In my opinion

conference breakdown

2011-07-14T14:24:00.001-07:00

Trying to get a bus off the floor

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I have tasted the kool-aid

2011-07-13T17:28:00.001-07:00

And I think I like it

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Communities within GIS

2011-07-13T15:36:00.001-07:00

This is a blog post from an iPad app that I downloaded from the apple store. This should make is easier to post blogs.

One session I attended was on user communities within the esri ArcGIS umbrella that will help customers and employees to collaborate. The categories include:
IDEAS
WIKI
Forums
Beta
Answers
Community blog
Workspaces

Some of these communities are currently available and others are still in development. The three that they showed today were IDEAS.ArcGIS.com, wiki.GIS.com, and forums.arcgis.com

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:San Diego,CA

Blogging in a session

2011-07-13T09:11:00.001-07:00

I thought I would try to blog,with picture,while in a session. What you need to know about at enterprise GIS project. This slide hit home..

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Day 1 part 2

2011-07-12T17:02:00.000-07:00

Day 1 was a plenary session with a great deal of information. Jack Dangermond, founder /President of Esri, gave an overview of the company, the different focus areas oaf the software, and the future things to come. One announcement from Mr. Dangermond was they acquired a Swiss software firm, Procedural. Procedural develops CityEngine, software used to create 3D, urban environments from 2D data. Another highlight in my notes. ArcGIS runtime is a new lightweight platform for developers. The key points here include small footprint, fast deployment, native 64 and 32 bit, Linux and Windows support. It was mentioned that ArcGIS is or will be available for home use.... I think this more for trying / playing then using GIS software at home. A great deal of talk about the cloud was presented. I hope to attend some sessions

Later in the plenary session the Esri staff listed the top 10 features of the software. This was grouped by three main business focus areas, ArcGIS server, desktop, and mobile/runtime..

Desktop:
10. Search - the presenter showed how to search 4,600+ projects with spatial filtering and how fast it was.

9. Editor tracking - update automatically within the application what changes were made and by who.

8. Geotagged photo to points

7. GPX to features

6. Improved KML support

5. New generalization tools

4. Geodatabase administration - this allow things like managing locks on a DB and viewing versions within the ArcGIS environment

3. Key numbering - lable more description on maps

2. Dynamic legends

1. Share as... This allows the ability to publish information easier

ArcGIS Server Top 10

10. Global data
9. Silverlight viewer
8. 64 bit support
7. New architecture - web services
6. Easier to install and configure
5. More IT friendly -( I have a note that registry options are gone but I am not sure what this means :-)
4. Live and historic traffic for network analysis
3. Dynamic layers (cool)
2. Printing high quality maps
1. Better performance

Mobile devices / runtime Top 10

10. ArcGIS on iOS - I now have it on my iPad
9. ArcGIS on windows phone ( not much response from the audience )
8. ArcGIS on windows mobile
7. ArcGIS on android
6. Can't read my notes, something about pop-up's on mobile devices
5. Social media - Facebook twitter others... Can't wait to Facebook my GIS, oh I guess I already do with my Garmin...
4. Off-line capabilities - this could have some benefit in the field when the network is not available
3. Faster application startup. It was so fast tha I did not see it because I was writing
2. Fast map display
1. Easy deployment - they gave an example of deploying it on a USB stick.

Esri Conference - 7/11 - Day 1

2011-07-12T07:58:00.000-07:00

Today 7/11 is the first day of the Esri conference in San Diego. After a triathlon in Boulder on Sunday then hopping on a plane to CA, I am a little tired. Thank goodness for coffee..

Also on this trip I brought my own iPad which made it much easier to blog and not have to deal with the time of booting a PC. I will try to post some pictures taken with the iPad and post them....

Note: when I tried to post a picture, I could not do it directly from the iPad. I had a couple of options. One purchase an app or use a service like photo bucket.. I used photo bucket to upload this picture from the San Diego baseball park.

If they don't have a game going on you can walk down to the outfield fence....

Final thoughts on Oracle Open World –

2010-09-26T13:39:00.000-07:00

It looks like I got off on my day numbering for each blog page but that’s ok, it’s the content that counts..

Session: Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control Deployment Best Practices

This was a full house and thinking about other sessions related to Grid that I attended; they all had a good turnout. This session focused on planning the Grid environment, especially when it is being used to manage more than databases. One key item that I got out of this session was using the command line tool, emctl to export the Oracle Management Server (OMS) configuration (emctl exportconfig oms). Another item that we will need to do is separate the OMS from the Oracle Management Repository (OMR), and we can do this when we move to 11g with Weblogic. An abstract name of virtual name should be used for the OMS in order to support load balancing. This session reference the emctl command line tool for other items like tracking audit actions and other maintenance tasks. Also the backup of the emd.properties and targers.xml for the agents is key in recovery.

Session: Extreme Performance with In-Memory Database Technology: Real-Life Stories

Although we are not using TimesTen, in-memory database, I thought this would be an interesting session. The main tier that an in-memory database would fit is in the application tier. If the application requires lightning speed response times then an in-memory database would help. This was a panel session with people from three different companies that use TimesTen. One person was from Ericsson, one from Bank of America and the third was with a company that developed a solution for the US Postal Service. USPS was looking for a solution to reduce fraud in postage. I don’t remember if he gave a number in the amount of loss but it must have been very high to develop this system. They incorporated a barcode in the stamp which contains information that would verify authenticity of the stamp. He could not go into detail due to security issues. According to the presenter, USPS has the highest name brand of any other organization, including McDonalds, Coke, Nike.. Not sure how this is measured, but OK. He said they have 55.3 billion in revenue which would rank them 21^st in the fortune 500 companies. The system they use for this application has 2.25 terabytes of memory, yes terabytes. We might be able to put all of our databases into this one TimesTen database. The old system did 275 million transactions in 15 hours and the new system does 4 billon transactions in less than 6 hours. TimesTen has similar technology of traditional RDBMS but everything is in memory, it even does replication. Ericsson uses replication with TimesTen and has a total downtime of 5 minutes a year.. Isn’t that about 99.9999996 percent uptime.. Hybernate even has a dialect for TimesTen.

