DOAG Exaday 2017: a preview

I am quite excited to have been accepted to speak at the upcoming DOAG Exaday taking place June 20 in Frankfurt. It is the third time I have been lucky enough to present at the event, having spoken both in Frankfurt in Hamburg in previous years.

As you can probably imagine by looking at this weblog, I am a great supporter of the Oracle Engineered Systems community. My interest is not limited to Germany: I still remember the many great meetings in London in the context of UKOUG’s Exadays. I am also very lucky to work for @enkitec where we have been sharing real-world experience at E4 for years and will do so again in June this year.

Unfortunately interest in the UKOUG’s Systems Event has dwindled a bit recently which lead me to focus on the Exadata in Germany this year. I am going to speak – in German – about how you can make your migrations to Exadata easier. This is a talk I have delivered a few times before but leaped at the opportunity to update the material to release 12.2.

I am very glad to see my colleague @fritshoogland and many other great speakers too numerous to mention at the event. If you are an engineer working on Oracle Exadata and its cousins this is definitely the event to attend.

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Public appearances first half of 2014

I had the great fortune to have had many of my abstract accepted for upcoming conferences and other public appearances, the first ones for this year are these:

OUG Ireland

The first conference I’ll be attending is in Dublin, for OUG Ireland 2014 on March 11.I’m going to help out with RAC Attack and also present about Technologies for Developing Highly Available Applications in RAC 12c at 14:50 for about 45 minutes. What can you expect? Here is the official abstract, I am looking forward to the presentation and the live demos.

Oracle offers a wealth of technologies to make your application more resilient to instance failure. This talk presents an overview of what is commonly considered in application development based on the Java programming language. You will learn about these technologies from a DBA’s point of view. Options will include TAF as a baseline followed by FCF and finally Application Continuity (incl. demos)

Exadata Workshop

At Enkitec we regularly organise Exadata workshops for those who are either interested in the technology or using it already but want to get more out of it. These workshops are scheduled quarterly, and I have already held two of these in London. The next one for Europe will take place on March 27 (Thursday), again in Oracle’s London City Office. If you are interested in the Exadata platform the workshop is an opportunity to discuss your deployment with other users or just to bounce ideas off other people then by all means come along (it’s free of charge)! The official link to this workshop is here:

http://www.enkitec.com/education/sessions/exadata_workshop_london_27-mar-2014

I have updated the material to include the latest Oracle 12c cell software features as well as support for the new RDBMS architecture-Container Databases-and will update delegates on how this works and also how Exadata supports Oracle’s consolidation platform. There are many cool new features in 12c worth exploring and knowing about.

OUGN Spring Seminar

Next up is the Norwegian User Group’s Spring Meeting on April 3-4 where I have managed to secure two slots: Oracle 12c features that didn’t make the marketing top 10 Advanced RAC programming features The agenda is online and can be found here: http://ougnvarseminar2014.sched.org/ There are far too many great speakers to just link to my talks, feel free to browse (and register :) For me the meeting starts on Wednesday 2nd when I’m flying to Oslo. This is without a shadow of a doubt a very good conference, and I can only recommend it-exactly like the others on this page. It is very well organised and definitely worth going. There are very few other conferences where you can mingle with the presenters and chat about all sorts of things in the same way as there. I have attended twice already and enjoyed it every time.

Enkitec E4

Enkitec’s Extreme Exadata Expo is one of the conferences with the highest technical content I can imagine. I attended last year and was really impressed by the speakers and the content. The impact on “Big Data” is clearly visible in the agenda and like last year you can find Exadata and “Big Data” talks.

Enkitec Extreme Exadata Expo

I am quite chuffed I made it on the agenda of the event! I’m going to present “Think Exa” together with my colleague Frits Hoogland. In this presentation we are going to talk about setting your mindset on Exadata to overcome pre-ASM and pre-RAC habits. Unlearning some things we have been taught (or doing) for many years take its time, and we are hoping to give the audience an overview of what can be achieved with the platform. At the same time that I am happy that I secured a speaker’s slot I am even more excited to attend the conference. Looking at the list of speakers who already confirmed their attendance it is going to be a blast. I am looking forward to seeing my colleagues from the United States but also to catch up with new and old friends.

Looking forward to seeing you at one of these events!

I am speaking at AIM & Database Server combined SIG

If you haven’t thought about attending UKOUG’s AIM & Database Server combined SIG, you definitely should! The agenda is seriously good with many well known speakers and lots of networking opportunity. It’s also one of the few events outside an Oracle office. 

I am speaking about how you can use incremental backups to reduce cross-platform transportable tablespace (TTS) downtime:

A little known MOS note describes how you can potentially reduce downtime by a significant amount when migrating databases between systems with different endianness. Many sites are looking for ways to move their databases from big-endian platforms such as HP-UX, AIX or Solaris/SPARC to an Exadata system running Linux. A new functionality called cross-platform incremental backup in conjunction with the already-known cross-platform transportable tablespaces makes this possible. When using incrementally rolled forward backups the source system stays up while the destination database is instantiated. Further incremental backups are then applied to the destination to keep it current-while the source system stays fully available.

At the time of the cut-over only a final incremental backup needs to be transferred to the destination host, which is significantly smaller than the full set normally transferred. The time window for when the source tablespaces have to be offline often is a lot smaller than compared to the traditional TTS process.

Hope to see you there!

