The Oracle Blog

Reviewing Oracle Database 11g Release 2 Performance Tuning Tips and Techniques

It's not only important for Oracle DBAs to not only keep learning but also to keep their skills honed to a fine edge. There are certain books that are considered great books. In the Oracle world, one of the great books has been Rich Niemiec's Oracle Database Performance Tuning Tips and Techniques. Previous releases of this book have been a required must read for new DBAs and a book that experienced DBAs should periodically review to keep their skills sharp.
What makes a book great?
One website (Martin Cothran) defined a great book as: To call something "great” is to attribute to it some combination of three virtues: intellectual, moral, and aesthetic. An intellectual virtue has to do with something's truth; a moral virtue has to do with the good of a thing; and an aesthetic virtue has to do with a thing's beauty. Ultimately, however, all of these considerations come into play for a book to be called truly "great.”
A Great Oracle Book
I think Rich's Performance Tuning Tips and Techniques book fits into this category. Rich's book is a definitive book on Oracle tuning that has proved itself over time. This book is a good thing because performance tuning is a key skill DBAs must have. It also has aesthetic virtue because his insights, words of wisdom and perspective make this book a thing of beauty from an Oracle DBA perspective.
Time to Start Reading
I'm now going to read the latest release of this book from the very beginning to make sure I keep my skills honed. I will follow up with my review when I finish the book.

Labels: Performance Tuning

Oracle Open World 2011: Sunday

Sunday, opening day at Oracle Open World is always a fantastic launch to the conference. Some of the highlights:

IOUG day contains a number of presentations from the IOUG user community. Excellent presentations and it's great that Oracle has the user community so involved.
Oracle ACE dinner - is always one of the most popular events among the leaders in the Oracle user community. The Oracle ACE program is one of the best managed programs in the IT industry.
The networking that occurs during the conference is always one of the most valuable take aways from the conference. This is a tremendous amount of energy and enthusiasm among the attendees.
Launch of the IOUG Virtualization SIG - The IOUG Virtualization SIG is going to be one of the most popular groups in the Oracle user community.

Oracle Open World 2011

Oracle Open World is always an excellent technical conference. I look forward to all the networking and activities at the conference. I plan on building my schedule based on the upcoming leading edge technologies.

Virtualization and Exadata continue to be the hot areas in the Oracle community. I plan on attending a lot of the sessions revolving around these two areas.

Labels: ORacle Open World 2011

A Definition of Cloud Computing

A definition of cloud computing: http://tinyurl.com/3uv96gj

Collaborate 11 Thursday - John Kanagaraj a great leader in the Oracle Community

April Sims is the new Executive Editor of IOUG SELECT Journal, taking the place of retiring Executive Editor John Kanagaraj. John Kanagaraj is a key leader in the IOUG (Independent Oracle Users Group) and has been an invaluable member of the Oracle user community in his role as Executive Director of the IOUG Select Journal. While I was on the IOUG Board of Directors, John was the consummate professional and had a great management style that was critical in being successful. John has a very collaborate style that is very inclusive and is able to raise the quality of the people around him. John's easy going management approach made it a pleasure to work with him. John is one of the most respected as well as liked member in the user community. During his leadership the SELECT Journal every year has been voted the number one value of being a member of the IOUG.

As a member of the Oracle user community I cannot thank John enough for his endless hours, leadership as well as executive skill in taking the SELECT Journal to a higher level of excellence and maintaining that high level of excellence during his tenure.

John, "thank you for everything you did for the IOUG Select Journal. You will be missed and you MADE a difference".

April, "Best wishes in your new role as the Executive Director of SELECT". Go get em April! We look forward to your enthusiasm and energy you will bring into the position. I will be more than glad to be a resource for you in any way I can. Welcome aboard. :)

Labels: Collaborate 11

Collaborate 2011 Oracle Users Conference

The Oracle Collaborate 2011 Users Conference in Oracle the week of April 10th, 2011 is right around the corner. As always the Collaborate conference with the IOUG, OAUG and Quest User Groups is one of the top Oracle events of the year.

Installing Oracle Discoverer 10g

I recently had to do an Oracle Discoverer install and I had forgotten how much fun they can be, so I thought I'd share. I'm going to skip a lot of the explanations and details, this is just to give someone a feel for the install process.

When installing Oracle Discoverer in an Oracle 10g environment you need to go through the following steps:
1. Start the Oracle Application Server 10g install. Install the Oracle Application Server Infrastructure 10g first. This installs Identity Management services as well as the Metadata Repository for the Oracle Application Server Middle-Tier Servers.

Install using the Identity Management and Metadata Repository. This builds the infrastructure.
Make sure and write down all userids/passwords, you are going to need them when installing Oracle 10g Discoverer in the next step. You may need to log into to Application Server Control to get your port number for OID.

2. Then start the Oracle Application Server 10g install again but this time install the Business Intelligence and Forms.

Under Configuration Options choose Oracle Application Server 10g Discoverer. You can install additional options like the 10g Portal, 10g Wireless or 10g Personalization options as well.
Choose the Automatic option for Configure ports unless you understand the manual configuration of ports.
You're now going to need to Register with an Oracle Internet Directory that you will get from your Oracle Application Server Infrastructure install you did previously. You need to provide the Host and port. (i.e. "your host name" and 13060).
Now login using the OID login (Username: cn=orcladmin, password "your password").

3. Install the Oracle Business Intelligence Tools 10g. Select to install the Discoverer Administrator that you will use to install the EUL.

4. Once the Oracle Application Server 10g install is complete you need a Discoverer Administrator to go set up an End User Layer (EUL). Using the Discover Administrator, setup and configure the EUL. The EUL is a user view of the data that hides the complexity of the underlying tables. The Discoverer Administrator will walk you through the process of creating the EUL and then the creation of a new business area.

The Administration Tasklist is a great guideline for the steps you will take to configure an EUL. Steps like: Create business area, Edit items, Create joins, Create calculated items, Create conditions, Create items and date hierarchies, Create item classes, Create new folders, Create summary folders, Grant business area access, etc.

5. Once your EUL is set up, then you can log in using a web URL provided to you by the administrator. It will be something like this: http://tserver01:7778/discoverer/plus. You will then use your userid, password, database and End User Layer information that will be provided to you by your administrator to log in.

This was just a quick summary to help someone that is just getting started. The Oracle Discoverer documentation on otn.oracle.com is pretty straight forward in terms of how to set up an EUL and then give a new Discoverer user permission to access it.

Have fun.

Virtualization of Application Servers and Database Servers

I've been pretty busy watching and listening to all the presentations from Oracle Open World and VM World to pick up trends, directions, best practices and insights. From everything I am seeing, my time is being well spent on virtualizing database and application servers. You can also read more about this at
http://cloud-dba-journey.blogspot.com/ .

Oracle Open World - 2010

Oracle Open World in San Francisco opens this week, and may well be the biggest OOW ever. The combination of technologies and products promises to make it a very exciting week. Highlights for the conference include:

MySQL Sunday - Everyone on the open source side has been waiting to find out in more detail exactly what is Oracle's stated direction with MySQL. We're all hoping for some big announcements.
Where is Java going? - Everyone is looking to see what Thomas Kurian and Oracle has to say to answer a lot of questions about Java.
Oracle's Cloud Strategy - Here we learn more about what Oracle is doing with Cloud technology and their Cloud vision.
Oracle Fusion Applications - lots of anticipation here.
What's the latest on Sun hardware and updated information on Exadata.

