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 21st 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.
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