Pythian Group

Welcome to Log Buffer, the weekly roundup of database industry news.

For your reading pleasure this week we have Log Buffer #196:

Charles Hooper blogs about an in-depth investigation on what can cause Oracle to ignore a hint.

Doug Burns reminds his readers that there are only two weeks left to submit papers for UKOUG. The deadline is Aug. 2.
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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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Unlike my previous post, this time it’s relevant for everyone and not only those lucky ones in Sydney. ;-)

I have been presenting about RAC Connection Management on a number of conferences and I have done a white paper that is focused on RAC Workload Management. It was available to the conference attendees and now is publicly available so read on.
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Tonight I returned from my first UKOUG conference. I’ve been to smaller conferences like Microsoft Technet and big ones like European Oracle Open World before, but this was without a doubt best one so far (measured by the value of content and amount of fun).

I couldn’t attend all the sessions that aroused my interest, there were simply too many of them. From those I attended, there are few I’d like to mention as highlights of the conference.

Tom Kyte and his “Best way…” was one of the most entertaining sessions and at the same time, one of the most educational. James Morle and his view of the current state of storage devices was also one of the very strong ones in both perspectives.

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I arrived to the conference at yesterday around lunch time. I was supposed to come on Sunday but I was delayed because of my UK visa renewal. In fact, I almost had to cancel it completely but the world is not without good people who were able to magically help speeding up the process.

Unfortunately, I’ve been on the road for the 42 hours or so which includes about 8 hours drive to the UK High Commission in Canberra and then back to Sydney airport. Then the flight to London with stop-over in Singapore — way too long to be reasonably enjoyable. From London it’s a coach to Birmingham and finally after quick check-in at Jury’s Inn and shower, I was here — “fresh and rested”.

My first presentation was supposed to be today at 16:30 but I wasn’t sure if I would make it on time or not so we decided to keep Gregory Guillou as he volunteered anyway to substitute me in case I wouldn’t get a visa (thanks Gregory!). Well, turns out that I would be able to help and having couple people on stage (assuming they know what they talking about) is better than one. ;-)

When I realized the issue with my visa, we also started to think about options for the masterclass on the last day of the conference and we had a great idea of setting up a remote presentation bridge UK-Australia with couple Oakies on the stage locally. Those brave volunteers were Michael Moller, aka M2, and Moans Nogood. In fact, I think they might still pop up on Friday and I’m sure it would be good fun so please drop by.

The presentation yesterday went pretty well except that we obviously had to skip all the demo’s as it was 45 minutes and the original presentation was for 1.5-2 hours slot. In my experience, it’s tough to follow someone’s else slides but Gregory did a good job. It was also his first conference speaking experience as far as I know and I hope he would consider doing it more often — he has lots to share. I had nothing better to do than to play with the laser pointer but I took the liberty to answer few questions and add few details — in the end, why would I sit on the stage then!?

Alright, back to the conference now. You should be able to find me in few places – OakTable, Pythian booth or wandering between the halls as well as sitting on few session, I hope. You can catch me on the phone as well if you want to meet me but don’t see me around — text me at +44 7901581915.

Oh, almost forgot to say that I had great evening last night and it was a pleasure to catch up with everyone at the Focus Pubs and later and the Tap & Spile. I should mention that Scottish table was my favorite at the Focus Pubs as they had the best drinks around (what a surprise, Thomas!). I should also share my disappointment in Tap & Spile this year — their beer selection wasn’t great this time and they closed down the downstairs area doing some painting job — bad timing guys! I should say that I survived until midnight after this loooong day for me and this morning looks great (so far).

Several of us from The Pythian Group will be at the UKOUG 2008 Conference & Exhibition in Birmingham UK, from the 1^st to the 5^th of December. This year marks the 20^th 25^th anniversary of the UKOUG, so the gathering is expected to be really big.

Pythian will contribute two presentations, both on Monday December 1^st. Lukas Vysusil will be presenting in the Oracle E-Business Suite technical stream at 15:40 on Monday. His presentation will be mostly about autoconfig template customization and maintenance. He’ll also discuss autoconfig best practices, and new features in R12.

Gregory Guillou (or Gregory together with Alex Gorbachev if Alex gets his visa on-time) will provide a practical understanding of Oracle Clusterware/CRS and the knowledge required for independent troubleshooting of Clusterware issues, in “Under the Hood of Oracle Clusterware”, at 16:15 on Tuesday.

Besides our enlightened presenters, you can meet Paul Vallée, Peter Simecka, and me, Dan Elbl, at the Pythian stand (27A) for a consultation or just for a friendly chat. We will have some good quality Slivovic and Becherovka from the Czech Republic for you to sample.

If you’d like to meet us, email me to arrange a time.

See you at UKOUG!

I recently traveled to Europe to present at a few conferences. The Slovenia Oracle User Group (SIOUG) conducted an Oracle conference in Portoroz, a port city in Adriatic Sea.

Thanks to my friend Joze Senegacnik, I had wonderful time in Slovenia. We also visited the city of Venice while we were there. Of course, we all knew that Venice is the city of bridges—over a hundred small islands connected by bridges. But visiting Venice in person had a dramatic effect on us. We were mesmerized by the beauty, culture, and architecture, in particular the Basilica of St.Mark. Venice is indeed the Queen of the Adriatic.

Back to reality. I presented a few papers for the Dallas Oracle Users Group (DOUG) for their October tech meeting too. All these papers can be accessed following these links: Read the rest of this entry . . .

Mind you this was actually written more than a week ago but I didn’t have time to review and upload the photos on time so sorry for this delay.

I’m on the plane back to Canada and I’m extremely satisfied with the conference this year. I should say that I found it harder to keep up in the evenings with some slightly non-sober DBA’s around and get up “early” in the mornings to visit several good morning technical sessions. You might blame age but I shouldn’t complain… not yet, at least!

Enough whining… This is my final UKOUG 2007 post as you might have figured already so let’s get to it.

The last day was the shortest but the most difficult. I set my alarm at 8AM and it worked, unfortunately. I got up but couldn’t find my way around bouncing from the walls and bumping into the corners so I had to catch another couple hours of sleep. I could only wake up after 10 and by the time I took a shower, packed my luggage and checked out, it’s almost the middle of Doug Burns’ presentation and I didn’t want to disturb his speech which was very good I heard. Christo’s presentation was over by that time but I saw it already anyway in a full 60 minutes format so I didn’t really need a 45 minutes refresher. In addition, I can always shout in the office if I need an answer to a memory questions.

I waited in the speaker lounge until Doug’s session is over and used this opportunity to chat with few other speakers and later bumped into Lisa Dobson (or did she bump into me?). I had an interesting observation that we both were whispering and my explanation would be that we didn’t want to bother several other speakers who were focused on work, presentations and emails. There is another theory as well but I like this one more. ;-)
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