All the anticipation is creating a lot of excitement for the conference. This Oracle Open World conference more than any Oracle conference has attendees coming to the conference looking for answers.

Labels: Oracle Open World 2010

Explosion of Virtualization and the Cloud in Data Centers

Two years ago, after the IOUG Collaborate conference, Steve Lemme and I sat down and discussed what we felt were the hot areas we should focus on for the Oracle user community. We focused on open source, virtualization and Cloud Computing. We launched a number of initiatives and had a number of virtualization and open source activities in the last two IOUG Collaborate conferences.

So it's been an amazing journey watching the continued explosion of open source, the Cloud and the use of virtualization in data centers this last year. I've been talking to a number of CIOs and database managers who are discussing their challenges in moving to the Cloud and finding the necessary expertise to use virtualization to reduce costs, simplify management as well as increase the speed of deploying database servers, web servers and development environments. It's also apparent that a lot of groups (i.e. DBAs) do not understand cloud technology and virtualization, so they fear them and have very inaccurate perspectives of them. Two very important areas of cloud technology are security and compliance. There are a lot of companies on the fast track to develop their expertise so they can successfully implement Cloud Computing.

As Oracle Open World draws near, look for implementing Cloud technology and virtualization to be two very hot topics. In the last year when teaching database server classes I always had a number of students that were always excited to talk about how they were deploying VMware and virtualization solutions in their database environments.

So if you are looking to find two areas that are growing very fast and have a lot of excitement and momentum around them, then Cloud Computing and Virtualization are the two key areas to look into. With the growth of Virtualization and Cloud Infrastructures, VMworld 2010 will be the key cloud event of the year to attend.

Labels: Cloud Computing and Virtualization

George Trujillo at Oracle and MySQL Conferences

Some of my best friends I've gained and things I have learned have been at business and technical conferences. Here are three excellent conferences I hope to attend in the next few months:

RMOUG (Denver: Feb 16 - 18) - Rocky Mountain Oracle Users Group - A fantastic local Oracle users conference.
Collab 10 (Las Vegas:Apr 18 - 22) - Collaborate 10- The big Oracle users conference of the year.
MySQL Conference and Expo (Santa Clara:Apr 12 - 15) - MySQL users conference.

Labels: Oracle MySQL conferences George Trujillo

Oracle Database 11gR2 Available on Solaris (Sparc)

Oracle Database 11gR2 is now available on Solaris (Sparc). I have a number of customers that have been waiting for this. Oracle Database 11gR2 (11.2.0.1.0) is now available on the following platforms:

Linux x86
Linux x86-64
Solaris (SPARC) (64-bit)

Labels: Oracle Database 11g

Oracle Open World 2009 - San Francisco Thursday October 15, 2009

Conference wrap up. It was an outstanding conference. Here are some of the highlights for me:

Conference was extremely well run. Absolutely fantastic conference experience.
Excellent technical presentations on new features for Oracle Database Server 11gR2 and Oracle Fusion Middleware 11gR2.
Organization of social networking for conference.
Oracle ACEs dinner.
Oracle live streaming video.
Great friends.
OTN lounge networking.
Great food in San Francisco.
Excellent networking and meetings during week.
Bus transportation for all events was excellent.
IOUG community at the conference.

Key summary points:

Oracle will spend more R&D on Java, Solaris, SPARC and other important areas.
Oracle 11gR2 feature/functionality is very impressive. Overall reduces cost but adds new level of complexity for DBAs.
Virtualization is hot, Oracle, HP, Sun, Vmware all increasing VM technology for managing IT environments.
Oracle (software) + Sun (hardware) = Speed
Social networking for business stood out as key part of conference.
Oracle Fusion middleware technology is key to everything Oracle is doing in Fusion Applications.

Time to head back home.

Labels: Oracle Open World 2009

Oracle Open World 2009 - San Francisco Wednesday October 14, 2009

Tonight is the big appreciation event at Treasure Island. Aerosmith, The Wailers, Three Dog Night and Roger Daltrey is a great line up. New Oracle/Sun Exadata system.

Today it's time for me to take off my Fusion Middleware hat, put on my database server hat and focus on 11gR2 features and on HA areas.

Oracle 11gR2 has tons of absolutely incredible functionality, I'm very impressed. Lots of things to reduce costs and simplify management of Oracle environments. However, there is definitely a new layer of complexity that is required to make things easier.

Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM) has incredible functionality and interfaces. Very, very impressive.

Oracle RAC 11gR2 new features. Highlights include:

RAC single node virtualized single instance.
Oracle grid infrastructure - ASM and Clusterware.
New installs cannot put OCR and voting files on raw partitions. Shared file system or ASM must be used.
Policy and role separated cluster management.
Server pools - logical division of cluster into pools of servers.
GPnP
More than one public network supported.
IP service discovery.
Grid Naming Service (GNS).

Active Data Guard New Features:

11gR2 lag control and DML redirect.
Auto block media repair for primary and secondary platforms.
OBIEE and active data guard.
Top link and active data guard.

Daily Agenda

Keynote: Larry Ellison discusses the state of technology. Arnold Schwarzenegger joined the keynote.
Keynote: S. Gopalakrishnan - Seven Game Changing Trends: How Prepared Are You?
Oracle Real Application Clusters and Oracle Clusterware Release 11.2
Active Data Guard Best Practices: Standby for More Than Disaster Recovery
Unconference presentations

Labels: Oracle Open World 2009

Virtualization

At Oracle Open World Oracle, Sun, HP and Dell - They are all saying virtualization, virtualization, virtualization. The new OS of the data center.

At a meeting last night seen the market share for the virtualization market. It's going to get interesting. :)

Virtualization is happening and its going to pick up speed. Virtualization and consolidation are all about lowering cost and providing more flexibiilty and speed. Business is mandating more and more of this.

Labels: Oracle Open World 2009

Oracle Open World 2009 - San Francisco Tueday October 13, 2009

It's definitely a batten the hatches day in San Francisco. The weather is dark, gloomy, rainy and windy. However all the positive energy of the conference is the shining light.

Oracle commercials are fantastic, very funny yet are doing a great job of getting business message across.

Networking - Fantastic to get insights, perspectives, best practices, lessons learned, war stories, trends from industry leaders. Individual meetings are as valuable as sessions. Understanding how to network at conference is so important. My number one advice for networking success is to always pay it forward.

PHP is now in the enterprise and has Oracle's attention. Oracle is going to invest more and more in PHP. PHP is now in the enterprise and is now one of top three most popular programming languages. Oracle's doing things like leveraging PHP performance with Times Ten. Oracle is also investing more in Python and Ruby.

Cloud is virtualization, software, provisioning and platform as a service. Customers are looking at public, hybrid and private clouds.

Daily agenda:

Sun Second Life meeting - Digitial Quicksand - Time Draining Habits in a Web 2.0 world.
Keynote: Thomas Kurian - The Fusion message, importance of SOA/Web 2.0 apps to solve business challenges of disparate systems. ADF interfaces with WebCenter, very impressive. Active Data Guard in 11gR2 looks really good.
Keynote: The Future of Enterprise Computing
Meetings
Hidden Gems of Oracle Data Pump
Rein in the Chaos and Stop the Sprawl
Bloggers meetup

Evening ended with NetApps party, then the bloggers event. Bloggers event went really well. Wrapped up the evening with a great dinner at Houston's. Went to bed early, "You can't soar with the eagles if you hoot with the owls".