Session: Does Upgrade = Downtime? Minimal Downtime Strategies for Planned Maintenance

This session was an overview of the different methodologies to upgrade and reduce the amount of downtime. The case study was a Japanese and they review the amount of down time involved with different processes including, DBUA ( Oracle Database Upgrade Assistance ), export import, dataguard and GoldenGate. In the end, GoldenGate was the fastest and had the lowest amount of down time. I was able to download the slides so I did not take many notes.. http://blogs.oracle.com/upgrade/

Session: Hands-on Lab: Oracle GoldenGate and Oracle Data Integrator Enterprise Edition

This was a hands-on session using GoldenGate and Data Integrator. I found out that GoldenGate was a command line tool and ODI was the GUI used to implement a replication type process between two databases. So, any updates, inserts and deleted would go from one database to another real-time. The advantage to GoldenGate compared to Oracle streams is it is much faster and supports multiple databases. It would be possible to have a SQL Server database and Oracle database updating a common database in real-time.

Overall the Oracle Open World was a very good conference, kind of long, but informative. As I have mentioned, a few times, stay in San Francisco but in order to do this, register early. Also, if the tablet market heats up, take one for notes and to prevent from having to lug a laptop around every day. Avoid the exhibit area unless you have specific questions for a vendor like I did with VMware. Probably the best tool Oracle developed for the conference attendees was the schedule builder. This tool allowed a person to look at the available sessions and build a daily schedule. It also had the ability to email the schedule. They had a mobile app for phones to manage the schedule but we are unable to install applications on company phones.

It’s a Wrap…

2010-09-24T08:16:00.000-07:00

Sitting in the SFO airport, waiting to board flight 668, and thought I would add some miscellaneous rambling from the conference.

I saw this and thought what a great idea, using the stairs for advertising. Everyone takes the escalators so the ad is always visible.

I attended a session on TimesTen, an in-memory database ( way cool stuff but this is a rambling page), and noticed the room was above one of the exhibit areas. This is what it looks like when they are taking things down. Amazing what goes on to put something on this big.

After all of the sessions ended yesterday evening, they has a small party in the Yerba Buena gardens with a local band. They played a number of cover songs and the lead singer is an employee of Oracle. I guess this is the 4^th or 5^th year they have been doing this. It was sponsored by Tsingtao so I had to have a couple,( beers :-).

I found out the group is The Five Hundreds and the lead is Tom Geck.

I know I posted how much I enjoyed riding BART from Berkeley to San Francisco and back every day for Oracle Open World conference and because the nice working folks at BART knew what enjoyment I was having, they gave me a parting gift..

Day - 5 Oracle Open World

2010-09-23T10:12:00.000-07:00

Last day of the event and I think I finally know where Moscone( North, South, West), the Marriott, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts are located for the different sessions.

I will post yesterday’s events as time permits.

Wednesday was a good day at Oracle Open World; some hands-on, good sessions on performance tuning, and one-on-one with Joel Kallman, (Director, Software Development for Oracle Application Express).

The hands-on session was an Introduction to Oracle Data Integrator Enterprise Edition. At a high level ODE is a tool used for extract, transform, and load (ETL) of data, any type of data. Flat files, comma delimited, XML, other database platforms. I even noticed my old friend Informix on the list of sources. The lab was taking XML data sources, joining the data, and inserting it into an Oracle database. Like most of the Oracle tools these days, OED is Java based so it will run on Linux, Apple and Winblows. These one hour hands-on sessions are a good test of the product for me. I figure if I can get through the lesson then the software must be fairly simple to operate out of the box. Granted we only scratch the surface of the products. This is one of those products that we need, I know we could use it, but we don’t know we need it. It’s a cycle… More information on OED can be found here:

http://www.oracle.com/us/products/middleware/data-integration/059305.html

I had three sessions related to tuning and all were very informative.

1. Performance Tuning with DB Time

2. SQL Tuning Roundtable with Oracle Gurus

3. Tuning the Oracle Grid

We’ve been tuning with DB Time and did not even realize it. We used it fix performance issue with ETAS and CARMA. It’s built into Grid Control. I remember studying for the 10g OCP exam that DB Time was a key metric to pay attention to because it was new in 10g and the fundamental measurement of Oracle performance. This is one that requires the slides to help explain. But, basically, when you take all the idle wait time out of a histogram, it compresses everything and you end up with the graph on the performance page of Grid for a database. I need to look at the real-time SQL monitoring of Grid. They showed a number of charts with it and from what I understand; the real-time SQL monitoring can be used to “watch” SQL run. For example, if a long query is running and it is loading data, a person should be able to see where it is in the load by using real-time SQL monitoring and then be able to make some estimates of when it will be finished… This was mentioned is both sessions 1 and 2.

One question for the round table was about best practices for implementing profile changes into a production environment and passing it through the change control processes, (ITIL:-) no, SDL. The response was comparing an update statistics in production without having to test first. It should not be a problem to implement a profile directly into production. In 11g multiple profiles can be staged and switched out if needed. New in 11g is SQL Plan Management (SPM) which uses the baseline logic to implement the plan management process.. Here is a URL to some additional information for performance tuning of 11g.

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/features/performance/index.html

I went to the demo grounds in one of the exhibit halls looking specifically to find someone that could answer my question on best practices for architecture of Apex. There are three different ways to get Apex up and running:

Using Apache with mod_plsql fronted Apex
Have it all inside the database ( came out in 11g )
Use Oracle application server ( OC4J or the Web Logic version)

The demo grounds are miles of stand up posts with a divider which will allow up to 4 stations. There must have been a few hundred of these stations. I got my map out to try and narrow down where the Apex hands-on area was and found that it was in Moscone North, Database area. Great, found it… But when I got there I see a sea of these demo things just under the database section. And, you have to walk around each one to see what area they are focusing on. Oh, and two rows so you can get dizzy very easy walking around these things. But I found one on Apex, don’t remember what it was but I knew I was close. Kept walking around and found one that may be of some help. So I asked the person at the station my question and she took me to the Oracle documentation that outlines the three methodologies to get Apex up and running. Great, but I was looking for best practices.. She mentioned that I talk to the director of Apex development and he just happened to walk by so she grabbed him.

