Public Appearances

I was very pleasently surprised that Oracle University are offering another day for my “Grid Infrastructure and Database High Availability Deep Dive” seminar. In addition to the immenent seminars in June (I blogged about them earlier), this one is in London, England. For anyone interested, here is the link:

http://education.oracle.com/pls/web_prod-plq-dad/db_pages.getCourseDesc?dc=D70365_1439069&p_org_id=28&lang=US

The date has been set to October 10th, so there is plenty of time still, but nevertheless I hope to see you there!

I am doing a couple of one day seminars with Oracle University, currently planned for Austria and Switzerland. They go by the title “Grid Intrastructure and Database High Availability Deep Dive”, and can be accessed via these links.

• Switzerland
• Austria

To save you from having to get the abstract, I copied it from the Oracle University website:

Providing a highly available database architecture fit for today’s fast changing requirements can be a complex task. Many technologies are available to provide resilience, each with its own advantages and possible disadvantages. This seminar begins with an overview of available HA technologies (hard and soft partitioning of servers, cold failover clusters, RAC and RAC One Node) and complementary tools and techniques to provide recovery from site failure (Data Guard or storage replication).

In the second part of the seminar, we look at Grid Infrastructure in great detail. Oracle Grid Infrastructure is the latest incarnation of the Clusterware HA framework which successfully powers every single 10g and 11g RAC installation. Despite its widespread implementation, many of its features are still not well understood by its users. We focus on Grid Infrastructure, what it is, what it does and how it can be put to best use, including the creation of an active/passive cold failover cluster for web and database resources. Special focus will be placed on the various storage options (Cluster File System, ASM, etc), the cluster interconnect and other implementation choices and on troubleshooting Grid Infrastructure. In the final part of the seminar, we explore Real Application Clusters and its various uses, from HA to scalability to consolidation. We discuss patching and workload management, coding for RAC and other techniques that will allow users to maximise the full potential of the package.

See you there if you are interested!

Just a really quick post about my appearance at Miracle Open World 2011 in Denmark next month:

http://www.mow2011.dk/

I strongly recommend you to have a look at the agenda and speakers, there are lots of fellow Oak Table members sharing their knowledge-quite an incredible lineup and a great honour for me to be there.

Yesterday I returned from a trip to Amsterdam where I presented about Grid Infrastructure 11.2 as part of Logica’s Guru 4 Pro series. I have to say it has been a very pleasant experience! And it marked the first time I presented outside the UK as well.

Logica Holland runs a series of events where renowned experts present about the latest and greatest developments in their field. I was very pleased getting an invitation to the series, and gladly accepted. I opted to give the audience a “close look at Grid Infrastructure”. I think Oracle University would have termed it a “Deep Dive”, and a deep dive it was!

The flight from London Gatwick, my “home” airport to Amsterdam is very short indeed, I had the feeling I spent more time on taxiways than in the air. Upon arrival I was picked up by Dennis van Onselen, Logica’s Practice Manager. I really appreciate not having had to resort to a taxi to the venue!

Before the main event kicked off at 18:30 in the evening there was time for a session with Logica employees. For about two and a half we went through pros and cons of various technologies in the Oracle portfolio, and had a really good discussion along the way. I hope the attendees found it useful.

After a short break, I started my talk which was well received by the audience. I recognised some familiar faces in the audience, and was very pleased to also see Piet de Visser who I haven’t met all year and who introduced me to Anjo Kolk-I didn’t know he was part of the audience as well. After the presentation which was the longest I gave so far (around 90 minutes) we had a great discussion about the contents and high availability strategies in general. I felt a little strain on my voice, even though I was mike’d up after a cold I was suffering from at the weekend. I can fully understand singers now who can’t make it to their concert. But I’m back to normal now, hoping it won’t repeat itself during next week’s UKOUG conference.

One of the really good things that came out of this session was the prospect of returning to Holland for more presentations about RAC and all things around it. I would be delighted to return, anyone interested please drop me a line. And that of course includes Miracle!

By the way, I have converted the presentation to a PDF, and it can be downloaded here.

Just a quick one to announce that I’ll present at said event. Here’s the short synopsis of my talk:

Upgrading to Oracle Real Application Cluster 11.2

With the end of premier support in sight mid 2011 many business start looking at possible upgrade paths. With the majority of RAC systems deployed on Oracle 10g, there is a strong demand to upgrade these systems to 11.2. The presentation focuses on different upgrade paths, including Grid Infrastructure and the RDBMS. Alternative approaches to upgrading the software will be discussed as well. Experience from migrations performed at a large financial institution round the presentation up.