Pythian Group

You know you’re a geek when…

Pythian is proudly celebrating International Geek Pride Day! According to the Wikipedia, Geek Pride Day is “an initiative which claims the right of every person to be a nerd or a geek”. In this case, I’ll gladly claim my chance to join the party!

Today I’m sporting an X-Men t-shirt in light of my favorite comic book character (love that bad boy Wolverine), and thinking back to the earlier days of my life where my geekiness was a little more apparent than today.

I briefly experimented with COBOL computer programming at summer camp (and I’m sure Paul Vallee will laugh again reading this as I recalled the language erroneously as Cobolt when I told him the story). My newly learned skills netted me a bumble bee image that flew across the screen. Thrilling!

Throughout grade school, I’d run home from school in record time to make the next episode of Spider-Man. During my early teens on Friday nights I could be found at the neighbours house with the local kids absorbed in a game of D&D.

While I may or may not pass for a geek with my tales above, more importantly today is a reminder and another reason for me to celebrate my Pythian colleagues. Even though some are “geekier” than others, they are all wonderful, unique and special individuals in their own right, and so I wear my X-Men t-shirt with pride today in honor of them.

Got a geeky story to share? Would you classify yourself as a geek? Why?
How would you fill in the blank below?
You know you’re a geek when….

Either create a post and link it to this one, or send me an email with a link to your post, or comment on this post with your response.

Thanks for playing.

Singer Wang celebrates with mascot Domokum.

Pythian is pleased to announce that Paul Vallee, Pythian’s Founder and Executive Chairman, has been named as one of Ottawa’s rising stars on Ottawa Business Journal’s 2011 Forty Under Forty list.

The Forty Under 40 recognizes the amazing achievements of forty accomplished business people under the age of forty. After careful review, the judges, a prestigious group of community leaders, name a list of Ottawa’s top entrepreneurs – people who are driving Ottawa’s economy and setting an example in corporate and philanthropic circles. Nominees are assessed on a 40-point system, using three key criteria: career accomplishments, professional expertise as well as community and charitable involvement.

Paul thanks Pythian’s Ottawa customers and partners for their longstanding support and Pythian’s employees for their dedication to delivering outstanding service.

Yesterday was actually my second day at Hotsos, 2011. I arrived at Dallas late on Sunday night, and had a bit of time to catch up with friends and colleagues, but not much else.

Monday the presentations began, and early in the morning at that.

Kerry Osborne gave the keynote – some kind of “History of Computing” thing. The subject was slightly less than fascinating, but Kerry is a funny guy and it was a fun keynote anyways.

The next session was also Kerry, this time speaking about Exadata performance. I can’t say I learned anything new. This is usually an issue when attending a presentation about hot new topics – too much time is spent on the basics. In the past every presentation about streams performance included 30 minutes of “what are streams” slides which bored me to death.

Then came Cary Millsap with “Thinking Clearly about Performance”. It is really lovely to watch how his presentation evolved over the year or two that Cary was presenting on this topic. Cary is a master presenter – He has clear and minimalistic slides that support his talk, he has great stories and awesome delivery.

I appreciate the need to think clearly, so after lunch I attended Toon’s “Thinking Clearly about SQL”. This was a thought provoking presentation – I stayed up late last night trying to figure out what I learned there and what I think of it. Toon Koppelaars advocated formal methods of writing SQL statements. This involves two steps – converting business requirements to a format problem statement and then converting these statements to SQL code using formal transformations. The first step seems mandatory to me, however the formal conversion has high overhead and may result in very clunky SQL. I’d only try that if every other method of arriving at correct SQL will fail.

The next session was Andrew Zittelli’s “Four Things Every Developer Should Know about Oracle”. It was excellent. I want to send the slides to every developer I ever worked with. I learned quiet a bit about how redo works for parallel sessions and some about dbms_locks and driving tables.

My own session was up next, which caused me to miss “Contemporary Latch Internals” by Andrey Nikolaev – everyone says it was excellent and that I should have been there. My session went well – the attendees had great questions and for once they even laughed at my jokes. However, I believe that my TCP/IP presentation is cursed to always finish 10-15 minutes early. It happened yesterday, even though I’ve added a 10 minutes section about RAC troubleshooting to beef it up. For Collaborate, I’ll practice speaking slowly.

The last session for the day was Golden Gate performance by Stephen Haisley. It  was a good session and pretty in-depth. I learned some important things about monitoring GoldenGate, how to use the latest version (and when to avoid it) and why its important to use SQL batching.

It was a good and full day, and it continued with fun discussions over dinner and a surprisingly technical talk late into the night in the local bar. Hint to the wise – spending an hour or two in a bar with someone like Christo or Dr. Neil Gunther, and you learn more than you do in a full day of conference.

Once again the great Wizards of Northern California have reached out to the community, pleading for help in the deciphering of one more challenging riddle. The second edition of the NoCOUG SQL Challenge has been published and is open for submissions! This time Iggy and his ensemble came up not only with a SQL challenge but also with a brain-bender riddle that must be resolved before you can start coding your solution. Very nice!

I’ve taken my stab at the problem and described my solution below. If you want to make a fresh attempt at the problem, stop here, otherwise scroll down for my solution.
Read the rest of this entry . . .

Sometimes I get questions as to whether Pythian is one of the competitors battling with Oracle for MySQL support. The answer lies in the distinction of product support and operational support.