His name was Joel Kallman and was very helpful. With the new version of Apex, 4.0 they introduced an Apex listener which eliminates the limitations of mod_plsql and Apache 1.3. Starting in 10g, Oracle released their HTTP server which is now based on Apache 2.0. This is good because we are not tied to the Apache 1.3 platform with the mod_plsq. Joel told me that Apex.oracle.com was based on the Apache 2.0 HTTP server which will allow for connection pooling using the Apex listener. Here is a URL to his blog one this. http://joelkallman.blogspot.com/2008/01/oracle-http-server-apache-20-and.html

Still need to do some reading on this but it sound promising to just use Apache 2.0, ( aka Oracle HTTP server) as the architecture.

Day – 4 Oracle Open World

2010-09-22T09:27:00.000-07:00

Just had to add a quick update while I have some time...

The Oracle stuff is in 5-6 buildings and I don’t know how many Java is occupying. Anyway, I was walking from one building to another and as usual people are handing out stuff. I see something that looks like a CD and I figured it could be a local band trying to get their sound out to people, so I grab one. As I am walking I look closely at the CD cover and this is what it was….

:-)

The question of the day is… Are you a geek if you wear both straps of the backpack?

I think I mentioned this before but I have to state it again, register early and get accommodations in SF. I am tired of the BART thing.

Yesterday I got to spend time in the cloud with Amazon EC2. This was a hands-on session with Oracle Database Firewall and we connected to EC2 environment to do the lab. It sounded as if this was another acquisition for Oracle and was relative new. I am not a firewall person but the idea of monitoring and blocking SQL traffic on the network with white list, black list and exception list policies is kind of interesting. We also used swingbench, the same tool I used to compare Oracle on AIX and Linux, to test firewall rules. Because this is designed specifically for databases, and not just Oracle, it would be a good front-end to protect a database exposed to the internet.

The rest of the day was a bit uneventful but I guess that’s how it goes. Every session can’t be great. I have a couple hands on sessions toady so hopefully the next update will be more informative.

Day - 2 Oracle Open World

2010-09-21T09:18:00.000-07:00

Lesson Learned: Get an iPad or have a PC that runs Windows 7.. This waiting for XP to load is a pain.

Day two started about like day 1 with one good thing, a transfer on BART was not required to get to SF. It was a direct route. Have I mentioned yet how big this Open World is?

Looking west, east, south, I don't know I am lost without the mountains

This is looking the other direction from the one above

A couple of things I forgot to mention from the Keynote by Larry… He said they were going to bring his boat, guess it’s really called a yacht, into SF but the mast would not fit under the Golden Gate Bridge. The thing must be huge, ( 20 stories high see: http://bmworacleracing.com/de/yacht/pdf/The_USA.pdf ) Also, since Larry bought, oops forgot, won, the cup, he now gets to pick where in the USA to have the next cup race.

A model of Larry’s boat

The CUP..

The other thing Larry, ( we are on a first name basis :-) talked about was Cloud Computing and what is it really.. He mentioned it’s a number of things, some of it is old concepts. He gave an example of Salesforce.com and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). Both are cloud computing but Amazons’ vision is more what cloud computing should be and the key term is elastic. When a company or person signs up with EC2 they get an isolated (VM) to do their thing. This making it more secure than Saleforce.com where everyone shares everything. So, if anyone asks if you are in the cloud, just say yes and it would be a true statememt.

One more thing before going to the sessions…. While I was on BART I came across an article in the Money section that could impact someone. If you own a 2007 to 2009 Bentley, there is a recall to fix the mechanism that retracts the classic Bentley winged “B” hood ornament because it can rust. This is not all models so check with your dealer first.

Session: Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler: Modeling from Soup to Nuts

I mentioned in the post from my BlackBerry that I heard some breaking news.. The last session of Day-2 was “Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler: Modeling from Soup to Nuts”. The only reason I scheduled this was to get some additional information about this product even thought we were using ERWin within the organization as the modeling tool of choice. The first thing the presenter mentioned was SQL Developer Data Modeler is now “FREE”, yep, free. This is 100% Java so it can run on anything plus all of the modeling files are in XML format. Wow, cool.. The cool thing about the XML format is the ability to use Subversion for versioning of data models. No special software to create a repository like ERWin, which were unable to get working anyway. Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler will model different database platforms including MySQL, DB2, and I believe SQL Server. This was a good session which was a total ‘live’ demo of the product. I think I will download it after posting this blog..

Session: MySQL Strategy and Roadmap

The session MySQL Strategy and Roadmap, had a theme that MySQL is here to stay and they are continuing to grow the product, even though Oracle now owns it, or I guess oversees it, because it is open source. Some items on the next release include:

External authentication
Audit Capture
On-line operations like ALTER TABLE and ALTER INDEX
More integration with Oracle products

MySQL has a commercial offering for companies requiring support and additional features which include the enterprise monitoring tool. It looked cool but they also mentioned the integration to Grid Control for the Oracle customer that is use to that interface. One interesting new feature coming out in the cluster version is Select Project Joins (SPJ). What this will do is allow the join process to be pushed into the cluster for faster results. They said they were seeing 30 times faster joins. They also talked about replicating data between Oracle and MySQL using Golden Gate, ( which Oracle acquired last year). I have a hands on session, Day-4, with Golden Gate.

Session: Real-World Mission-Critical Database Monitoring with Oracle Enterprise Manager

This was in probably a medium sized based on the scale of S, M, L, and it was fairly full. This tells me that the interest for Grid Control is strong. The presentation was done by an employee for AT&T and was a review of their process implementing Grid Control in their organization. I was hoping for 11g information but they were on 10g. Some statistics include 2,000+ Oracle databases, 60+ DBA’s, and I did not write down how many countries.. The goal was to try and standardize database administration and monitoring instead of having different scripts and tools across all databases. They started the proof of concept in March of 2007 and deployed to production in 2009. They did develop some User Defined Metrics (UDM) and User Defined Policies (UDP) to do things that Grid could not do out-of-box. The user the EMCLI command line tool extensively, ( guess I need to read up on this). The presenter mentioned security compliancy and how difficult it can be for a DBA to manage and there was a small rumble of laughter in the room. Good to know I am not the only one on that boat, and it’s not Larry’s boat… They developed something to check the alert.log for specific ORA- errors that required a DBA’s attention and notified them. I think we may be looking at Splunk for this.. One thing I found odd was the number of people taking pictures of the slides. A couple of people only took a couple pictures either with their phone or small camera but one guy, sitting in front of me, to a picture of every slide whit his big 35mm looking camera. Guess no one told him that we would be receiving copies of the presentations…

Oracle was having a buy one get one free sale on Exalogic so I got one.. Not sure how I will get them on the airplane

Day - 1 OOW– continued..

