Pythian Group

I’ve just published Oracle Database 11g Express Edition Amazon EC2 image (AMI) but most of you have never used Amazon EC2… Not until now! This is a guide to walk you thorough the process of getting your very first EC2 instance up and running. Buckle up — it’s going to be awesome!

1. Go to Amazon Web Services and open an account. You could use one that you buy your books with.
2. Go to AWS Management Console for EC2 and sign up for Amazon EC2. You will need your credit card for this. You will not be charged anything unless you are either start using EC2 instances or allocate EBS storage and other related items. The sign-up page shows you all the pricing. You will especially like “Free tier for new AWS customers” section that gives you 750 hours of Micro instance uptime, 10 GB of EBS storage some bandwidth and few small goodies. This mean that you will not be charged anything in the beginning of your experiments. They will also do phone verification — I can’t remember I’ve seen it last time so it must be reasonable new. Works for cell phones too. Activation usually takes just few minutes and you’ll get an email confirmation and you get access to EC2, VPC, S3 and SNS. Direct link to AWS Management Console for EC2
3. Now you can launch your first instance. So let’s start Oracle 11g XE beta image that I published just recently. Click “Launch Instance” then select “Community AMIs” tab. It will start loading AMIs list and it will take ages so don’t wait for it to finish and search for “pythian” – you will get pythian-oel-5.6-64bit-Oracle11gXE-beta image with AMI ID ami-e231cc8b the latest at the time of this writing.
   
   Select that image.

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At the 2008 MySQL Conference and Expo, The Pythian Group gave away EXPLAIN cheatsheets. They were very nice, printed in full color and laminated to ensure you can spill your coffee* on it and it will survive.

For those not at the conference, or those that want to make more, the file is downloadable as a 136Kb PDF at explain-diagram.pdf

* or tea, for those of us in the civilized world.