Pythian Group

A data file is considered unrecoverable if an unrecoverable operation has been performed on an object residing in the data file since the last backup of the data file. Operations will become unrecoverable if they are not logged in the redo log. These “nologging” operations that suppress the generation of redo log, include the following:

1. direct load/SQL load
2. direct-path inserts result from insert or merge statement
3. ALTER TABLE commands
4. CREATE and ALTER INDEX commands
5. INSERT /*+APPEND*/
6. partition manipulation
7. database object that has explicitly set with nologging option
8. Oracle eBusiness Suite concurrent job execution identified in Oracle metalink note: 216211.1
9. Oracle eBusiness Suite patches activities that involve database object manipulation

The database recovery operations will look completed, but those data blocks used by the nologging objects in the data file will be marked corrupted when they are recovered. Accessing those nologging data objects in the recovered database instance will return a data block reading error such as ORA-1578 and ORA-26040, and the logical corruption in the data file will prevent the database object from being useful in the recovered database instance.

How do we detect unrecoverable operations?

Unrecoverable data files are those that involve nologging operations since the last successful backup took place. There are several ways to identify them. Read the rest of this entry . . .

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 . . .

It’s the second day of the InSync09 conference in Sydney — the first large-scale conference in Australia that combined user of all Oracle applications such as E-Business Suite, Hyperion, Siebel and all others that Oracle has bought in the last years. There is quite a bit of sessions on SOA and Fusion technology.

Official number of attendees is 550 but it definitely feels smaller. Perhaps, because quite a number attending only one of two days.

There are very few sessions going into technical details and I think my presentation yesterday was as technical as it could get at this conference even though it was more “shallow” than my typical presentations. My talk was titled “Making Oracle E-Business Suite Highly Available”. The idea of the session was to advocate for being reasonable when implementing HA solutions.
Read the rest of this entry . . .

InSync09 is the first conference in Australia focused on Oracle applications which in the past few years multiplied immensely in numbers — e-Business Suite, JD Edwards, JD Edwards, Hyperion, Siebel, BEA, PeopleSoft. There is also significant focus on SOA.

I submitted couple abstracts and one of them has been accepted so if you are attending InSync09 next week then I’ll see you there! Make you you find me to say hello — they plan to have quite a crows there with up to 500 people.

The presentation that I’m doing is titled “Making Oracle E-Business Suite R12 Highly Available”. It’s more an architectural paper to show what are the paths and how to plan the environment for high availability and what technologies can be used. Obviously, I will touch some of the DBA friendly topics like RAC and DataGuard but it definitely won’t be focused on the database tier only. It’s actually going to be quite an experience as I’m not really an Apps DBA myself so learning curve has been quite steep. I do, however, have good advisers in this are so it should be fine.

The rest of you who are not attending the conference, perhaps, you will make it tonight to the Sydney Oracle Meetup with Tanel Poder and Ric Van Dyke. In the end, what can be better in the current economy than free education topped up with free beer?

Tonight I returned from my first UKOUG conference. I’ve been to smaller conferences like Microsoft Technet and big ones like European Oracle Open World before, but this was without a doubt best one so far (measured by the value of content and amount of fun).

I couldn’t attend all the sessions that aroused my interest, there were simply too many of them. From those I attended, there are few I’d like to mention as highlights of the conference.

Tom Kyte and his “Best way…” was one of the most entertaining sessions and at the same time, one of the most educational. James Morle and his view of the current state of storage devices was also one of the very strong ones in both perspectives.

Read the rest of this entry . . .

I decided to build my first sand box ever. I always wanted one, but there was no time or reason until now. Fortunately, hardware is ridiculously cheap these days compared to the past, so you can actually run full-blown Oracle Applications on your home PC without compromises.

I built a Dual Core box with 8G of RAM for an install of E-Business Suite R12. For OS I chose Oracle EL5U2, mainly because I’m used to the RH/OEL clones, and also because I expected it to be less painful than other distributions.

I started slowly, as time allowed, spending some time chasing various libraries and packages on the Net. Eventually it took me a week to realize how tedious it is to go the manual way. I got so frustrated by the dependencies that I gave up and purchased access to the ULN network.