2010-09-20T09:40:00.000-07:00

Lessons learned: I should have taken a journalism course in college or maybe that shorthand class in high school would have helped, (does anyone still use that..)

The rest of Sunday included a panel discussion of Oracle Apex and the Keynote presentation, which include Oracle CEO Larry Ellison.

The panel discussion included the PM for Oracle Apex, a developer lead, and some non Oracle employees that were experts with the product. In this session I learned some new things and confirmed some stuff that I already was evangelizing with Apex. One person mentioned the direction to use Apex to kill Access. I have not been that strong but I do believe that Apex is a better foundation for departmentalized applications that Access. One of the panel members described how business units needed technical solutions and IT departments were too busy to help so companies ended up with “Miniature little train wreaks” all over the place. Someone mentioned that they scanned their network for .MDB files and had over 100,000, then the question was asked of how many of the Access database files were unique, ( different names). That number dropped to 50-60K. So a lot of data duplication spread across an organization.

Someone asked about a tool to convert Access to Apex. Oracle already has a tool built into sqldeveloper to assist in the conversation process but the person in the audience wanted a one button push to convert all of the forms and reports to Apex. Thinking the ability to convert VB code would be fairly simple and Oracle would make a fortune with it. ( what the..? ) The panel did mention that just because the Access thing was created, the logic and functionality may not be the best. Remember most of these Access db’s were built by non IT people.. If anyone has seen the mechanical equipment Access db’s at my work would see this first hand.

Some discussion on the marketing of Apex was done. It’s still not real clear how to market Apex, as the Access, Excel replacement for centralized data / reporting management, or as the enterprise class development tool. Oracle Open World web site (http://www.oracle.com/us/openworld/036763.htm?src=6896290&Act=46 ) was developed in Apex, also Oracle store, https://shop.oracle.com/pls/ostore/f?p=ostore:home:0 has been converted from Java to Apex. Maybe one direction would be to have an IT shop that does nothing but COTS and Apex. No .Net, Java, PHP, or any other development. (remember the name of this site, it’s just an opinion)

There was some discussion on future enhancements of the product and the PM was taking notes on adding them in future releases. In some cases, the requested feature would be out in 4.1 ( 4.0 is the latest version).

One thing mentioned that I found interesting is the idea that building “things” in Apex should not necessarily be considered enterprise applications. The enterprise application has to go through the development process. I have seen this before where one business unit builds an Access or FoxPro thing thinking it would be good for the enterprise and finding that it just did not scale well outside the department of 2-4 people.

In the 4.0 version of Apex, there are a number of Flash objects available including interactive maps. Cool stuff but it will not work on an iPad..

Keynote speeches

The keynote event had some high points and low points. They did tell us that a record 41,000 people are registered at Open World. Could it really be that even of a number?

The HP presentation by a couple of VP’s turned into quite the sales pitch. I did not realize HP was in the network hardware market and they feel this is an area of growth for them. Guess they feel Cisco has too much of the market share.

By the time Larry Ellison got to the stage I was getting a little bored with the whole smoke on the stage, upbeat music, flashing lights and the High Definition 4 wide movie screens. Before Larry came to the stage we were shown a video of Larry’s yacht sailing in the Americas Cup, which was very impressive. In February, after 3 to 4 attempts, Larry was able to buy, or should I say win, the Americas Cup and bring it back to the United States.. But they did use Oracle hardware and software to help win the cup.

When they announced Larry, he came on stage and I did not see when they rolled out the server rack, ( I was sitting it the cheap, cheap, cheap seats). The rack contained all layers that an infrastructure needs, storage, processors, and networking, to run any business. Fully loaded, the one rack would have enough power to process all of the transactions for facebook, ( wow). This thing is called Exalogic. More information can be found here, Remember I am not a journalism person..)

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/oracle-openworld-keynotes-exalogic-infomercials-cloud-innovation-news/39326

I did like how Larry jabbed IBM and comparing Exalogic to IBM large P class series hardware. The Exalogic can grow up (within the cabinet) and across (multiple cabinets). The Exalogic is fully redundant in every area,( disk, memory, network, processors). Larry made it a point that the Exalogic comes with two guest operating systems, Solaris and Linux. He did not even mention that Windows would even run as a guest on this thing but I guess that is assumed..

Day one of Oracle Open World

2010-09-19T14:50:00.001-07:00

Well this Oracle Open World thing got started today and I already have some lessons learned… First, most important, register early and get accommodations in San Francisco. I am staying in Berkeley CA, and taking BART to the conference, which is fine but on Sunday the red line from Berkeley to SF does not run and requires a transfer before crossing under, yes under, the bay. So, because of the additional time, I missed the first session, Enterprise Manager Grid Control--Moments of Truth.

The second session, DBA Fusion--An Introduction to Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g was interesting. Ray Smith from Portland General Electric gave a presentation on his experiences of 11g Grid Control. Some highlights:

· Oracle is really taking this Grid Control serious as a management tool for enterprise datacenter management. I had heard this last year at the 10g Grid Control training and it was very to the Oracle product line.

· Don’t do try and have the DBA group install, manage and monitor the Fusion Weblogic middle tier. This should be done by the middleware group, ( Dan, are you ready to install Weblogic :-) This really requires a person with Java experience to take control

· During the install try as much as possible to keep the defaults for the names, ( i.e. Middleware for the MIDDLEWARE_HOME name) and directory structure. This will help when talking with Oracle support on problems

· As with the database software, or any Oracle software, apply patches when finished after the install.. Weblogic uses a thing called “Smart Update Installer” Good thing it is smart…

· There was some discussion after the session about the memory utilization of the application server and keeping the application tier separate from the database repository. We are currently not doing this in the 10g Grid environment but then it was just the DBA group that did it all.

After the session, I thought it might be good to get started in the 11g Grid ( Fusion Middleware) by installing it in a VM and pointing the development / test environments to it. Then direct the production to it. I hope to get to the Demo grounds to view some actual “stuff” with Oracle 11g Grid Control tomorrow.

Well, just wanted to get in the habit updating this blog as much as possible with notes.

Hope it is found useful..