Labels: Oracle Open World 2009

Sun at Oracle Open World

There has been a lot of energy and talk on Sun at Oracle Open World. Presentations on Oracle Exadata with Sun hardware have been generating a lot of excitement. James Gosling has also been very popular at the conference.

Labels: Oracle Open World 2009

Duke at Oracle Open World

Duke has been spotted around the conference and was signing autographs at the Oracle Technology Network Lounge today. Duke said that maybe Sakila can join him at the conference next year.

Java running on 6 billion devices with over 100 million downloads. James Gosling had a funny line during keynote, "It's like the old story on eggs and ham. The chicken is involved but the pig is committed."

Labels: Oracle Open World 2009

Thoughts on Oracle Open World for DBAs

A very clear message is companies are getting a lot smarter on managing the infrastructure, application complexity and data explosion. Virtualization is going to play an increasing role in future DBA operations.

RAC New Features in Oracle Database 11gR2

New features in Oracle Database 11gR2 for RAC and ASM are significant. Before RAC new features were incremental in new releases. In Oracle Database 11gR2 RAC new features are dramatic.

Show me the money
Here are some key skills that are going to increase in demand:

Virtualization
ASM
Storage
Enterprise Architects
Oracle Fusion Middleware technology - SOA, JDeveloper, ADF, BPEL, Web Services, XML...

Labels: Oracle Open World 2009

Oracle Open World 2009 - San Francisco Monday October 12, 2009

Day begins with morning keynote with Judy Simms (CMO), Safra Catz (Oracle President), Charles Phillips (Oracle President), Joel Koppleman (Primavera) and Ann Livermore (HP Exec VP). Oracle is all about innovation and integration of technology. Absolutely amazing the incredible feature/functionality in Oracle Database 11gR2 and Oracle Fusion Middleware 11gR2.

Oracle Technology Network Lounge

Oracle Technology Network Lounge was great today. Ran into a lot of friends. You definitely need to stop by the IOUG booth. Lots of exciting things happening in the user group. While there heard about a Cloud and virtualization Special Interest Groups getting started.

Thoughts for the day

Oracle Database 11gR2 New Features are going to change how companies manage Oracle databases. Combine that with virtualization, flash storage and hardware and I can assure you Oracle DBAs have no idea how much new technology is going to change how companies manage Oracle databases.

Oracle Fusion Middleware 11gR2 has finally achieved what they've talked about for years, high powered declarative programming for building web applications. The interfaces for Oracle Enterprise Manager, SQL Developer and JDeveloper are incredibly rich with unbelievable functionality and they all integrate incredibly well together. Allowing all the interfaces to work very well together is so powerful. For example, going in and working with Oracle XML and going back and forth with OEM, SQL Builder and JDeveloper to work with XML structures is just incredible. I looked at this with the rich interfaces and all I could think was "wow", allowing all the pieces to easly integrate is absolutely empowering. By the way, new 11gR2 XML features rock!

Oracle's leveraging of Twitter, Facebook, LiveStream, schedule builder, live updates is making this a very high ROI conference. "It's by far the best conference experience I've ever had."

The "in" look at the conference is suit coat without the tie.

Absolutely incredible new functionality/features in Oracle 11gR2 are very important in today's corporate IT departments deailing with rigid infrastructures, application complexity and information explosion. Too much of IT department budget is spent on operations instead of innovation. Virtualization is key to HP's Convergence Infrastructure.

Note to IT people. People with virtualization (automation, provisioning, load planning) skills are going to be in high demand.

Ann Livermore from HP is an excellent speaker. If you are on the same stage as her, you'd better be on that day. :)

Day ended with a fantastic San Francisco evening. Had a fun meeting with an old friend at Mel's Diner. Then took the cable car to Fishermans' Wharf to meet some more friends for a relaxing evening.

Labels: Oracle Open World 2009

Here comes the PRESS!

Generating a lot of online content for the Oracle Open World conference is a lot of fun. Watch out here comes the press!

Labels: Oracle Open World 2009

Oracle Open World 2009 - Oracle ACEs dinner

The Oracle ACEs dinner was absolutely fantastic as always. Thanks Lillian for putting together a fantastic program. The Oracle ACEs program brings together some of the top Oracle leaders in the user community. The picture is of the new Oracle ACE tshirt. I love the shirts and coats we get in the ACEs program. Information exchanged over dinner more than pays for the the price of the Oracle conference. The Oracle ACE program is also important to me because I can make statements about Oracle version 4 or 5 and there are others there that understand what I am saying. :)

Another great shirt from the Oracle ACEs program. Too funny, but I like this shirt. :)

Labels: Oracle Open World 2009

Oracle Open World 2009 - San Francisco Sunday October 11, 2009

Great day at Oracle Open World:

Stopping by and visiting IOUG booth. They are giving away Tips Booklet.
Developing Rich Internet Applications and Rich Enterprise Applications with Oracle ADF Faces
Oracle Fusion Development Experience: An Oracle Application Development Framework Overview
Introduction to Storing, Indexing, and Querying XML with Oracle XML Database I
Introduction to Storing, Indexing, and Querying XML with Oracle XML Database II
High-Performance Database Applications Using Oracle In-Memory Database Cache Scott McNealy,
Meeting with friends for coffee before ACEs dinner
Oracle ACEs dinner
Probably won't be able to attend the open receptions but that's okay.

Hands on labs were of extreme high quality, well organized and put together well. I really got a lot of value out of the ADF and XML hands on labs. I enjoyed them so much I'm having a hard time stopping myself from going back to hotel and playing with 11gR2 ADF and XML new features. :)

Keynote with Scott McNealy, James Gosling, John Fowler and Larry Ellison was excellent. Highly recommend you watch the online version of this. Oracle spending over 3 billion on research and development. Combine Oracle's budget on R&D and combine that with Sun's R&D budget and its going to create an incredible R&D environment.

Highlights of Larry Ellison during keynote:

SPARC is a incredible technology.
MySQL competes in different market. Oracle will spend more on developing MySQL. MySQL does not compete against Oracle.
Sun solution offers 25% better throughput with 16x better performance response time versus IBM.
Sun hardware/software with Oracle software is a great combination.
IBM is NOT very green compared to Sun.

Scott discussed top ten innovations he is proud of:

NFS/PC-NFS Technology
SPARC chip
Sun was open source before open source was cool.
Solaris combining BSD + UNIX System 5 was the solution to beat.
Java
ZFS
Open Storage
E10K - 64-way Solaris4.
Project Blackbox - datacenter on wheels
SunRay
Flash
Chip multithreading "CoolThreads"

Labels: Oracle Open World 2009

Oracle Open World 2009 - San Francisco

Saturday - October 10, 2009

Really nice relaxing day in the city

I arrived in San Francisco and was able to spend the day relaxing and enjoying the city. The Blue Angels were performing above the city and it was a great performance. My hotel room overlooks San Francisco bay so I was able to get a close up view of their air aerobatics, it was awesome. With some of their maneuvers it seems they were barely skimming the tops of the buildings.