I’m speaking at Enkitec Extreme Exadata Expo E4

Just a short notice to those interested that I’m very proud to be in the lineup for Enkitec’s Extreme Exadata Expo. The event takes place August 5-6, 2013 and is held in the Four Seasons Resort & Spa, Irving, Texas. There is plenty of time for you to register.

I was really sorry I missed out last year but this time I’m glad to participate and attend!

The list of great speakers includes too many to name here-you should see for yourself about who is coming to Dallas this August and why this event is unmissable.

I’m hoping to see you there!

Grid Infrastructure And Database High Availability Deep Dive Seminars 2013

So this is a little bit of a plug for myself and Enkitec but I’m running my Grid Infrastructure And Database High Availability Deep Dive Seminars again for Oracle University. This time these events are online, so no need to come to a classroom at all.

Here is the short description of the course:

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.

If you are interested I would like to invite you to head over to the Oracle University website here which has a more extensive synopsis and all the detail you need:

http://education.oracle.com/pls/web_prod-plq-dad/db_pages.getCourseDesc?dc=D81641_2043034

UPDATE: I received several emails and comments that the above link does not work. I couldn’t reproduce this until today. It appears to be an issue with the country selection. If you have USA selected in the top right corner the link won’t work, switching to United Kingdom (my preference) will fetch the course detail. I don’t quite understand as to why that is the case since the class is virtual and not depending on a country…

I hope to hear from you during the course!

OUGN Spring Seminar 2013

The annual conference held by the Oracle User Group in Norway has once again been just great. It was the second year I went and I have to admit that it was every bit as good as last year, and that’s holding a very high standard.

The combination of such great hosts, great speakers and a wonderful atmosphere make this one of the best conferences to attend in Europe. The added benefit of being on a boat makes it a great opportunity to meet the speakers and to hang out with during dinner and after the sessions. Unfortunately I had to leave a day early and write these lines while on a train back home.

OUGN Spring meeting 2012

I had the great pleasure to spend the better part of last week at the Norwegian Oracle User Group’s spring conference. Martin Nash and I helped promote the Real Application Cluster platform on the attendees’ laptop in a program called RAC Attack.  RAC Attack has its home on the wikibooks website http://racattack.org where the whole program is documented and available for self-study. The purpose of the hands-on labs which Jeremy Schneider started a few years ago is to allow users to get practical experience installing Oracle Linux, Grid Infrastructure and the RDBMS binaries before creating a two node database. Following the database creation a practical session ensues which explains certain HA concepts with RAC such as session failover. We are planning on greatly enhancing the lab session as we go along. If you have any suggestions about what you would like to see covered by us then please let us know!

RAC Attack at OUGN 2012

Quick post to bring the Virtual Box PDF to the attendees. Follow this link to get the instructions

RAC Attack Using VirtualBox

UPDATE

This post was the best way to get the PDF instructions to participants of the OUGN 2012 RAC Attack seminar without too much effort on our side. If you have since then used your favourite search engine and ended up here in the hope that there is an interesting story please navigate here instead:

https://martincarstenbach.wordpress.com/2012/03/26/ougn-spring-meeting-2012/

Thanks for passing by!

AIM SIG and my talk about Enterprise Manager 12c

Yesterday I presented at UKOUG’s Availability, Infrastructure and Management Special Interest Group (hey, say this 3 times in a row, quickly!) about Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c and my experience with it. As my good fried Piet de Visser pointed out I had way too much to say for the 45 minute slot allocated. But then Piet always tells me that. Sadly he is also often right :) That’s why I like seeing him during my talks!

In summary I would have liked to do a different presentation, and that’s for two reasons: 1) I overran and 2) I haven’t managed to show the patching part which is hugely interesting, at least to me.

Now here’s the reason for the blog post. I haven’t done online seminars yet, and was wondering if people were interested in a 1-1.5 hour UKOUG-like presentation from myself, broadcast via Goto Meeting or similar to an audience. Would that be of interest? The topics to be covered are:

• Thinking about the installation of OEM 12c including HA and other deployment options
• Walking through the installation using print screens (it takes too long and I would bore you showing a slow moving progress bar)
• Demo time, i.e. logging on to the system and showing a few things

For the interactive part I’d

• show the new user interface
• walk through the agent push
• demonstrate how to add a target
• and finally guide you through the patching process

I prefer this to be interactive (technology permitting), with a timescale of 1 to 1.5 hours and a Q&A session at the end. I will try to set something up if there is sufficient interest.

WARNING & disclaimer

I’m not an expert in OEM 12c! I installed it, played with it and can show you what I know.

Availability Infrastructure & Management SIG March 14th 2012

I am proud to be able to speak at the first instalment of the Availability, infrastructure and management SIG on March 14th in  the London City office.

The event is announced on the UKOUG website here:

http://www.ukoug.org/events/ukoug-availability-infrastructure-and-management-sig-meeting/

Unfortunately I will be between you and lunch! I hope that works out, and I don’t overrun.

I am going to demonstrate my (little) knowledge of Oracle Enterprise Manager 12.1. I looked at it for one of my customers and came to like it. As it is very different from the previous versions of the product, a more closely focused session seems appropriate. An Internet connection permitting, I am going to demonstrate navigation through the new interface, self update, target discovery and if time permits, I will patch a single instance HA environment (also known as Oracle Restart).

If all demos work this could be quite an entertaining sessions, questions are welcome!