Schedule for Oracle OpenWorld 2010

2010-09-11T12:00:00.000-07:00

( subject to change )

Schedule: Sunday: 12:30PM Title: IOUG: Enterprise Manager Grid Control--Moments of Truth

Abstract: This case study describes successes and challenges experienced by The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory through utilization of Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control. The discussion focuses on key features that enable administrators to become more proactive and efficient through database monitoring, standardized administration, and automated patching and provisioning.

Schedule: Sunday: 13:30PM Title: IOUG: DBA Fusion--An Introduction to Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g

Abstract: On the closing day of Collaborate10, Oracle President Charles Phillips announced the release of Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g. It forms the core element of Oracle\2019s integrated IT management strategy by providing a single management console for every element of the technology stack right out of the box. The secret, of course, is how to get Oracle Enterprise Manager out of the box and onto your server. This session introduces you to the new architecture of the Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g management service on ! Linux an d walks you through its installation and configuration Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g.

Schedule: Sunday: 15:30PM Title: Oracle Application Express Expert Panel Discussion
Abstract: In this session, the panel members will field questions from the attendees.

Schedule: Monday: 11:00AM Title: Cloud Computing and Digital Transformation: Your Next Competitive Advantage?

Abstract: Companies are making moves to stake out their next competitive advantage, and cloud computing has emerged as a top candidate. Cloud computing can not only help companies revolutionize their business by eliminating the technology barriers that have long frustrated business leaders, but it can deliver best-in-class solutions at a fraction of the cost of previous investments. If applied well, cloud computing can enable innovation, improve time to market, and increase flexibility. Attend this session to learn how a clearly integrated cloud strategy equates to a business value far deeper than cost savings\2014and one that can give your company a new competitive advantage.

Schedule: Monday: 12:30PM Title: MySQL Strategy and Roadmap

Abstract: This session outlines Oracle’s overall strategy for MySQL, including the current and future state of the MySQL family of products and Oracle’s investment in the technology and community. Join MySQL executives and experts in the session to learn about product directions, new features, and enhancements and where and how you can benefit from using MySQL technology and products

Schedule: Monday: 14:00PM Title: Real-World Mission-Critical Database Monitoring with Oracle Enterprise Manager

Abstract: AT&T\2019s database teams deliver and manage highly available database systems to support growing business needs. Hear how they met this challenge by using Oracle Enterprise Manager as their standard database monitoring solution and by deploying the Oracle Enterprise Manager infrastructure with high-availability best practices. This session covers the team’s experience in implementing this solution, including design considerations for high availability for thousands of databases, features used to implement standardized database monitoring, extending monitoring with user-defined metrics, maintaining high availability across Oracle Enterprise Manager upgrades, and other useful tips learned in supporting this solution.

Schedule: Monday: 17:00PM Title: Optimizing Servers for Oracle Database Performance

Abstract: This session presents an essential guide to understanding how configuring the optimal server environment can eliminate performance bottlenecks. Using example workloads on Oracle Enterprise Linux, it looks at the way Oracle Database processes your workload from CPU, memory, and interconnect through to storage and examines how hardware choices influence the efficiency of each step. It also reviews key technologies in each area, from multicore CPUs to solid-state drives; how these differ for OLTP and data warehouse environments; and how to monitor, test, and tune for the optimal Oracle Database environment.

Schedule: Tuesday: 11:00AM Title: Oracle GoldenGate: Making Your Best Practices Golden

Abstract: Oracle GoldenGate is rapidly becoming the tool of choice for replicating Oracle data for reporting, zero-downtime database upgrades, and data distribution. In this session, you will learn the best practices for running Oracle GoldenGate replication. HP engineers will share their best practices and tips and tricks based on a wide variety of experiences with running Oracle GoldenGate in real-world scenarios. Topics include best practices for planning, gathering requirements, installation, n! etwork c onsiderations, replication configuration, and management.

Schedule: Tuesday: 14:00PM Title: Unified Computing: Promoting the Next Phase in Virtualization

Abstract: Virtualization offers many advantages for lowering cost and improving server utilization, but traditional server architectures do not address many issues such as the time needed to deploy a new instance; the cost of adapters/switches to reach storage, servers, and the network; power; and cooling. In 2009 Cisco began offering a new approach, which many Fortune 500 companies have implemented. This session covers how the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) lowers cost/complexity while promoting higher levels of performance and management and provides insights into how Oracle takes advantage of the Cisco UCS design and how customers will benefit. A short Q&A session follows. In this session, enter for your chance to win a special prize.

Schedule: Tuesday: 15:30PM Title: Oracle Identity Management Administration Best Practices

Abstract: Are you looking for ways to cut down the costs of managing your Oracle Identity Management deployment? Are you interested in learning about best practices for improving the performance and avai! lability of identity and access services? Wondering how you can diagnose performance problems and monitor the Oracle Identity Management environment from a single console? This session covers the methods and tools you can use to gain insights into your end users, troubleshoot performance problems, define operational-level objectives, and proactively monitor your end-to-end Oracle Identity Management environment to meet your availability and performance targets.

Schedule: Tuesday: 17:00PM Title: Hands-on Lab: Oracle GoldenGate and Oracle Data Integrator Enterprise Edition

Abstract: In this hands-on lab, the participants will learn in a hands-on environment the best practices for architecting integrated, real-time data integration solutions that help reduce complexity and lower TCO. By using Oracle Data Integrator Enterprise Edition and Oracle GoldenGate together, you’ll be able to build high-performance solutions that integrate data reliably across heterogeneous sources and targets. The participants will use Oracle Data Integrator Enterprise Edition\2019s knowledge module, which directly leverages Oracle GoldenGate as its preferred change data capture (CDC) solution. This includes automating Oracle GoldenGate deployment as well as combining the real-time capture with transformation and bulk-data-movement capabilities.

Schedule: Wednesday: 10:00AM Title: Hands-on Lab: In! troducti on to Oracle Data Integrator Enterprise Edition

Abstract: Oracle Data Integrator Enterprise Edition delivers unique next-generation extract, load, transform (ELT) technology that improves performance and reduces data integration costs, even across heterogeneous systems. In this hands-on lab, developers, DBAs, and data architects will learn the steps needed for ELT: organizing source metadata for import, defining interface mappings for extract, and then loading multiple file and database sources into a target data warehouse and transforming them. In addition, the participants will learn how to orchestrate execution of multiple interfaces through a package workflow.