Dinner with Steve Lemme

I had a great dinner with Steve Lemme. His insights in where the industry is going with virtualization are eye opening. We've had a lot of discussions on virtualization and putting together a Special Interest Group (SIG) for the Oracle user community (IOUG). It's definitely time to get this going. Virtualization is going to be one of the hottest areas in the IT industry.

Labels: Oracle Open World 2009

Oracle Product Definitions for MySQLers

Oracle definitions for MySQLers (Dolphins)

OTN is the Oracle Technology Network, the URL is http://otn.oracle.com, it is the Oracle equivalent of dev.mysql.com. Contains software downloads, white papers, tutorials, forums, etc. Joining is free.
Oracle Database 11gR2 is the lastest release of the new database server and it can be downloaded on Linux systems currently. The Release 2 is important because this is the main release customers migrate to. Only early adopters usually go to a Release 1 of Oracle. Expect a lot of activity at Oracle Open World in October on the Oracle Database 11gR2 release.
Oracle Apps 11i/12i - Oracle business applications (Financials, Manufacturing, HR, etc.)
Oracle EBS is Oracle's E-Business Suite containing Oracle business applications.
Oracle Fusion Applications - next generation integration of Oracle EBS, Siebel, JD Edwards, PeopleSoft business applications.
Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g - Technical foundation for Oracle Fusion business applications (Java, J2EE, Web Services, Java, BPEL, SOA, XML, ADF, Business Rules, ....)
JDeveloper is an enterprise IDE supporting database design, UML design, PL/SQL development, XML development, Java Development, etc.
Eclipse Enterprise Pack is a set of Oracle plugins for middleware development using the Eclipse IDE.
Application Express (APEX) is Oracle's native web development environment. Customers can build full blown web applications running in database server. Very fast, runs natively compiled PL/SQL in database server to generate web applications.
Oracle Weblogic Server - Application Server Oracle is basing all future middleware development on.
Oracle Enterprise Manager (Grid Control) - Very robust enterprise tool for monitoring and managing Oracle infrastructures (operating system, databases, application servers, web services, applications, ....)

Labels: Oracle Definitions

Hottest New Feature in Oracle Database 11gR2

Overview of Oracle ASM

Oracle Automatic Storage Management (ASM) is volume manager and a file system that can be used to manage all storage for Oracle environments. This allows a company to strip and mirror data without having to use expensive third party volume managers. The storage management unit for ASM are disk groups. A disk group is a collection of disks that ASM manages as a single unit. ASM can distribute hot spots on a disk to distribute I/O across multiple disks. ASM provides two key advantages:

Inexpensive storage management by supporting striping and mirroring across cheap fast disks instead of purchasing expensive storage arrays.
A consistent storage management system across different operating systems.

Oracle ACFS

An exciting new feature of Oracle ASM is the Oracle Automatic Storage Management Cluster File System (ACFS) is a multi-platform file system that supports storage of software, application files, executables, trace and log files, BFILEs, configuration files, audio, video, text and any other type of application data file. Key highlights:

Oracle ASM will still be used for all database files (recommended).
Oracle ACFS will manage non-database files. ACFS will not support files that can be stored in ASM.

ACFS provides:

Dynamic file system resizing.
Disk management through ASM disk groups.
Mirroring capability and protection.
Balanced I/O distribution.
ACFS can be accessed through operating file system tools and APIs.
Access capability through NAS, NFS and CIFS.
Support for hundreds of thousands of files.

The ability to have a HA file system supporting striping and mirroring across multiple platforms is pretty impressive. With what I've seen so far, this is going to be a hot new feature in Oracle 11gR2.

Labels: Oracle Database 11g New Features

Excellent article on delivering presentations

I found an excellent article on delivering presentations that I thought I would share with everyone. Carmine Gallo's "How to Give a Lousy Presentation" contains fifteen ways to make a bad impression. It amazes me how often you see professional speakers as well as newbies making the same common mistakes over and over again. I definitely recommend reading this article.

The Future of Backups for DBAs

DBAs have used vendor solutions for backups for years.

In the Oracle world RMAN has been the primary tool used for Oracle backups.
In the MySQL world replication, InnoDB hot backup have been primary tools used for backups.

However as databases grow into the two terabyte range and larger, the old ways are just not efficient any longer. In the future you will see snapshots and split mirror backups become more prominent in large database enviroments.

Snapshots and split mirror backups offered by logical volume managers and some operating systems allow a backup to be taken in a few seconds. Higher availability requirements and time windows required to perform backups are becoming bigger issues as database servers continue to grow in size.

Labels: Best Practices

The Importance of Peripheral DBA Skills

The DBA Skills Gap

In going to different companies every month I am consistently seeing a DBA skills gap in the peripheral areas of being a DBA. In the old days, a DBA that understood the operating system, networking and the development environment was a pretty complete DBA. Especially since in the old days, DBAs came from the development ranks and could support developers. In today's complex database environments, there is a definite skills gap in DBAs understanding the environments around databases. DBAs don't need to be experts in these areas, but should at least be comfortable in some of the areas surrounding databases:

Operating system.
Basic networking knowledge.
Storage management.
RAID levels.
Striping and mirroring concepts.
Middle-tier fundamentals (Application Servers, connection pooling, caching, connection best practices from Java, .NET, PHP, etc).
J2EE environments (Web Services, WSDL, SOA, BPEL, ...).
XML.

DBAs with peripheral skills in some of these areas are worth their weight in gold. With the complexity of database management it is getting harder and harder for new DBAs to have strong DBA skills and peripheral skills of the environment surrounding the database.

Labels: Oracle DBA

Reading Whitepapers from Collaborate 09

Complexity of Database Environments

Database vendors are putting in tremendous effort to reduce the complexity of database environments. However in the world of multi-tiered architectures, application servers, web technologies, storage, clustering, virtualization, Grid management, EPM, MDM as well as the constant growth in databases and performance challenges their is going to be complexity. So DBAs are going to need to constantly upgrade their skills to be ready for all the challenges surrounding database environments.

IOUG Collaborate 09 Conference Whitepapers and Podcasts

One of the ways of keeping an Oracle DBA and Developer's skills up is to attend user conferences. The whitepapers and podcasts from the IOUG Collaborate 09 conference are one way to keep up to speed on what the top Oracle user community leaders are saying. I have been reading a number of excellent whitepapers and podcasts. Below are some of the categories of whitepapers from the IOUG conference.

Technology Directions
Connectivity
Governance and Corporate Compliance
Application Express
Service Oriented Architecture
11g Features
Performance Database Tuning
Database Programming
Security
Tools Evaluation
Frameworks
Testing/Quality Assurance
Best Practices
Web Development
Crossover Topics for App Server Administrators
Industry Best Practices
Case Studies
Design/Configuration
Enterprise Integration

As a database professional make sure you are finding ways to keep your skills up. :)

Labels: Collaborate 09

Are You A DBA That Scales Vertically or Horizontally?

