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?
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| Looking west, east, south, I don't know I am lost without the mountains |
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| 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.
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A model of Larry’s boat |
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| 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…
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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 |
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