Pythian Group

I’ve never attended the North California Oracle User Group Conferences even though they are organized every quarter. However, I’ve been always jealous of the great agenda they put together. A couple months ago, Chen Shapira reminded me once again that the next NoCOUG conference was coming up and asked whether I would be able to come to present. What a chance, I thought, easy to plan as I have no other conferences in May.

So, at NoCOUG Spring Conference 2010 in just 10 days, I’ll be doing my two hour long presentation — Demystifying Oracle RAC Workload Management. If it’s your local conference, I hope you can attend and say hello. You might also want to download the whitepaper that I put together few years ago for Hotsos Symposium — Oracle RAC Workload Management.

The conference is free to members of NoCOUG and only $50 to non-members but it would make more sense to just join the user group as its annual fees are unbelievably low — I couldn’t say it better than Iggy Fernandez did:

How much does a NoCOUG membership cost? It doesn’t cost $400, as you might expect to pay for so much educational value. It doesn’t cost $300 and it doesn’t cost $200. It doesn’t even cost $100. Yes, a calendar-year NoCOUG membership only costs $95! Won’t you join today?

Read the rest of this entry . . .

Singe I’ve got a special press badge this year, I felt I had to do something about it so I decided to make short interview with few people that I’m running into during this Oracle Open World.

I have already blogged about my Sunday’s interviews but I created a Youtube playlist where you can see them all (use arrows on the sides).

So far I interviewed Justin Kestelyn, Richard Foote, Stanley ACE Director, John Kanagaraj, Marko Gralike, Jacco Landlust, Chris Muir, Tim Hall, Steven Feuerstein, Gareth Llewellyn, Doug Burns, Marcel Kratochvil and Gary Goodman. There is one more day left so I’ll trying to do few more.

Following my presentation at InSycn09 about Oracle E-Business Suite high availability, I gave a few minutes interview to a fellow Oracle tweeter here in Sydney and member of the team behind The Red Room blog — Gareth Llewellyn.

I should say that my dedication to the interview was very strong :) and you will believe me if I tell you that during that time the party in the InSync09 exhibition hall was already in the full swing. Thanks to Gareth, the interview is now on Youtube and if you go there directly, you can watch in HD.
Read the rest of this entry . . .

Last Friday (September 26), Paul Vallée and I were lucky enough to interview Kevin Closson about the Oracle Exadata Storage Server. A tidied-up stream of the audio is here: closson-interview.m3u.

The audio quality is a little spotty here and there, so you might like to follow the transcription below.

Paul gets the interview started.

Paul Vallée (PV): Christo Kutrovsky and myself, Paul Vallée. We’re on the line with Kevin Closson of Oracle (and prior to that with Hewlett-Packard, and prior to that with Polyserve, and prior to that with Sequent). A giant of our industry, and I’m honoured to be speaking to him. Kevin, hello.

Kevin Closson (KC): Well, they always say that flattery gets you nowhere, but apparently it’ll get you on the phone.

PV: [laughs] Very nice!

KC: No seriously, it’s more than a pleasure to be here. I like what you guys do, so this is good.

PV: Thank you, Kevin. So, we are here to talk about the work that Larry Ellison announced yesterday, specifically the work around the Oracle Database Machine and the Exadata Storage Server. Kevin, can you just quickly introduce yourself and how you came to be involved in the project?

KC: Right. So, I’m a performance architect with Oracle, and the project that I’m stationed on, if you will, is the development team for Oracle Exadata Storage Server. And the way I came to Oracle is, quite a few of the folks who are involved with the very genesis of Exadata are people that I’ve known and worked with closely dating back to the early ’90s. And after a fruitful endeavour as the chief software architect for Oracle solutions at Polyserve, it became an opportunity to latch onto Oracle, because we sold our company to them. So there we are.

PV: How exciting! Congratulations! So I noticed that there’s still a little, I guess a diversion in terms of the branding. Larry definitely introduced it as the Exadata Programmable Storage Server, and I double-checked the video. But in your blog, you’re calling it, for sure, just the Exadata Storage Server. Just how recently was the marketing/messaging developed for this?

KC: You know, I’m not a part of the Go-To-Market (GTM) efforts, but, you know, honestly, the way these things are brought to market . . .  They’re developed under a project name, and the project name remains the same for years. It was over the last few months that Marketing began cooking the name and what-have-you. Now, if you’re referring to something that Larry said in his keynotes, I have to admit I didn’t commit to photographic memory all the slides. And certainly, if he used the term “programmable”, I’m not going to correct Larry Ellison.

PV: [laughs] That would be risky.

Read the rest of this entry . . .