Schedule: Wednesday: 11:30AM Title: Maximizing Database Performance: Performance Tuning with DB Time

Abstract: Understanding and effectively using the concept of DB time is key to obtaining maximum performance from your Oracle database. This presentation explores the concept of DB time and uses real-world examples to show you how tuning for DB time enables you to get the best performance from your Oracle database.

Schedule: Wednesday: 13:00PM Title: SQL Tuning Roundtable with Oracle Gurus

Abstract: If you have ever had a question about why the Oracle query optimizer behaves the way it does or how to tune a SQL statement and didn\2019t know whom to ask, now is your chance. In this session, Oracle experts on SQL optimization answer questions you have always wanted to ask. As a bonus, you will also learn about recent enhancements in this area from experts who designed them.

Schedule: Wednesday: 16:45PM Title: Tuning the Oracle Grid

Abstract: This session presents the top 10 tips for tuning your architecture for grid computing. The main focus is to show many Oracle Grid Control screen shots so the attendees can see the depth of the product.• Know the basics; introduction to Oracle Real Application Clusters (Oracle RAC)• Oracle direction• Market direction: consolidation• Grid basics: start with Oracle RAC• Grid basics: scaling it• The interconnect and block coordination• Tuning quick tips using Statspack and Automatic Workload Repository reports• Use Oracle Grid Control for monitoring• Oracle Grid Control for multinode systems• Use Grid Control to tune systems

Schedule: Thursday: 09:00AM Title: End-to-End Secure Identity Propagation

Abstract: The many different parts of an IT system each require their own authentication, but they still must communicate with each other. Mature federation standards can be a powerful glue for your business identity silos, as can the concept of identity propagation, in which you replicate the authenticated identities through multiple business systems and processes by leveraging standards and technologies to pragmatically address identity business use cases, both within your own enterprise walls and at service providers and business partners. This session addresses how to propagate identities across multiple tiers of identity infrastructure as well as across multiple access methods and unintegrated identity silos.

Schedule: Thursday: 10:30AM Title: Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control Deployment Best Practices

Abstract: Everything you’ve always wanted to know but were afraid to ask: this session addresses some of the critical issues associated with designing for deployment, sizing the infrastructure for short- and long-term needs, agent deployment and management best practices, OMS patching and monitoring best practices, securing your environment, and how to implement with high availability and disaster recovery in mind. This is a must-attend session for anyone just embarking on a new deployment or planning for upgrades or future expansion.

Schedule: Thursday: 12:00PM Title: Extreme Performance with In-Memory Database Technology: Real-Life Stories

Abstract: In-memory database technology has been available for more than a decade; thousands of enterprise companies have adopted it successfully for mission-critical applications with stringent response time requirements. Come learn from users with production deployments of Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database, as standalone databases or as read-write caches for Oracle Database. This customer panel discusses real-life use cases, lessons learned, implementation best practices, and deployment of in-memory databases larger than 1 TB.

Schedule: Thursday: 13:30PM Title: Does Upgrade = Downtime? Minimal Downtime Strategies for Planned Maintenance

Abstract: This session examines options and methods available for performing database upgrades in the time window that fits your business needs. You will learn about upgrade techniques ranging from traditional command-line upgrades to using transportable tablespaces, Oracle Data Guard, Oracle Streams, and Oracle GoldenGate. A comparison of upgrade methods by Fujitsu Hokuriku Systems Ltd. provides hard data to help you make the right choices for your upgrade scenario.

Schedule: Thursday: 15:00PM Title: Hands-on Lab: Oracle GoldenGate and Oracle Data Integrator Enterprise Edition

Abstract: In this hands-on lab, the participants will learn in a hands-on environment the best practices for architecting integrated, real-time data integration solutions that help reduce complexity and lower TCO. By using Oracle Data Integrator Enterprise Edition and Oracle GoldenGate together, you’ll be able to build high-performance solutions that integrate data reliably across heterogeneous sources and targets. The participants will use Oracle Data Integrator Enterprise Edition\2019s knowledge module, which directly leverages Oracle GoldenGate as its preferred change data capture (CDC) solution. This includes automating Oracle GoldenGate deployment as well as combining the real-time capture with transformation and bulk-data-movement capabilities.

Tom Kyte Visits Denver at the Western Hotel - 9/8/2010

2010-09-11T08:48:00.000-07:00

This past week I attended an Oracle half day session about 11g with the Key note speaker being Tome Kyte. I thought I would take my note and apply then to my blog in preparation of going to Oracle Open World in a couple of week. I am also trying something a little different by writing my totes in an email message and sending to the blog to be posted… We will see how it goes.

This is just a summary of my notes. I should be receiving the Power Point presentations soon.

The topic of his presentation was “Oracle Database 11g – What does this mean” which covered some interesting topics and, as usual for Tom Kyte, was entertaining and informative. Some of the highlights included:

Oracle Data Masking Irreversible De-identification – This will allow the ability to create test environments and masking sensitive information, (credit card, social security numbers) with realistic but non-factual values allowing production data to be safely used in development. This is not just creating “dummy” data but values appear to be valid.

Use Standby Database for Testing – The physical standby can be used as a test environment by creating a restore point before doing the test then after testing flashback to the restore point and put the standby in managed recovery mode.

Some words of wisdom that Tom referred to when making a change:

1. The change does nothing ( good or bad )

2. The change causes something bad to happen

3. The change causes something good to happen

The Database Replay functionality of Oracle 11g allows you to capture workloads on a production system and replay them exactly as they happened on a test system. This provides an accurate method to test the impact of a variety of system changes including:

· Database upgrades.

· Operating system upgrades or migrations.

· Configuration changes, such as changes to initialization parameters or conversion from a single node to a RAC environment.

· Hardware changes or migrations.

Configuration management is an add-on for Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control..

I attended a session related to upgrading to Oracle 11g given by Roy Swonger. One important document/web site is the Oracle upgrade companion which can be accessed here: ( it only works in IE but PDF’s and HTML can be downloaded)

https://support.oracle.com/CSP/main/article?cmd=show&type=ATT&id=785351.1:upgrade_guide

Many Meta Link references were listed in the presentation for sources of the upgrade( 785351.1, 837570.1, 421191.1)

At a high level the following steps should be performed in an upgrade

1. Install software in new home

2. Apply newest patch set update (PSU)

3. Apply any recommended patches

4. Apply patches for known issues

5. Start the database upgrade

Note: When doing the install of the Oracle software do not select the option to do the upgrade too. The software should be installed first, patched, and then the upgrade can be completed.

