Pythian Group

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:

• Exadata I/O Resource Manager: Ideal Technology for Database Consolidation, Wednesday 1:15pm in room 4B
• Peering Through the Cloud: The Straight Goods on Oracle Exalogic, directly after, Wednesday 4pm in room 4C

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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For the final day of UKOUG there are quite a few Pythian presentations. Unfortunately a lot of them happen at the same time, so it won’t be possible to attend them all live.

Using Oracle GoldenGate to Minimize Database Upgrade Risk

10:10, Media Suite
Marc Fielding

Even the best-planned database upgrades can leave nagging questions: what happens if my upgraded system performs unexpectedly? Is there a way I can go back to the previous version without downtime and data loss? Oracle GoldenGate allows DBAs to give affirmative answers to these questions. Drawing on upgrade experiences ranging from mid-sized databases to a large 10TB 90-CPU OLTP system, this session will show how to optimally configure Oracle GoldenGate, minimize downtime, maximize replication performance, and integrate Oracle GoldenGate into existing infrastructure such as Oracle ASM and storage-based replication.

Learn the various deployment scenarios where GoldenGate can minimize upgrade risk and delivery business value. Find out how GoldenGate can help not only during the upgrade, but after the upgrade as well. Learn how to use GoldenGate in medium- and high-volume environments. See real-world, tested GoldenGate configurations. Find out lessons learned and pitfalls to avoid.

The Answer to Free Memory Swap and Everything

10:10, Hall 8A
Christo Kutrovsky

Do I have enough memory? Why is my free memory so low? Am I swapping to disk? Can I increase my SGA (db cache) size? Can I add another instance to this server? Are my system resources used optimally? These are all questions that often haunt DBAs. This presentation is The Answer. It covers in detail the different types of memory, how to monitor memory, and how to optimally use it with Oracle. Multiple examples in the presentation demonstrate how certain actions on the database side cause different memory areas to be allocated and used on the OS side. Key underlying differences in operating systems approaches to managing memory will be highlighted, with special attention given to Linux and Solaris. Using Linux as an example throughout, this presentation explains how to effectively use tools such as “top”, “vmstat” and “/proc/meminfo” to look into into a system’s allocation and use of memory.

Amazon RDS, EC2 and S3 for Oracle Databases

11:20am, Hall 10B
Alex Gorbachev

This technical session focuses on specific recommendations and guidelines for leveraging the Amazon Web Services platform to host Oracle databases. We will looks into traditional database hosting using EC2 platform as well as recently introduced Amazon RDS on Oracle. We will look into how to configure, provision, backup, restore, monitor, and secure your databases in AWS. We will also look on how you can leverage S3 cloud storage for hybrid cloud deployments, particularly for backup and archival storage.

Backup and Recovery Roundtable

11:20am, Roundtable Area
Michael Abbey

A discussion of backup and recovery technology, problems and solutions. We will poll the attendees for an agenda on the day and proceed with an informal discussion not limited to:

RMAN, OSB, Sans, Data Guard backups, RAC backups and other topics of interest.

Concurrent Processing Performance Analysis for Apps DBAs

2:25pm, Hall 10B
Maris Elsins

Concurrent processing is one of the key elements of Oracle E-Business Suite, that’s used by most of modules for scheduling and processing background jobs. Keeping this functionality healthy is important to get maximum performance out of it. The paper describes the key metrics to estimate the performance of the concurrent managers, discusses approaches and techniques that can be used to understand how well the concurrent processing is set up, what are the bottlenecks and delays in processing of concurrent requests and provides tips on how to deal with each of the identified problem. This paper is targeted for Oracle Applications DBAs and technical consultants.

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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(editor’s note: the author is talking about UKOUG, the UK’s major Oracle conference, happening this week in Birmingham)

And so it should be :). The flight over was uneventful, save for my excitement about having 3 seats to myself. Then the big challenge surfaced … a 5’8″ human trying to recline in a 4’10″ horizontal surface. I woke about a bit later with a stiff neck but the shut-eye was worth it.
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While Oracle OpenWorld is still hot in our memories, I’m going to be presenting two of my OOW11 sessions at the Toronto Oracle User Group’s DD Day 2011 on 28-Oct-2011 — in just a bit over 2 weeks. Last time I presented for TOUG at their summer meeting in 2008 which makes it a tad over 3 years ago. It was a good fun and I’m looking forward to see many of you there again.

By the way, I think it’s quite a deal at $140 for non-members and $90 for TOUG members for a one day conference like that, especially if you are interested in the topics presented.

I have two sessions to present:
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It’s a busy summer at Pythian, with our continuing wave of speaking sessions at upcoming community and regional industry events.

Coming to a city near you, watch for Pythian presenting hot Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server database topics:
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I just arrived to Minneapolis, MN and will be speaking tomorrow at the Twin Cities Oracle Users Group 2011 Winter Meeting. It’s the first time I’m speaking for this user group so I’m excited to meet the new audience. I will present one hour version of my Grid Infrastructure Internals session. Of course, no demos during presentation as it’s just enough to cover the theory slides but I’ll leave the demo as a homework as usual. :)

Big thanks to Klara Hribkova, Vice President of TCOUG, for picking me up at the airport and organizing a dinner. I’ve had a lovely meal — Bison Pot Roast — melting in my mouth.

I’m staying at Doubletree Hotel Minneapolis-Park Place. Nice and clean and very friendly staff but what’s interesting about this hotel is that they have DSL modems in the rooms so each connection is going via its own DSL line. Isn’t that cool? Read the rest of this entry . . .

For those of you in the New York City area, I’ll be speaking at the NYOUG joint BI/DW and Web SIG meeting. The topic will be a case study of Pythian’s Exadata implementation at LinkShare. It will be 6pm this Thursday, December 2, at the APRESS offices at 233 Spring Street, sixth floor. Previous notices did say fifth floor, but I can confirm it will indeed be the on the sixth. It’s free for NYOUG members and $10 for non-members. The NYOUG would like confirmations by November 30 to get an idea of numbers and how much pizza to order, so drop them a line at info@nyoug.org if you plan on attending.

Further info from the NYOUG website

If you can’t make it, recordings of my webinar on the same topic are available online as well.

Hello Birmingham!

It’s past Sunday midnight and I’m stuck in my room in the last couple hours finishing my slides for my masterclass tomorrow. Turns out that I’m presenting the very first session of the conference at 9am. I wish there is a keynote instead so that I could grab one more hour of sleep (it’s going to be deep into the night back home in Canada). Strange that the keynote was moved to Wednesday — I hope UKOUG has really good reason for that!

My two hours masterclass will start at the same time as Tom Kyte’s a-la keynote session — what a competition. On the other hand, there is no other sessions in server technology so I expect that folks without interest of database development will automatically end up in my session. I’m in Hall 5 – quite large room. Is it the second biggest room after the Hall 1?

I will need to work hard to keep the audience… maybe I shouldn’t plan for any breaks to make sure I don’t let folks slip out to the next sessions like James Morles’ Sane SAN 2010 or Jeremy Schneider’s Large Scale ASM.

My masterclass is based on the slides that I presented at the Oracle OpenWorld few months ago which, in turn is reworked session on Oracle Clusterware internals that I’ve done number of times as long session with demos. I thought updating this material to 11gR2 would be easy… Boy was I wrong!
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For those of you who weren’t able to attend my webinar last week “Implementing Exadata: the results are in, recordings are now available online.

They’re at the same link as the original webinar registration: http://bit.ly/exadatawebinar2.

If you’re just joining us, recordings of my previous webinar Implementing Exadata: Strategies for Success are also available, as for other webinars