Pythian Group

As the the Icelandic volcano ashes are clearing out and we finally have high hopes of flight home, I want to post the slides of the two presentations I did.

My first presentation was a double slot session about Oracle Clusterware internals. Presenting first thing in the morning on the first day is not easy at this event. Miracle Open World traditionally organized as 160% conference with 80% of technical content and 80% of networking and social interactions. Of course, the last 80% go deep into the night. Needless to say that 5am wake up call was tough — I had to craft few more slides to add some 11gR2 information and publish the first production of We Do Not Use TV Studio.

But I felt surprisingly well and fresh. The presentation itself was quite dynamic and all demos worked as planned except pausing OPROCD — 50/50 that eviction happens during my actions and it took me 10 time to repeat it. I couldn’t recall that I was lucky more than twice in a row until that session but… things happen. You can see the slides below for the reference. However, without the text and demos behind the slides, they are not very useful I’m afraid.
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Here’s a sneak peek at a video matrix — this is all the videos that include Pythian Group employees at the MySQL conference. I hope to have all the rest of the videos processed and uploaded within 24 hours, with a matrix similar to the one below (but of course with many more sessions).

I’m looking forward to traveling to San Jose for this year’s MySQL Conference. If there’s anything that can trump the drama of conf two years ago, where we observed how Sun would handle its new property, and then the drama of last year, where we observed how Oracle would handle the pending acquisition, it’s going to be the drama around this one — the first MySQLConf since the Oracle/Sun merger has been finalized and approved.

I think there is some finality to the changing of the guard this time, since there aren’t really that many companies that could conceivably swallow up Oracle itself! (Maybe I shouldn’t say that — next thing you know they’ll spin it off heh.) But regardless, I am looking forward to getting to know Edward Screven and getting a sense from the keynote and other communications exactly what he’s planning to … DO … with MySQL.

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Video fragments of my session posted at the end — read on.

I arrived at Omni Mandalay Hotel on Sunday evening with Dan Norris. I was flying through Chicago and it turned out that Dan was on the same flight and only few rows behind me. Small world.

Preparations for the conference were very chaotic on my part and, of course, I didn’t have either of my presentations ready. I was very stressed and getting sick as well — it looked like a complete disaster waiting to happen. I’d like to say that I was feeling like Doug Burns as he often managed to get sick just before a conference. Of course, I worked on my slides for the last few days as well as on the flight and presentation was slowly getting there but boy was I tired!

I quickly said hello to the crowd in the bar on the way to my room and rushed away to do some more damage to my slides. And then I had a brilliant idea — I could still see one of my best mates and do something good about my presentation! I asked Doug if he was interested in the preview (he probably wasn’t interested but he couldn’t say it to me) especially that my session wasn’t on his original agenda. Of course, that would mean that he had to leave a bunch of other good friends and spend some time tete-a-tete. Knowing Doug, this is some of the hardest thing to ask from him but it shows how good of a friend he is! (Plus, everyone thinks that he is anti-social anyway. Shhhh!)
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Just a quick announcements…

If you didn’t manage to attend my presentation, Oracle 11g ASM — The Evolution, during RMOUG or other conferences, you have a chance to see it online today. I’m doing it a web-cast at RAC SIG. It’s today, 4-Mar-10 at 12:00pm EST (9:00am PST).

RMOUG was over last week but I haven’t got back until earlier this week and I finally managed to clean up the backlog of things I missed so I could write the conference wrap up. After the RMOUG, I went skiing with a bunch of good friends and discovered a great skiing resort of Breckenridge. This is me at the peak 8 summit:

These were great times except one day with the questionable results of an experiment to find a recipe for the perfect hangover that I and Mogens Nørgaard have conducted. Well, the science does require sacrifices…

Back to the conference…
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Oracle ASM 11g Release 2 – The Evolution

Oracle Automatic Storage Management has proven to be one of the most widely adopted new features in Oracle Database 10g and it has been dramatically improved in the later 11g releases. This presentation will explain what changes are solved by ASM, how these challenges are solved, what barriers there are to ASM adoptions, and how 11g Release 2 addresses these barriers.

I shall say that the slides alone are not that helpful without my commentary but if you didn’t manage to attend it on one of the previous conferences, we will be releasing it as a webinar soon so stay tuned.

This is a call for topics for the upcoming Server Manageability Roundtable that I will be running at UKOUG Conference 2009 Technology and E-Business Suite. I should have probably blogged earlier about this but better later than never…

The Server Manageability Roundtable is on Monday, 30-Nov, at 16:25 in the foyer on the 5th level. It’s a bit late and I should have probably proposed to change the venue to the nearby pub but it’s too late now so let’s make it the last effort for the day and then…

The topic is quite broad so we will obviously need to focus on the most relevant areas for the attendees and this is the chance to state your interest so please comment away!

Here are the topics that I think might be particularly interested:

• Oracle Enterprise Manager — experience, deployment issues, success stories, strengths and weaknesses.
• Impact of virtualization and cloud computing — does it make it easier to manage our infrastructure?
• Costs cutting by manageability improvements — myth or reality?
• Managing highly available environment — human factors.

Make sure to leave a comment below whether you have something to say on the topics above or something completely new. Sharing your experience would be fantastic! Thanks in advance for all contributions and I promise I’ll write up the report on this round-table.

Now that our new web-site is live I’d like to do the first blog post on it!

You shouldn’t be surprised if you notice that it’s difficult to locate your DBAs in the first week of December (i.e. in just two weeks from now)! And you know why? Because you need to be looking in the right place to find them.

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Yes, it’s almost that time of the year when one of the best Oracle conferences in the world opens its doors to attendees in Birmingham — UKOUG Conference 2009: Technology & E-Business Suite. The lineup of speakers will be fantastic as usual and agenda is full of juicy bits — You will have usual troubles scheduling sessions to attend and hate to make compromises between presentations you want to see badly but that’s kind of problems you’d rather have at a good conference.

The past year was very eventful so I feel like I haven’t been at the UKOUG Conferences for years even though I did come to the UKOUG Conference 2008. This conference is something special for me — it’s the first conference I attended and presented on so it’s set the tone for the whole conferencing experience of my life and I’m very grateful for that! So far, I haven’t missed a single year since my first UKOUG conference and I hope I keep it this way for years to come.
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