My Interview In The Latest Quarterly Journal Of Northern California Oracle Users Group

This is just a quick blog entry to invite you to get a copy of the latest quarterly journal of Northern California Oracle Users Group. The Editor, Iggy Fernandez, interviewed me on a wide range of topics. The article begins on page 4.

Please click on the following link:

http://www.nocoug.org/Journal/NoCOUG_Journal_201208.pdf

The following is a screenshot of the magazine cover and following that is a list of the questions posed to me in the interview.

Interview questions:

Is hardware the new software? Why bother with indexing,
clustering, partitioning, and sharding (not to mention application
design) if hardware keeps getting bigger and faster
and cheaper every day. Can we just “load and go?”

You were an architect in Oracle’s Exadata development organization.
With all the excitement about Exadata in the Oracle
community, what motivated you to leave?

You’ve been referring to it as “Exaggerdata.” Why so harsh?
You’ve got to admit that there’s plenty of secret sauce under
the covers.

“Do-it-yourself Exadata-level performance?” Really? We’re
all ears.

Are TPC benchmarks relevant today?

Where do you stand in the “Battle Against Any Raid Five
(BAARF)?”

Can NAS match the performance of SAN? Can SAN match
the performance of locally attached storage

As a long-time NetApp fan, I like to stay in my comfort zone
but perhaps I’m biased. Does NetApp still offer anything that
the other NAS vendors (such as EMC) don’t?

Do we need yet another “silly little Oracle benchmark”?

Do you recommend that I use ASM? I worry that a sleepy
system administrator will unplug my disks someday because
“there were no files on them.” I do like to have my files where
I can count them every day!

Do you have an opinion on the NoSQL movement? Will the
relational mothership ever catch up with the speedboats?

My management is pushing me to take my databases virtual.
I can appreciate the advantages (such as elasticity) of virtualization,
but I’m not so sure about performance. Also, I cannot
rely on guest O/S statistics. Is it just the Luddite in me? Can
you help me push back on my management?

I like the Oracle Database Appliance (ODA) because RAC
raises the bar higher than most IT organizations can handle,
and ODA lowers it. What would you improve about the ODA
if you had a wizard wand?

Is NoCOUG a dinosaur, a venerable relic of the pre-information
age that has outlasted its usefulness?

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