Oracle Database Management Strategic Directions

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

2012-03-03T17:35:00.006-07:00

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.

Oracle Open World 2011: Sunday

2011-10-03T09:25:00.004-06:00

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

2011-09-05T21:36:00.001-06:00

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.

A Definition of Cloud Computing

2011-04-16T11:10:00.002-06:00

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

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

2011-04-14T11:01:00.002-06:00

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. :)

Collaborate 2011 Oracle Users Conference

2011-03-24T13:58:00.000-06:00

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

2010-11-09T16:06:00.003-07:00

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

2010-10-23T10:41:00.000-06:00

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

2010-09-19T09:15:00.000-06:00

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.

Explosion of Virtualization and the Cloud in Data Centers

2010-07-21T17:32:00.002-06:00

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.

George Trujillo at Oracle and MySQL Conferences

2010-01-12T23:29:00.000-07:00

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.

Oracle Database 11gR2 Available on Solaris (Sparc)

2009-11-16T16:07:00.000-07:00

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)

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

2009-10-14T19:31:00.001-06:00

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.

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

2009-10-14T07:29:00.004-06:00

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

Virtualization

2009-10-13T11:49:00.001-06:00

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.

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

2009-10-13T08:48:00.009-06:00

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".

Sun at Oracle Open World

2009-10-13T03:06:00.000-06:00

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.

Duke at Oracle Open World

2009-10-13T02:56:00.001-06:00

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."

Thoughts on Oracle Open World for DBAs

2009-10-13T02:53:00.001-06:00

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...

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

2009-10-12T10:28:00.006-06:00

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.

Here comes the PRESS!

2009-10-12T00:30:00.000-06:00

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

Oracle Open World 2009 - Oracle ACEs dinner

2009-10-12T00:09:00.004-06:00

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. :)

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

2009-10-11T09:20:00.008-06:00

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"

Oracle Open World 2009 - San Francisco

2009-10-11T09:04:00.000-06:00

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.

Oracle Product Definitions for MySQLers

2009-09-02T13:35:00.001-06:00

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, ....)