Technical Blog

By now the Denver Convention Center is probably cleaned up from IOUG Collaborate. The signs directing thousands of attendees to top-notch technical presentations have been removed, the twenty rental laptops which composed the classroom for Pythian’s RAC Attack class have been returned and the vendor exhibition floor has been completely cleared out. Flight delays notwithstanding (thanks to some midwest weather), attendees are generally home by now – even those coming from places as far away as Germany and Australia.

Now that the buzz is dying down, I’ve finally found a few minutes to post my personal highlights.

Friends Old and New

First off, my favorite part of Collaborate is the opportunity to meet so many old friends and make new acquaintances who are all using Oracle technology. It’s both fun and informative to hear about the ways others are using Oracle software.

I was recently involved with an upgrade project to go from 11.2.0.2 to 11.2.0.3 on an Exadata V2. We hit some snags during the upgrade specifically related to OEM 12c Cloud Control. We performed an out-of-place upgrade and OEM 12.1.0.1.0 had some difficulty in dealing with this.

12c Cloud Control is supposed to run a daily check which looks for new targets on each server. When it finds something new, it places this in a queue to wait for admin approval. With a single click you can promote the newly discovered target into an OEM managed object.

I recently helped setup an Exadata X2-8 Database Machine with the latest version of OEM Cloud Countrol (12.1.0.2). A few documents do exist for this process – the most useful of which are the Exadata Discovery Cookbook and the Setup Automation Kit. However I found a few inconsistencies and problems; I think the existing documents I found were written on older versions of OEM and older versions of the tools. Also there are some additional steps for older Exadatas which didn’t apply to my case.

This is just a small bug fix release of the plugin. It was actually quietly released for a while now of if you have downloaded the plugin recently, you have the latest version. To be sure — check the version in the Console or you will see it in the file name.

Disclaimer: much that follows is pure speculation on my part. It could be completely wrong and I’m putting it out there in the hopes that it’ll eventually be proven one way or the other.

Announcing the IOUG Big Data Special Interest Group (SIG)!

We have the SIG meeting at Oracle Open World — come join us with you morning coffee. Nothing better than starting your Big morning with Big Data talks! Yes — we actually managed to get the room at this busy times at OOW thanks to IOUG.

What: IOUG Big Data SIG Meeting

When: 8:45-9:45am, Tue, 2-Oct-2012

Where: Moscone West Level 3, Overlook 3 (OOW12)

Everyone is welcome. Gwen Shapira is the SIG leader and expect lots of great things in that space. The SIG is also looking for volunteers — that’s going to be hot space so if you want to engage early come and let us know.

Oracle OpenWorld 2012 is just over a month away and yes we are organizing the Annual Oracle Bloggers Meetup — one of your top favorite events of the OpenWorld.

What: Oracle Bloggers Meetup 2012

When: Wed, 3-Oct-2012, 5:30pm

MySQL management plugin for EM 12c has been long overdue. I’ve initially migrated the older plugin to EM 12c about 6 months ago and few dozen people received this as initial beta of the plugin. It worked OK but didn’t use any of the 12c new features and its home page was a bit of a mess in the EM 12c Cloud Control web interface.

I’ve had lots of new features to add but I didn’t really have much time to invest into completing them all. Finally, I decided to just finish the home page dashboard and clean it up from all unfinished new features. I did, however, finish MySQL Slave configuration and status monitoring which was the largest gap in the the functionality of the previous plugin. There is no custom UI for MySQL slave management yet (that’s coming) but monitoring is available as standard metrics and configuration management features.

This blog is a little bit self serving and I’d normally not post it but I think that it would be an awesome deal for those of you who are thinking of buying an Oracle Database Appliance now. We have several just two left brand new, unopened ODAs left in our inventory that we need to move. Half of them are gone to our customers but there are few still left. We are not really interested in holding on to them while somebody else can put them to good use so we have very very (did I say very?) good price. :) Limited time offer as they say.

When preparing for the the IOUG Collaborate 12 deep dive on deploying Oracle Databases for high Availability, I wanted to provide some feedback on what hardware components are failing most frequently and which ones are less frequently. I believe I have reasonably good idea about that but I thought that providing some more objective data would be better. I couldn’t find and results of a more scientific research so I decided to organize a poll. This blog post shows the results and I promised to share it with several groups.