Just to illustrate the type of struggle I went through, I found four distinct lists of required packages for 10g installation (in Oracle documentation and metalink combined). I’d recommend Note 421308.1 – Requirements For Installing Oracle10gR2 On RHEL/OEL 5 (x86_64), which summarizes the database part in a neat way. I also encourage you not to underestimate requirements of related Note 376183.1 – Defining a “default RPMs” installation of the RHEL OS.

Nevertheless, it’s just way more easy to use the oracle-validated package, which will download all dependencies for you. Well, almost all.

The next step was to prepare the machine. The only tricky part (from the DBA point of view) is to setup a DNS server, but even that went well. There are plenty of nice howtos on the web — search for keyword “rndc”.

Once I had all the required packages installed, users created, kernel parameters set, domain name resolution working, and Xvnc started, it was time to call a wizard.

Read the rest of this entry . . .

Hot on the heels of my publishing our Applications DBA opening in Ottawa, Canada earlier this week, we now have an apps DBA opening in our office in Hyderabad as well.

Needless to say, we are seeing rapid uptake of our outsourced E-Business Suite 11i management services.

I have a senior Oracle Applications DBA opening at Pythian’s office in Hyderabad, India. This opening pays on an international payscale, meaning that I am ideally looking for an elite candidate working for a compensation plan in the 25-35 lacs range TCE. Remember, Pythian is not in India to save money on payroll, Pythian is in India to staff an elite workforce in that timezone. Feel free to apply if you aren’t at the 25+ lacs pa range yet in your career and let us decide.

The candidate I am looking for is delighted and excited with the apps dba workload and does not have aspirations to managing a big team. If you are my ideal candidate, you are the kind of person who thinks implementing Apps on RAC is exciting, or moving a large company’s Apps from Solaris to Linux would be super fun, or even just doing a massive 12i upgrade or installation sounds just dreamy. You will actually be doing these things. You will not have a team of 5-7 people doing them for you.

Working at Pythian is different than working in-house or as a consultant, because you’ll be making your contributions available to each of the customers assigned to your team, allowing you to see more use cases, more technologies, and work with more and varied environments, all the while building interesting and long-lasting working relationships with your peers.

The Hyderabad office is ideally situated in the Somajiguda district of Hyderabad, pretty much right downtown, or as downtown as downtown can be in a city that has a lake smack dab in the middle of it.

We support some of the most interesting and mission-critical Oracle Applications environments in the world, including one that is FDA-regulated in support of a global biosciences company. Meaning lives are at stake. It doesn’t get any more mission-critical, or more personally rewarding, than that.

Top criteria:

• Outstanding Oracle Apps DBA on UNIX skills, bonus points for Apps RAC and major implementation and upgrades experience
• Exceptional troubleshooting, problem-solving and learning skills
• Superior productivity per hour and overall getting-the-job-done-right abilities
• Fluent communication skills in English, both written and oral, are mandatory. Second or third languages are also a huge benefit (we have customers all over the world and are always eager to add a language to our repertoire)
• Core DBA skills are a prerequisite for Apps DBA at this level, but you know that already
• Publications, blogging and presentations experience and interest a plus
• Experience with Oracle Applications Server and Portal a plus
• SAP, Peoplesoft and other ERP experience a plus

Job highlights:

• Work in an elite team of Apps DBAs for an elite group and growing of customers; you’ll learn more here in a year than in any in-house DBA job no matter how long you stay; I personally guarantee it.
• Work and gain valuable experience on every mainstream platform, including AIX, HP/UX, Solaris, Linux, Tru64, Windows, etc.
• Support every mainstream database technology and feature, including Oracle RAC, advanced queuing, advanced replication, every flavour of dataguard, RMAN, streams, etc. etc.
• Work across multiple industries including health care, manufacturing, media, dot-com, education, retail, services, and many more.
• Work in a company that values hard work, not long work.
• Work in a company that will allow you to research and write articles, presentations and blog posts on company time, and pay for you to present your research at just about any user conference worldwide where it gets accepted.

Learn more about Pythian and see our customer list at http://www.pythian.com.

To apply:

Send me an email with a one-paragraph introduction of who you are and why you are exceptional to me at vallee@pythian.com. Feel free to attach your resume in any format (Word, PDF, RTF, ODT, whatever makes you happy.)