It is always important to make sure you are maintaining your skill set and marketability as an Oracle professional. In a down economy it is even more so for a DBA. So my question to you is , do you try to scale vertically or horizontally? Scaling vertically, is picking a specific area like RAC or BI and trying to maximize your expertise in that one area. If you scale horizontally you are trying to maintain expertise in a number of areas. I have focused on scaling horizontally, so I can manage HA across all tiers of an Oracle infrastructure. This has involved three key areas:

Infrastructure Management: Oracle Enterprise Manager (Grid Control)
Database Server High Availability: Oracle RAC, Data Guard, Streams, Disaster Recovery, Performance and Backup/Recovery
Middle-tier Management: Oracle Fusion Middleware (J2EE, Web Services, BPEL, SOA, XML, Oracle Business Rules)

Maximizing your expertise is very important these days. The traditional DBA that just knows basic administration, performance tuning and backup/recovery is the lowest common denominator and the easiest person to outsource. Here are ten areas you may want to consider for increasing your expertise and marketability as a DBA:

Managing infrastructures with Oracle Enterprise Manager (Grid Control)
High Availability (RAC, Data Guard, Streams)
Virtualization
Oracle Fusion Middleware
Oracle Applications DBA (EBS, PeopleSoft, JDEdwards, Siebel, Oracle Fusion, ...)
Oracle EPM
Oracle Essbase and EPM
Oracle Security
Oracle Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence
Oracle Application Server and Portal

Trends for Oracle DBAs

Maintaining and Improving Your Technical Expertise

The complexity of Oracle environments and the strategic importance of Oracle databases require the Oracle DBAs constantly improve their skill sets to remain marketable. What are you doing today to maintain your expertise and your marketability in this ever increasing competitive IT market?

Upcoming Skill Sets that are Increasing in Importance

At customer sites I see the following skill sets increasing in importance (in no particular order):

Virtualization.
Storage management (ASM and Clustering).
Oracle Application DBAs.
Oracle Fusion Middleware (Java, Web Services, XML, SOA, BPEL, SOAP, WSDL, ...).
Business Intelligence

Labels: Oracle Future Trends and Directions

Collaborate 09 - IOUG, OAUG, Quest: Oracle Users Conference

The Collaborate 09 Users Conference is going to be a conference with an excellent ROI. Some of the key areas I will be looking at include:

DBA best practices tips and tricks.
Latest techniques in RAC, Data Guard, Streams and OEM.
Performance tuning, performance tuning, performance tuning.
Oracle Automatic Storage Management is a key upcoming skill for Oracle DBAs.
Updates on Oracle Fusion Middleware technology and intergration with BEA.
Oracle DBAs with applications knowledge will be in ever increasing demand. So attending some OAUG and Quest presentations will be good for the technical DBA.
Looking at evolution of Oracle BI with Hyperion.

Collaborate is the key Oracle technical users conference of the year. I can't wait for the conference to begin.

Labels: Collaborate 09

Cloud Computing: The Importance of Understanding Technology Shifts

The technology environments being used by startup companies is always important to understand. These environments show the next generation of where technology and business are going. After startup organizations maximize these technologies you then see these technologies grow into large organizations. In the last thirty years we have seen the importance of recognizing this. What's interesting yet not surprising is that patterns of change are occurring faster and faster.

1980s - 2000 - During this time desktop computing, Unix, client/server, relational databases allowed small organizations to compete against the traditional big companies running IBM, DEC, Prime, Unisys who were the traditional technology powers in the 1960s and 1970s. (note: I wonder how may know even who DEC, Prime and Unisys are)
2000 - 2005 - During this time commodity hardware (x86), Linux, mid-range systems, clustering (growing systems horizontally instead of vertically) is where you seen tremendous growth.
2005 - Today - Open source has been the big growth area using Linux, MySQL, PHP, Apache to growth large scale web solutions.
Today - - Cloud computing and Software As A Service (SAAS) have the potential to be the next big growth area.

Each of these technology shifts were first seen by startup organizations that needed to leverage the cost efficiency and effectiveness of new technology to compete against larger firms. It will be important to watch the emergence of open source, cloud computing and SAAS and the role they play in business growth and development.

Labels: Cloud Computing, Technology trends

Top Ten Things to Do to Find an IT Job in Today's Economy

Right now a lot of professionals are not prepared to get a new job in today's economy. Their resume and approach to finding a job are totally wrong. The reason is they are using the same type of resume and approach to finding a job that they used in the .com boom days. That approach will not work today. It is very important for someone to make a major effort in their strategy for getting a new job.

Here is a top ten list for finding a new IT job in today's economy.

Accomplishments: Make sure your resume focuses on accomplishments and things you have done to make companies successful. A resume showing you are a great DBA or Developer is not going to be enough. The competition is going to be too intense. You'll lose the numbers game. Your resume needs to show what you are going to do for a company and new boss. Accomplishments, accomplishments, accomplishments!
What have you done lately: A company is not likely to care that you have tons of experience. What have you done in the last two years that separates you from all the other resumes. Focus on highly polishing your resume for the last two years, then last five years and then last ten years. In sports, your market value is going to be based on what you did last season, not ten seasons ago. It is the same in today's economic market.
Go the extra mile: Properly research the organization, hiring department, hiring manager for the job you are interested in. A "To Whom It May Concern" cover letter is going to wind up in the trash.
What makes you special: If you are applying for a job, it is likely 300 - 1000 other people are also. How is your resume going to get on the stack to get an interview. Your resume and cover letter has to get you the interview. Focus on that. Your interview will then focus on getting the job.
First impression is everything: Your cover letter is more important than your resume. If your cover letter is not good enough, your resume will never get read. Make your cover letter stand out.
Win the numbers game: You are going to be competing against hundreds of people looking for a job. Just having experience and being good at what you do is not going to be enough. There are also likely people interviewing for the position that have the inside track due to networking or people that they know. What's going to impress someone enough about you that makes you a candidate they have to look at?
The 30 second resume: If someone is looking at hundreds of resumes they are not likely to spend more than 30 - 60 seconds looking at a resume. Your resume needs to be able to make the 30 second cut.
Prepare: Proper preparation prevents pitiful performance. You just got an interview. You've done a great job being one of the few candidates that gets an interview. Now you have to get the job. You'd better have prepared your questions, your answers and everything you do in that interview. Someone within 15 seconds will have a feeling if they are interested in you or not. Go to the library, get on the internet, talk to friends, but you'd better be ready to completely ace an interview.
Get better: While you are going through the interview process keep improving your skills. Make yourself more attractive to an interviewer. Are there additional skills you can be working on? Are there skills you can add more depth to?
Life is not fair: Don't expect life to be fair. In this politically correct world we pretend people are not prejudice, are nice and will treat everyone fairly. That could not be further from the truth. Prepare yourself to win the game in an unfair world. Be the best candidate so the organization sees that you "are the one" that they have to hire.

Whatever you do, don't despair, give up or get down. Make yourself better and stronger during this process. Read books on networking. Call friends, peers, get out there. Get more involved in church, local groups, charity events, etc. to get out in front of people. Also find ways to deal with the stress. Whether it is exercise, starting a new hobby, whatever. But you have to be ready when you get the interview.

And last, work your rear end off! The harder you work the luckier you will get.