At Pythian, we are laser focused on supporting applications and data infrastructure using Oracle, MySQL and Microsoft SQL Server products. A vast majority of our Oracle customers (there are few customers who have very old 7.x and 8.x products running without vendor support) have Oracle maintenance subscriptions that include product updates and product support. Product support entitles the customer to open support requests when the product doesn’t perform according to the specifications (bug reports) as well as fill in enhancement requests. It also covers deployment blue-prints and deployment guidelines in the official vendor documentation and support database. Read the rest of this entry . . .

Last week brought great news to Pythian — one of our DBAs in Pakistan, Fahd Mirza, has become an Oracle ACE. Fahd joined Pythian in September 2010 as the very first Pythian employee in Pakistan and thanks to his skills and ambitions ended up on the team supporting Exadata environments. Fahd is a long standing active community member, frequent blogger and passionate Oracle technologist evangelizing for Oracle technology in Pakistan. No wonder he got nominated as an Oracle ACE and was accepted.

I should also mention that another Oracle ACE DBA joined us recently Read the rest of this entry . . .

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

A very warm welcome to the Log Buffer, the premier medley of fresh information culled from the blogs related to the technology which stores the world, yes, the databases.

In this edition, the Log Buffer #205, we have yet again found the pulse of the industry.

Oracle:

On the Oracle front, leading Oracle technologist Andrey Goryunov carries on his hands-on experiments of newest version of the Oracle database. This time he slices away chopt.

It’s always very informative and exciting to know about internals of RAC Stuff like what actually is maintained in the Voting Disk . Riyaj has it here.

Jonathan Lewis does a little thought experiment with list partitioning.

HugesPages almost always provide value to the Oracle databases on the Linux Systems, and many people wonder why they are not the default. Kevin Closson touches some points regarding HugesPages, and he also notes down some finer points like the dislike of AMM and Hugespage for each other.

Hardly anyone would refuse a gift consisting of chocolate, ice cream, flower and designer watch. Yes, now you can have Tanel Poder, Cary Millsap, Jonathan Lewis, and Kerry Osborne at one Virtual Oracle Conference.

Tim Hall, like many other people is perturbed over the plagiarism of his articles.

Oracle recommends that you use JRockit JDK with your Oracle products and the reasons are described by JaySenSharma at his Weblogic Wonder blog.

DB2:

Now, RPM and DEB packages for DB2 Express-C are available for the download. Get it from here.

Troy Coleman, blogs about the ripple-creating news that Last week IBM announced the general availability of DB2 10 for z/OS.

The keynote session for the third day of the IOD conference features the authors of Freakonomics, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, and Craig Mullins highly recommend that.

SQL Server:

If you are curious about the title “Plumbing The Depths of SQL Server / PowerShell Integration, then don’t miss SQL Server Connections conference on Nov 1-4 in Las Vegas and attend the session by Bob Beauchemin.

Though not earth-shattering and sky-ripping, but very valuable nonetheless this post by Jeff about calculating the median.

And following is the ever-green SQL Server Myth buster posts by Euan.

MySQL:

Zack Urlocker rambles on how open source software, cloud and software as a service are helping to bring about the consumerization of IT.

Here is one more effort where the bencmarking of MariaDB is being done.

Have a nice weekend.

Welcome to Log Buffer, the weekly roundup of happenings in the database world.

Lots to cover this week, so let’s get on with Log Buffer #204. Enjoy!

Oracle:

Pythian’s Gwen Shapira dabbles with MySQL and explores MySQL troubleshooting for the Oracle DBA.

Venkat Janakiraman explores how connectivity works for BI EE 11g on Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services 2008.

Iggy Fernandez explores SQL 101: Which Query is better, in part II to a post he covered in summer of this year.

Chet Justice, on Oraclenerd reviews how to use forgotten function OBIEE: Evaluate

Tanel Poder announces last chance for early-bird rates to sign up for the virtual conference on Systemic Oracle SQL Optimization featuring himself, Cary Millsap, Jonathan Lewis & Kerry Osbourne.

DB2:

Lots going on at the IOD 2010 conference over the past week. Craig Mullins covers the event with news, a video of attendees, and the final keynote.

MySQL:

Sheeri Cabral shares how she determines MySQL fragmentation.

Baron Schwartz posts the third in a series of posts on MySQL limitations – one thread per connection. In case you missed them, part 1 covered single-threaded replication, part 2, the binary log, and part 3, subqueries.

SQL Server:

On In Recovery, Paul S. Randal invites readers to participate in a survey to determine wait times on systems. Chime in with your feedback by commenting on his blog post or sending him an email after reading the instructions. Paul is also calling for participants for T-SQL Tuesday #12 – Why are DBA skills necessary.

And lastly in Postgres news, PG West 2010 is happening next week. There are a number of posts on the need for replication in PostgreSQL 9.0. Joshua Drake stirred the pot, responded and created a Replication poll to find out what you really think. Cast your vote!

Happy Haunting weekend.

Counting down. The details are finally organized — this year, we have not one, but TWO great prizes at the Oracle OpenWorld Bloggers Meetup.

1) T-shirt art contest on stylish Pythian designer t-shirts — one lucky blogger will receive an HP X310 Data Vault, generously sponsored again this year by HP.

2) For the best, most creative blog post about the meetup itself, Pythian is giving away an Apple TV. But, there are a few small rules:

1. the blog post must use as many names of people in attendance as possible.
2. the blog post must be readable. It needs to make sense to someone who wasn’t there. It must be a story and not a list.

Read the rest of this entry . . .