Pythian Group

As the birds have started their yearly migration back to their homes from the warmer areas to the relative less cooler areas in summer, bloggers are also touching base with the technologies which they cherish most and coming back with some master strokes. This new cool edition of Log Buffer, the coolest blog carnival covering hottest topics encompass that home coming. Now Chill with Log Buffer #222!!!

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Back in February, Jonathan Gennick asked me if I would be interested in writing a bit of content for an APRESS brochure to distribute at RMOUG Training Days. I thought it was a cool idea and chose the topic of database consolidation. I only needed 10 short tips but when I started to write, it was difficult to stop — clearly, expressing ideas in concise way must not be my strength.

Jonathan did heavy edits and turned my draft into 10 brief tips and, of course, quite a few details had to go as we shrank the size 3-4 times. Since I’ve already put my efforts into writing, I figured I could share it as well on my blog. Thus, welcome the first blog post from the series of database consolidation tips. Let’s get down to business…

While there are often multiple goals of a consolidation project, the main purpose of consolidation is to optimize costs which usually means minimizing the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of data infrastructure. Your current hardware might be past end of life, you might lack capacity for growth, your change management might be too slow, etc.
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Dear blog readers,

I’m working on a small story about database consolidation and interested to learn what are success and failures that others are going through. While we have our own experience at Pythian, I find it interesting to learn about what others are going through. If you have enough details, it would be nice to see your feedback along those lines.

1. Why consolidation project started – targets?
2. What were expectations / success criteria and how they were set?
3. What was the scope of the consolidation project.
4. Expected time-frame and whether you are done by now.
5. Was the project considered successful? Goals met (see item 2)?
6. What were the measurements before and after? Were there any?
7. Issues faced and how they were solved or worked around.
….
Interesting facts like platform, number of databases, versions, consolidation strategy and etc.
….

Sharing your experience here would be beneficial for the community at large. Besides, don’t you want to win a book?
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I just got an Exadata Customer Advisory e-mail from Oracle, identifying “an important issue that needs your immediate attention” and pointing to MOS note 1265396.1.

Note 1265396.1 talks of an issue with disk controllers in Exadata storage servers declaring false disk failures. In some “rare cases”, multiple such false failures occur at the same some, potentially causing data loss.

The issue applies to Sun (V2) database machines only, not the HP V1 or database machines or with the newer X2-2/X2-8 database servers.

The only fix is to upgrade to the newly-released version 11.2.2.1.1 of the storage server software. A combination of an upgrade and manually forcing disks back online at the disk controller and ASM levels can “bring back” the data in case of loss, assuming the disks haven’t been physically removed of course.

The 11.2.2.1.1 patch will run on any 11.2.0.1+ databases, though either 11.2.0.2 or 11.2.0.1 plus bundle patch 6 is recommended. If the database patches are in place, the storage server patch can be applied in a rolling fashion without downtime.

After over a hundred hours of hard work, Pythian has achieved multiple specializations under our Platinum membership level of the Oracle PartnerNetwork’s OPN Specialized program. We’re proud to be recognized by Oracle as a value-added services partner.

We’d like to shout out a big thank you to Pythian’s dedicated team of database experts who continue to demonstrate and prove why Pythian is trusted by so many clients for Oracle database and applications infrastructure support and consulting services. And, we’d like to give an even bigger thank you to our valuable customers, for your ongoing partnership and confidence in our company.

Check out our shiny new badges of honor, below:

But there is no rest for the wicked. Stay tuned for more news as we announce the next round of specializations.

Oracle Recognizes Pythian as a Value-Added Partner for Core Database Expertise and Outstanding Consulting Services

PYTHIAN NEWS: As Announced today at Oracle OpenWorld 2010, San Francisco, CA.

Contact Vanessa Simmons for media inquiries.

The Pythian Group, Inc., a leading provider of remote database infrastructure services, and a Platinum member of the Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN), today announced it has achieved four specializations under the OPN Specialized Program. By attaining “specialized status” Pythian has demonstrated and met rigorous business and technical competency criteria for core Oracle solutions including Oracle Database 11g, Database Performance Tuning, Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC), and Oracle Linux. Through specialization Pythian demonstrates solid experience, expertise and success with planning, deploying and managing Oracle products in complex and large-scale environments, providing added value to Oracle end-customers.

Pythian has been an Oracle partner since 1999, providing services across the entire Oracle technology stack since the company’s inception. Pythian consulted on the implementation of Oracle Exadata at LinkShare Corporation, the first in New York. The company’s DBA and senior consulting resources serve over 140 clients worldwide, including FOXSports Interactive, and have been engaged in many Oracle-related projects. In addition; Pythian is the outsourced database services team for Grasshopper, known as the virtual phone system for entrepreneurs.

“We have worked with Pythian for a number of years at FOXSports Interactive and view this specialization as a further commitment to the Oracle expertise they provide,” said Sheli Reynolds, Vice President, Engineering.
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When creating an index, Oracle versions 10g and above automatically compute optimizer statistics. And even before that, 9i had a COMPUTE STATISTICS clause to accomplish the same thing. Not only does it save the time and effort of running DBMS_STATS, but it also saves the disk I/O involved in such an operation, since all rows are available in the course of index creation.

Now why can’t this happen on a CREATE TABLE AS SELECT command? Most if not all of the statistics gathering steps (high/low value, number of distinct values, and even possibly histograms) can be gathered over the course of a simple table read, which is happening anyway.

Oracle 12.1 maybe?

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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Oracle SaaS for ISVs Software Licensing and Pythian Services Provide Flexible, Convenient, Scalable, Low-risk Solution to Plan, Deploy, Manage Oracle Database Infrastructures

PYTHIAN NEWS UPDATE
Contact Vanessa Simmons for media inquiries

The Pythian Group Inc., the leading provider of remote database infrastructure services, today announced that it is teaming with Oracle® to provide Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) with a convenient and flexible all-in-one solution for licensing Oracle products and Pythian services required to correctly plan, deploy and manage the ISV’s database infrastructure.
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[yanick@enkidu shuck]$ cat my_feeds | \
    perl -MXML::Feed \
         -ne'say( (XML::Feed->parse($_)->entries)[0]->summary ) if rand() > 0.5 '

Curtis Jewell followed up on an old post by Adam Kennedy and checked out if shuffling things around really improve compression. From the results, there seems to be very little blood to be squeezed out of that stone.

jjore came up with a very clever hack to stop the debugger when a test fails. Not only it is extremely useful, but the hack itself provides a lot of insight and food for thought for anyone attracted to the dark arts of under-the-Perl-interpreter-hood meddling.

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