And most of all, good luck! :)

Labels: finding a job, Getting a job, Job Tips, winning the interview game

George Trujllo: RMOUG 2009 Day Two Highlights

Today was an excellent wrap up to RMOUG training days. A summary of highlights:

For RMOUG being a local users group event, there were a large number of top Oracle presenters who flew in for the conference.
A large number of excellent performance tuning presentations. Performance tuning was a major focus.
The networking and interaction of the attendees was as good as I've seen at a conference in years.
I would put the quality of all of the presentations be extremely high for the conference.
There were no marketing presentations. Excellent focus on technical presentations with high ROI for attendees.

An observation: Oracle10gR2 has been out a long time (2005) and there has been a slow adoption rate of Oracle Database Server 11gR1. So as we start the new year, I wanted to see how have skills and tools of DBAs have evolved in the last few years and what is changing around DBAs. A few thoughts about DBAs between 2005 and 20010:

DBAs have gotten very, very good with core skills such as performance tuning, backup/recovery, ASM, RAC, partitioning, OEM, etc. So if you are a DBA you'd better have some very serious skills to compete as a senior DBA.
DBAs are adding lots of scripts, tricks and techniques to managing Oracle database servers.
I was surprised to see the large number of DBAs are still interested in basic DBA skills and knowledge.
Still a small percentage of DBAs that are really good with Streams, Data Guard, XML, etc.
A lot of DBAs are not using OEM features in 10g to manage their database servers due to licensing of management packs.
DBAs are not migrating to managing the middle tier. For the most part DBAs are staying to the database server. There are more developers migrating to managing the middle tier, similar to how the traditional developers migrated to be come DBAs.
There is still a long way to go to develop people's skills in Oracle Fusion Middleware (J2EE, Web Services, XML, BPEL, SOA, etc). Most people I talked to at the conference still do not even understand what Oracle Fusion Middleware is. If you ask attendees what is Oracle Fusion Middleware or why is it important, I'd bet 9 out of 10 could not answer these questions.

Overall a great success for the conference. Way to go RMOUG!

Now on to IOUG Collaborate 2009 in Orlando, FL starting May 3rd 2009!

Labels: RMOUG 2009

George Trujillo: RMOUG 2009 Training Days Highlights Day One

My Highlights of Day One at RMOUG 2009 Training Days:

As always RMOUG is a very well run conference and the volunteers and RMOUG team are outstanding.
Congratulations to Peggy King for a RMOUG Lifetime Achievement Award! Very well deserved.
Tom Kyte: Went to a presentation by Tom Kyte I was very familiar with, but his presentation style, techniques and demos always make it a pleasure to attend one of his presentations.
Debra Lilley: Excellent presentation on Fusion. It was great to have Debra deliver a detailed presentation on Oracle Fusion Middleware from the "applications" perspective. Debra has been a key leader in the Oracle Fusion Council for years and her insights and perspective on Oracle Fusion applications is invaluable.
John VanSant: Outstanding presentation on Oracle WebLogic Application Server. This was an excellent presentation for me to attend. I've spent years trying to master the Oracle Application Server and in Oracle 11g Fusion Middleware, everything is moving over to the WebLogic Application Server. It was great to hear from one of the top Java architects, his perspective on the WebLogic application server.

A few take aways for me:

Despite working with Oracle Fusion Middleware for a few years, there is still a lot to learn as middleware technology and surrounding standards continue to evolve. The enhancements to JDeveloper and the integration of Oracle technology into the WebLogic Application Server keeps the Oracle Fusion Middleware a moving target for right now.
I'm going to wait for the Oracle 11g WebLogic application server instead of investing heavily in Oracle WebLogic 10.3 skill development.
The new features of Oracle Fusion Applications bring alot of incredible technology and new functionality into the next generation of Oracle business applications. The role of SOA will continue to grow in large organizations and Oracle technology is in the center of this next generation of business applications.

It was great running into so many friends at the conference. There is a lot of energy and enthusiasm at the conference. It was also excellent to get a pulse and perspective from the attendees. I heard a number of people mention presentations I was not able to attend that they really enjoyed. A great first day of the conference.

Labels: George Trujillo, Oracle Training Days, RMOUG 2009

User Conferences for 2009

As always there is a great list of upcoming conferences to look at for the upcoming year. On my wish list is:

RMOUG - Training Days - Denver, CO, February 10 - 12, 2009
MySQL - MySQL Conference, Santa Clara, CA, April 20 - 23, 2009
IOUG - Collaborate 2009, Orlando, FL, May 3 - 7, 2009
JavaOne - JavaOne Conference, San Francisco, CA, June 2 - 5, 2009
Oracle - Openworld 2009 - San Francisco, CA, October 11-15, 2009

I have not attended presentations at all the local user group conferences but the following is a list of users conferences I have attended that were excellent.

Houston Oracle Users Group
Dallas Oracle Users Group
Northern California Oracle Users Group

I can't recommend highly enough to get involved in your local technical user groups and start getting involved.

George Trujillo at RMOUG (Denver Colorado)

The Rocky Mountain Oracle Users Group (RMOUG) is one of the top local Oracle user groups in the country. Their training days are February 10 - 12, 2009 at the Colorado Convention Center. On February 10th there are all day University events where you can see some of the top presenters focus on a specific topic. Then on February 11 - 12, there are the 1-2 hour presentations delivered by some of the top presenters in the Oracle world.

In today's economic climate it is more important than ever to maximize your networking, improve your technical skills and understand strategic directions. For technical DBAs, Developers, Application Server Administrators, Analysts, etc. technical user conferences are one of the best ways to achieve these goals. I can't recommend highly enough to attend the RMOUG conference if you can.

This year I am taking a break from presenting at conferences due to the number of side projects I am working on. However, there is incredible value in these Oracle user conferences and I plan on attending as many as I can. I thought I would go ahead and publish the presentations I plan on attending. There is no rhyme or reason for this schedule. I try to balance listening to future directions, new tips, looking at upcoming speakers, or seeing what a specific presenter has to say on a topic.

Presentations I plan on attending at RMOUG (this is tentative and may change):
Tuesday: February 10, 2009
Undecided on whether to attend University event.

Wed: February 11, 2009
9:00 Encryption Tom Kyte
10:30 Partitioning Tim Gorman
1:30 Tuning Advisors Donald Burleson
2:15 Best Practices Iggy Fernandez
3:15 Fusion Hands On Lynn Munsinger
5:00 Websphere John Vansant
6:00 Reception Four Seasons Ballroom

Thu: February 12, 2009
9:00 Execution Plans Charlie Callaway
10:15 Dev Workshop Cary Milsap
11:15 Execution Plans Tamal Poder
1:30 Connection Pools Michael Rosenbloom
2:45 Partitioning Hermann Baer
4:00 SOA for DBAs Brad Brown

I hope to run into as many friends as possible during the conference and hopefully will make a few new friends before the conference is over. You should also take a look at the upcoming IOUG Collaborate conference May 3 - 7, 2009 in Orlando, FL.

Labels: George Trujillo, Oracle User Conferences, RMOUG

2009 Oracle Users Conferences: Increasing Technical Skills

This is the time of year to start looking at upcoming Oracle user conferences. Attending local user groups are also an excellent way to get some great training. Upcoming Oracle user conferences I strongly recommend include:

Rocky Mountain Oracle Users Group, February 11-12 2009, Denver, CO, USA
Hotsos Symposium, March 8-12 2009, Dallas, TX, USA
COLLABORATE '09' Conference, May 3-7 2009, Orlando, FL ,USA
Kaleidoscope 2009 conference, June 21 - 25 2009, Monterey, CA, USA

Local user conferences that I have attended that have been excellent include:

Rocky Mountain Oracle Users Group
Dallas Oracle Users Group
Northern California Oracle Users Group
New York Oracle Users Group
Houston Oracle Users Group

Evolving trends and directions for DBAs and Developers: How do DBAs stay marketable?