Also, Roy recommended downloading the software from http://edelivery.oracle.com and not otn.oracle.com because on edelivery it is more current and can be connected back to a license agreement or CSI.

One thing that I found interesting was it is OK to install options and link them into the build but it does not mean you have to pay for them. The options can be linked into the engine but you must pay for them when you use them.

Golden gate was mentioned as an option for an upgrade process to reduce the amount of downtime. In the presentation it was mentioned that Golden Gate was 5X faster than Oracle streams for replication and does not have the inherent problems of streams. I have a hands on lab at Oracle Open World with Golden Gate. From the limited reading I have done I see some real benefit with this especially if multiple database vendors are part of the mix in the organization.

In the afternoon Tom Kyte gave another presentation on some SQL Techniques and in Tom Kyte fashion gave some very detailed and interesting examples of how SQL can be modified to increase performance. He gave some excellent examples of using scalar subqueries to reduce the number of IO calls to the database.

Again, this is just some highlights from my notes and I wanted to test creating a blog post with email. Next test may be with my BlackBerry.

email worked...

Just Getting Back to this Blog...

2010-09-05T17:26:00.000-07:00

It’s been some time since I updated this site and I thought I would start blogging again….

I am attending Oracle Open World in San Francisco this year, September 19-23, and I thought this would be a good place to add notes, information, and basic ramblings, ( which I do well :-) of things leading up to the event and daily updates while I am there.

This is an event that I always wanted to attend but was never fortunate enough to attend… Guess you just have to ask… First thing I found out is you need to ask early.. I registered last week and trying to find hotel accommodations in SF is impossible, especially on a government Per Diem. I found a place in Berkley, CA and figured I would take BART into SF. Stay tuned on how that goes…

I can’t believe the size of this thing. I went to an Informix conference in 1997, back when Informix was competition for Oracle and it was nowhere near this size. The organization of Open World must be a fulltime job for a department. Add Java to the mix, from the acquisition of Sun, and it explodes. Can’t wait to go…

Name Change

2008-05-30T06:59:00.000-07:00

Today I renamed the title of my blog page to “In my opinion” because the original title will no longer get any use. Just for posterity, I posted a copy of the original title page..

No More Informix - yeah :-)

2008-05-28T06:40:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I accepted a position with an organization that does not have Informix. They are 99% Oracle and 1% SQL Server. So, I think I will rename this blog to “In My Opinion” because I will no longer need to use it as a release of frustration on the inadequacies of Informix. Sure there will be bumps and mishaps in the Oracle environment but I know I will have a plethora of information available to resolve problems. This will also help me to become more marketable for future positions.

Goodbye Informix..

Jobs

2008-04-29T19:37:00.001-07:00

The job market is one big factor in my low support of the Informix product. I remember the days in the late 90’s, before IBM acquired them, when the company went through three CEO’s in three years. Eventually one of them, Phil White, went to prison…. When my days at Dillon Companies, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Kroger Company, were coming to an end in 2001, I was busy searching the job boards like Dice.com.

I knew the job market for an Informix DBA was limited but I had no idea how harsh it would be. After a few months on severance pay I was able to find a job as an Oracle DBA. Today, I still have my Dice.com account send me daily job postings based on two agents. One is set up for Informix and the other looks for Oracle jobs. About 99% of the time the Informix job agent returns the following message.

Sorry, no jobs posted today!!!

The Oracle agent returns something every day…

Documentation

2008-04-25T08:13:00.000-07:00

It’s been a while since my last post to this Blog. After trying to solve an Informix stored procedure language (SPL) problem yesterday I thought now would be a good time to do a post on Informix documentation and how poor it is on the IBM Web site to find anything. The problem was with nested FOREACH commands and not exiting out of one when another is complete. Informix has 50 pages dedicated to the SPL statements and yes, you can nest FOREACH statements. But very little is mentioned on control logic after an explicit exit foreach is used, and zero, nil, nada, zilch examples are given.

Also, if you are looking for a good book to purchase on Informix, good luck. Most books available on www.bn.com are from the 90’s. If you do happen to find a current book on Informix it is limited in substance. Looking at my shelf at work I counted 10 books on Oracle and probably have as many at home. Two of my favorite Oracle books are by Tom Kyte. If you want to get a real in depth understanding of how the Oracle engine works, with examples, I would highly recommend his books. I even go to my Oracle books to look up questions that may arise within Informix then try to relate the information I find in the Oracle book to the Informix environment.

Anyway, back to the vendor documentation comparison. My first stop is at the IBM Web site for Informix.

http://www-306.ibm.com/software/data/informix/

Now where to go.. My first click is on the Informix Library link. I am hopeful that the word documentation will be visible but what I see is another page that gives very little navigation assistance at all. The top of the page has some tabs, Overview, Data sheets, Tech Resources, White papers. The middle of the page is a summary of what is within each tab. I figure the documentation must be in the Tech Resources section. Within the Tech resource section I see bullet points for Articles, Bookstore, Documentation notes and Machine notes. I try the Documentation notes but that takes me, after a couple of clicks, to machine specific information and release notes.

I go back to the home page again thinking that the documentation must be in a different section. I navigate around the IBM Web site until I finally go back to the original Library link. It takes some time on the library page to figure out where the documentation is.

About half way down the page is the URL to the manuals

I like that the reference guides are available “at no charge” Gee, thanks IBM.

Once you find that Informix library is the link to documentation, it can take over 5 clicks to get to where a person can finally look for something.

At the Oracle technology network http://www.oracle.com/technology/index.html on the top of the page is “Documentation”, and they don’t fill obligated to let you know it is available free of charge. Also, http://tahiti.oracle.com/ is a link to all Oracle documentation. I don’t know the history of tahiti, but it is easy to remember..

Support for PHP

2008-01-30T09:23:00.001-08:00

According to the ZEND Developer Zone, http://devzone.zend.com/ PHP support for Informix has been moved to the PECL, the PHP Extension Community Library.

http://devzone.zend.com/node/view/id/1621#Heading11

“In other CVS news, Tony moved ext/informix out of the core in PHP_5_2 branch and CVS HEAD. The extension now resides in PECL CVS, but has no maintainer at the time of writing. The actively maintained pecl/pdo_informix extension should be used in new code.”

