t choose a database just because “it scales” (whats the trade-off)
Wade, don’t jump into new technologies
If you go with new technology, be aware that crazy things might happen
Make sure you’re not rebuilding MySQL
Posted by Raj Thukral on Apr 11, 2012
Here it is finally – the MySQL conference 2012 starts with the Keynote Sessions.
The first keynote speech is by Peter Zaitsev, founder of Percona and a very smart guy and also by Baron Schwartz (Percona), another very smart guy, the brains behind a number of toolkits for MySQL. They’re talking about the MySQL Evolution – what I alluded to in my first post regarding this conference – they ways in which MySQL has grown, evolved, scaled and continues to make new inroads into new applications and industries.
From Peter: “What is most important hasn’t changed – MySQL is still a great piece of technology and it is evolving very rapidly” (Love that quote!) Also “MySQL is also buzzword compatible: NoSQL, BigData”
From Baron: his own personal journey from closed-source, proprietory to open-source and the passion that went with it. I’m sure a lot of us working with/in the open-source community can relate. “Lets be here, Lets be now” He certainly had the audience engaged.
Posted by Raj Thukral on Apr 11, 2012
A very well attended Pedro’s dinner – I didn’t count, but we had 9 tables of 8-10 people or so – dare I say almost a 100 people? Lots of beer, margaritas and good conversations! Here are a few pictures from the event
Posted by Marc Fielding on Mar 9, 2012
Those of you who have seen me present about GoldenGate will know that I recommend using a heartbeat table to monitor GoldenGate lag. The heartbeat table is a great way to monitor GoldenGate replication because it can follow a single SQL insert through each major GoldenGate replication process, and report the replication lag attributable to each. And if you haven’t seen my presentation, I’m getting a revised and updated version ready for Collaborate 2012 this April.
However, this monitoring script relies on triggers, so if you have DBOPTIONS SUPPRESSTRIGGERS enabled, it will cause the entire replicat to error out with primary key violation errors. The issue prompted me to look into how this option is actually implemented.
Read the rest of this entry . . .
Posted by Gwen Shapira on Feb 8, 2012
I’m traveling quite a bit in the next few weeks, here’s where you can find me:
- On February 14, I’ll present an Exadata war story and big data introduction to OSWOUG (Oregon and South Washington Oracle User’s Group). If you are in Portland, drop by and say hello – I will be educational and entertaining.
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Posted by Marc Fielding on Jan 16, 2012
The 2012 edition of RMOUG Training Days in Denver less than a month away, running February 15 and 16 at the Colorado Convention Center in Denver. Although it’s only two days, there’s a lot of technical content there, and a refreshing reduction in marketing-oriented presentations from “product managers”. It’s not too late to register, and it’s a pretty nice excuse to get to the Rockies in ski season. I’ll be doing two presentations, and am polishing up whitepapers and presentations for the submission deadline tomorrow:
They’re right after each other in the grid, but I do get a short break for the dedicated exhibit hall time and paid vendor presentations (yes there are still a few; they have to pay the bills somehow).
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Posted by Maris Elsins on Jan 9, 2012
One of the hot topics at the UKOUG 2011 Technology and E-Business Suite Conference last December was the upcoming release of Oracle e-Business Suite R12.2. The new release will bring us lots of new features, usability improvements and new versions of technology stack components (Oracle Database 11g R2 and Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g R1 as the application server), but the most important and impressive new feature of course will be online patching. Online patching is supposed to change the game completely. All owners of E-Business Suite environments know that patching requires downtime. Although it can be reduced with various techniques (e.g. staged APPL_TOP), some downtime is still required to apply a number of changes. Online patching will not eliminate downtime completely, but will reduce it significantly by using “Edition Based Redefinition” (EBR) at the database level and using a secondary applications file system for online patching. In fact, all patching activity will be an online operation; downtime will be required only to switch from one version to another. Read the rest of this entry . . .
Posted by Alex Gorbachev on Dec 12, 2011
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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Posted by Marc Fielding on Dec 6, 2011
On tap for Tuesday is a 2-hour master class from Michael Abbey, along with an all-day drop-in RAC attack workshop with Alex Gorbachev and the RAC SIG.
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Posted by Marc Fielding on Dec 5, 2011
For those of you attending UKOUG today, there is a healthy dose of Pythian presentations on tap this afternoon. Actually, you can do it wall to wall 2:30pm to 6:30pm if you like.
To note:
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