I'm always being asked the following questions; "How do I stay marketable?" or "What trends are occurring in technology that impact DBAs and Developers?". The trends are pretty obvious, the question is what conclusions do we draw from them.

These trends can be found at http://mysql-dba-journey.blogspot.com .

Labels: Technology trends

Is SOA Activity Growing or Shrinking?

Coming back from the Oracle Open World conference, a lot of energy was around the Oracle middleware solutions and SOA. So I found the recent projections from Gartner that SOA growth projections are shrinking. The article says the number of companies looking at going to SOA is dropping dramatically since the beginning of 2008.

In this article, "Gartner also said the number of organizations already pursuing SOA shows a massive change in the future perception of SOA, from something that is essentially inevitable for all organizations in a short time to a situation where many organizations evaluated SOA and have chosen not to spend time and effort on it."

A lack of SOA expertise and no true business we also stated as key reasons for the slowdown in SOA growth projections. I found it interesting that SOA adoption is highest in Europe, moderate in the United States and lowest in Asia. Oracle is completely committed to SOA and the middleware for the Oracle Fusion Middleware applications, so the activity surrounding SOA is not likely to change around Oracle environments. However, SOA activity outside of Oracle will be interesting to monitor for the next year.

Labels: SOA

Oracle Open World Larry Ellison - Extreme Performance

We've all been waiting for the big announcement from Larry Ellison at Oracle Open World. This one is definitely going to shake things up a little bit. Here at the Moscone Center it's standing room only. Safra Catz CFO for Oracle introduced the keynote speakers.

HP, Ann Livermore, Executive Vice President, Technology Solutions Group

By 2010 more than 1/3 of CEOs and CIOs say their current data center will be unable to meet growing needs. Their infrastructures are going to need to deal with Information explosion, CEOs demanding more from IT and an aging infrastructure of data centers.

They need to provide robust information to enable better business decisions. She said, HP blade servers have 50% of the blade server market. With the acquisition of EDS, HP is looking to manage more data centers for customers. She sees future data centers will have assets operating as a single virtual infrastructure. She showed a video of how data centers for HP have been evolving. They moved from 85 to 6 data centers. Highly emphasized blade servers. She sees virtualization as empowering deployments faster. She talked about PODs (performance-enhancing data centers) that can be built and shipped. They are portable. Want to use laser light beams instead of copper wire.

Oracle, Larry Ellison, CEO - Extreme Performance

Larry Ellison is here to talk about "Extreme Performance". Large data warehouses are doubling every few years. Current systems will not be able to handle the data bandwidth of future systems. "The Data Bandwidth Problem". Data warehouses start to slowdown at 10TB. Even the fastest disk storage systems start to fall apart at 10 TBs. Midrange storage arrays and NAS have trouble sooner. Multiple ways to solve the data bandwith problem. One way is to reduce the amount of data that needs to go from storage to database or increase the bandwidth.

Oracle is announcing Oracle's first hardware product, The Exadata Programmable Storage Server. They are partnering with HP on this. They are building intelligence into the storage to reduce data going through the pipes. It will pass query results back to database server not disk blocks. So instead of going through storage array and transferring all disk blocks to database server and database server filters out the disk blocks to generate a query result. The Exadata Storage Server. They pass the query to the storage arrays. Underlying ASM storage will perform parallel processing in the storage grid. This will take a lot of pressure off the bandwidth. Also will have wider pipes and more of them. They will have 2 Infiniband pipes. The Infiniband pipes are actually faster than the disk storage.

2 Intel processors: 8 cores
12 Disk Drives, up to 12 TB raw storage
Oralce Enterprise Linux OS
Oracle Parallel Query database software

The HP Oracle Exadata Storage Server Grid is available with Linux today. Other systems coming. Believe in scaling horizontally:

Exadata Storage Grid
Oracle Database Grid
Fusion Middleware Grid

The Oracle HP Database Machine is the second database announcement, its all packaged for you:

8 Oracle database servers
64 Intel processsor cores
Oracle Enterprise Linux
Oracle Real Application Clusters
14 Exadata Storage Servers
14GB/sec data bandwidth
112 Intel Processor Cores
1000 GB disk drives

Current testing has shown 10 times to 72 times faster than current systems. He said Oracle mirrored Oracle's Primary Financial Data Warehouse and ran it on the Exadata Storage Server Grid and it ran 30 times faster. Larry compared the Oracle Database Machine and showed how they believe this new Oracle hardware is much faster than Teradata and Netezza. He believes Oracle now has a major architectural advantage. He said the delivery model is HP for systems delivery and hardware service and Oracle will provide sales and system support.

A good friend of mine looked at the pricing model for this solution and I heard numbers from 2 - 5 million dollars. So make sure you bring your checkbook for this. This I need to look at in more deail.

My understanding is that HP has exclusivity with Oracle for six months and then other companies can start working with Oracle using this technolog. Not sure about this, I have to look at it in more detail.

Labels: Evaluation of Enterprise Linux for Oracle, Exabyte Database Server, George Trujillo, Larry Ellison

Oracle Open World - Evolving Role of the Oracle DBA

Changing Role of the DBA

The role of the Oracle DBA is continuing to evolve. If you look at the Oracle Open World conference anybody that is looking can see this change. The fundamental skills of the "traditional" DBA that knew administration, performance tuning and backup and recovery is not going to be enough for an Oracle DBA to stay highly marketable in the future. Another bad thing about having just the traditional skills is that those skills are the easiest to offshore.

Steve Lemme has been one of the leaders in the Oracle community discussing the evolving role of the DBA and how automation is going to also change the role of a DBA. Here is one link to look at: http::/eyeonoracle.blogs.techtarget.com/2007/04/16/can-oracle-dbas-survive-automation/#comment-12549

Increasing your marketability as an Oracle DBA

So I'm always being asked what areas should a DBA be looking at. I then answer with "it depends". To be successful in any area, you have to have a passion for what you are working on. So I'm going to give my perspective on areas to be looking at if you want to stay marketable, and increase your salary.

I love what I do and I want to keep doing it! "The Technical Track" - Oracle environments are getting more and more complex. Specializing in Oracle RAC, Data Guard, Streams, OEM and managing VLDBs is an area that is continuing to increase. These additional areas are not anything special. More and more companies are going to require DBAs have skills in some of these areas.
Show me the money! "The Money Track" - There is going to be an every increasing demand for DBAs that understand areas like Essbase, BI, OLAP, Hyperion, Stellant. Specializing in these areas is going to return you to the golden days of the dot com period. When DBA bill rates were very high and top DBAs could tell companies the salary they wanted.
Give me Fusion or give me death. "Fusion Track" - When Oracle Fusion Applications start to gain momentum there is going to be an enormous demand for DBAs that can support Oracle applications as well as DBAs that can manage multiple tiers of an Oracle infrastructure that includes the middle-tier.