So what does the mean… I don’t know the exact details other than to build a PHP environment for Informix support requires more work effort. Out of box, ( gzip download), PHP has support for a number of database platforms. Of course, the Open Source DB’s, Msql and PostgreSQL are supported along with some of the ones that cost a few $$’s like Oracle and DB2. I also found it interesting that Adabase and SAP DB is supported but Informix was dropped. With the latest release of Informix 11 the administration tool is OpenAdmin Tool which is developed in PHP. This, I believe, is a great direction, but to try and build the PHP environment, in a Solaris environment, to support the tool can be challenging.

With Oracle the configuration is as ease as downloading the instant client software supplied by Oracle then running the configure script with the switch, --with-oci8=, run make and make install.

Install base can be a problem

2008-01-29T10:00:00.000-08:00

After the past couple of days, IBM has added more logs to the fire on the inadequacies of the Informix database product.

Over the past 6 months I have been involved in upgrading several environments from Informix 7.x to Informix 10.0. We went through the normal lifecycle process and did as much regression testing as possible for each application. Between standby and development environments we upgraded roughly eight environments with 20+ databases. The term database in Informix is a little different than Oracle. An Informix database would be similar to an Oracle schema…

Everything was fine until the largest OLTP database was upgraded in production. Although regression testing was completed, not every single possible transaction was tested. As it turns out one transaction that slipped through the cracks would come back to bite us right in the ass and would bring the database instance to its knees.

It turned out to be a complex view that has 15 tables and 18 CASE statements in the definition. When one of the values from the case statement was part of the WHERE clause, the Informix engine would rebuild the entire view into a temporary table and was also shown in the explain plan of the SQL. One of the 15 tables contains over a million rows so every time the problem query ran, it would rebuild the temporary table. The application server would time out but the SQL would continue to run on the database server. The user would get the timeout message and try the same process again which would cause multiple orphaned processes running on the database server and eventually bringing it to it knees. I should note that the same process on the Informix 7.x database would return a result set in under a second. (A good example of where a materialized view would work but it is not available in Informix :-)

I submitted this to IBM support as a problem and after trying a couple of suggestions that did not work, the case was escalated. I received a call from the new person handling the case and he was basically hinting at changing the logic of the process to not use the view or see if it was possible to rewrite the view. If not, he would have to try and build a test environment to reproduce the bug. After some discussion I offered to build a test case as time permits.

I don’t want to get down on Informix support for this because it has more to do with the install base of the Informix software. I believe if this database was in Oracle, we would not have experienced a “BUG” problem. That’s not to say we would not have had problems but any problem found, could be solved without it being a bug fix. The reason for this logic is due to the install base of Oracle compared to Informix. I would compare the upgrade to migrating from Oracle 8i (8.1.3) to Oracle 10g R2. This application in not a real complex system and any bug like symptoms this system would have encountered in 10g would have been found and fixed before we did the migration because Oracle has a larger install base than Informix. Someone else would have found the bug before our application encountered the problem.

Also, related to the install base, is the mass amount of support on the Web. I don’t know how many times I have used Ask Tom, Ixora, ORACLE-BASE, Oracle Technology Network, Metalink and other Web sites to find answers to my questions. Where do you go for Informix? If you dare, you can try comp.database.informix, and maybe, if you are lucky, you will not get a smart ass comment from Obnoxio The Clown. Although I must admit, I do enjoy his/her humor.

Vendor Support or Lack of

2008-01-27T17:03:00.000-08:00

As an Informix DBA, I always experienced problems with software companies not supporting Informix. The most recent problem occurred about six months ago with the software company DataFlux, (a SAS company). By the way, I would highly recommend this software to anybody looking for a data quality tool.

Using the ODBC driver supplied by DataFlux it would not allow simple date (yyyy/mm/dd) or date time (yyyy/mm/dd:hh:mm:ss) to be inserted into an Informix table with defined data types of date or datetime.

This was not a big deal because I still could use the ODBC driver supplied by Informix but is just shows the lack of vendor support for Informix.

I did a Google search for “Informix vendor support” and found a posting on the International Informix User Group (IIUG) for “Vendors not support Informix version 10” which is a listing of vendors that do not support the Informix database.

http://www.iiug.org/forums/informix-forum/index.cgi/noframes/read/28

Here is the list as of 3/2/2006:

SAP
Stellent (formerly Accorde/Optika )
BMC - Patrol Database tools (to work with the rest of their tools); SQL Back Track
Khalix
PeopleSoft
Vantive
Ecommerce Broadvision
Cadquest
Rockport
Kronos
Lawson
MapInfo

As this list grows I wonder why any company would purchase Informix for any new projects.

The reason behind the blog

2008-01-25T14:33:00.001-08:00

I have worked with Informix software for more than 15 years. I remember as a Unix administrator being handed a streaming tape and told to install the software that was on it. I remember after using the cpio command to extract the contents of the tape to the hard drive I had a bunch of files .dat and .idx. I believe it was version 4 something and the tool to manage the database, dbaccess, was not purchased so any changes made to the database had to be done with a 4gl program. Since then I have worked as a DBA using versions 5.x, 7.x, 9.x, and, most recently, 10.00.FC6.

In 2001 I was exposed to Oracle 8i, and in 2002 I passed five tests to become an Oracle Certified Professional (OCP) for 8i. Since then I have passed the tests to become 9i and 10g certified, which is the main reason for creating this blog. I needed a place to write down all of the shortcomings that Informix has compared to Oracle. Not necessarily for anyone to read but for me to have a place to express my frustrations with the Informix software.

With the recent release of Informix 11, (code name cheetah because it is fast :-) I thought this would be a good media to compile some of my comparisons between the two databases. Which reminds me, in the Oracle world there is a normal progression of software versions released by the company. Starting with Oracle 8i, I believe there were three major releases. Again with 9i there were two or three major releases and 10g had two or three major releases. Currently 11g has only one release. With Informix, if my memory server me correctly, version 6 was a mistake, so it is never mentioned. I don’t know what happened to version 8. Version 9 of Informix had, I believe, 5 major releases but 9.5 was changed to version 10. As far as I know 10.0 will be the only major release of this version because version 11 is generally available. My guess is some marketing person(s) set these versions to try and keep up with the Oracle numbering scheme. I guess if you can't beat them in features and support might as well just keep up with the version number.