Oracle Open World, September 21 - 25 2008

Blogging by George Trujillo at Oracle Open World.
blogs.sun.com/georgetrujillo
blogs.ioug.org

IOUG SIG Day at Oracle Open World 2008

Definitely take a look at Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG) SIG Sunday September 21, 2008 during Oracle Open World 2008 in San Francisco. The IOUG SIG day is going to contain technical presentations by recognized industry leaders in topics ranging from the database server, Oracle Fusion Middleware and Business Intelligence.

Labels: Oracle Open World

Oracle Open World - BEA Integration

While attending Oracle Open World (OOW) September 21 - 25 2008 attending presentations related to the BEA Integration into Oracle Fusion Middleware are going to be popular presentations.

Two Oracle booths in the Oracle Campgrounds I would definitely recommend visiting include:

Oracle WebLogic Server
Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse (OEPE)

The Oracle WebLogic Server is going to be the key engine that runs Oracle Fusion applications. OEPE takes the most popular middleware development tool and provides Oracle WebLogic Server plug-ins for Eclipse 3.3 and 3.4.

Labels: George Trujillo, Oracle Open World

Oracle Fusion Middleware Strategic Briefing

BEA Welcome and Oracle's Middleware Strategic Briefing

I just finished listening to the BEA Welcome and Oracle's Middleware Strategic Briefing by Charles Phillips (President) and Thomas Kurian (Senior Vice President) at Oracle. As part of the user community, I heard a lot of good things in this presentation. Oracle is continuing to excel at integrating acquisitions into their strategic directions. The strategic roadmap for integrating BEA into Oracle Fusion Middleware looks like a win for Oracle and BEA customers. The entire presentation can be replayed using RealPlayer.

Overall, I was impressed with Thomas Kurian's details of the BEA integration into Oracle and how that impacts Oracle Fusion Middleware technology. Thomas Kurian emphasized:

Oracle's solution offers a unified solution make up of modular components.
Key areas continue to be SOA, business intelligence, content management, Web 2.0 and process management.
There is a clear well-defined strategy for Oracle and BEA products. This will increase customer choices for how to implement their middleware solutions.
Oracle will continue to increase its investment in middleware technology.
Oracle has a number of local events planned for BEA customers and partners.

Key Points in Briefing

The key points that stood out to me:

Oracle's Application Integration Architecture (AIA) is demonstrating that Oracle picked the right framework for integrating Oracle and standards based solutions into enterprise solutions. AIA is showing flexibility as Oracle technology evolves.
The Oracle Integrated Development Environment (IDE) is still going to have JDeveloper as the key development tool but will also use an Oracle Eclipse Pack that will address all the BEA developers that have worked with Eclipse for years. This allows developers have have grown up with the Oracle JDeveloper tool and open source developers that use Eclipse to choose their IDE development tool of preference.
Oracle ADF will continue to be a key strategic piece of developing web based applications.
Oracle BPEL Process Manager will continue its key role in the SOA strategy.
Oracle Business Rules and BAM are going to continue their strategic roles.
BEA technology in areas where the BEA products or components excel, are going to be integrated into the Fusion Middleware modular components. Products like JRocket and parts of AquaLogic will strengthen Oracle Fusion Middleware in the future.
In areas where there is overlap between Oracle and BEA products, there is going to be some merging of products. This is something that should surprise no one. Customers are going to have to address this transition area.
BEA customers will be able to continue to use BEA products for existing support lifespans and no forced migration strategies are in place.
BEA developer and technology groups will move into the OTN online community.
SOA governance will include BEA AquaLogic Repository, Oracle Web Services Manager, EM SOA Management Pack, BEA AquaLogic Services Manager as key pieces.
Enterprise Portals will use Oracle WebCenter, BEA WebLogic Portal, BEA Commerce Services, BEA Collabra, BEA Pathways and BEA Ensemble as key components.
The Oracle Service Bus will integrate the Oracle ESB and BEA's service bus.

Summary

As the old saying goes, "the devil is in the details". However, the roadmap is clear and looks like a big win for Oracle and BEA customers. I liked knowing that my knowledge investment in areas such as Oracle ADF, BPEL, Oracle Business Rules and the Oracle Application Server continue to play a major role in Oracle Fusion Middleware. I also like knowing that leading edge components in BEA are going to integrate into the modular component design of Oracle Fusion Middleware. BEA technologists are going to have a larger transition.

Oracle Middleware expertise is going to continue to play a larger and larger role in the IT industry as Oracle Fusion applications start rolling out and as customers want to protect their current customizations to make sure they integrate into next generation business applications.

Labels: Oracle Fusion Middleware

Collaborate 2008 - Oracle Users Conference

The Oracle users conference called collaborate 2008 just wrapped up. This users conference is a collaboration of three key Oracle users groups:

Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG) is a users group supporting the technology side of Oracle.
Oracle Application Users Group (OAUG) supports users working with Oracle Applications.
Quest International Users Group (Quest) supports users working with PeopleSoft, JD Edwards and Oracle Utilities and their complementary products and services.

This conference is the largest Oracle users conference in the world. It allows someone to attend tracks for a specific user group or to attend presentations from different users group.

With my focus on the technology side, I usually attend presentations from the IOUG and then cherry pick key speakers and presentations from OAUG and Quest relating to Oracle Fusion Middleware. The OAUG and Quest both have a lot of presentations in the different Oracle application areas.

All three user groups try very hard to minimize the marketing presentations and focus on presentations related to Oracle technology or functional areas of Oracle applications.

For me, I attended some excellent presentations on the database server from the IOUG and some excellent presentations on Oracle Fusion Middleware from all three groups.

This is an excellent conference to attend with outstanding presentations and tremendous networking opportunities.

Thanks again to all the outstanding volunteers who are the heart and soul of the conference from all three groups.

And special kudos to Executive Editor John Kanagaraj and the Contributing Editors of Select Magazine. Select magazine is voted every year as the number one member benefit of the IOUG. The incredible effort of the Select team results in an outstanding and high regarded product. Way to go John, Tony, Don, Paul, Arup, Andy and April!

Labels: Collaborate 2008

Collaborate 2008 - Denver Colorado

The Collaborate 2008 Oracle users conference is definitely charged with a lot of energy and enthusiasm. Everybody seems to love the rooms at the Hyatt.
Sunday - A great start with a lot of excellent university presentations.
Monday - Fusion Infusion started with George Trujillo talking about the importance of Fusion Middleware to the user community. His presentation was followed by some excellent presentations by Fusion industry leaders such as Paul Dorsey, Peter Koletzke, Eric Marcioux, Basheer Khan and Duncan Mills. The words of wisdom and insights provided by these leaders was absolutely fantastic.
Monday ended with a great networking party "Oracle Tuning" that had a lot of members playing the guitar, singing songs, doing karaoke, and dancing. A great evening was had by everyone.
Tuesday - A lot of great presentations on Tuning, RAC and Fusion Middleware. The hands on Fusion development experience had to be the hit of the day.
Wednesday - Some excellent presentations on XML DB and Fusion Middleware. A lot of the buzz on the street is on Stellant and Hyperion. Oracle seems to be putting a lot more emphasis on WebCenter. Expect a lot more on WebCenter in the next year. Wednesday is a big party.

Everybody seems to really enjoy the networking that is occurring outside of the presentations.