Oracle Rant

This is my first blog entry. We just got done having the Suncoast Oracle Users Group Technology Day which was pretty good. We had over 260 attendees which was up from 175 last year. It was even more work too! I’m just glad it is over : ). Did I mention it was a lot of work? Oh well, there is always next year, right? : )

We have a good board but this is what it entailed in case anyone decides they want to do the same thing. First of all, the event costs nothing, so all the money must come from sponsors. We had to come up with a theme, get the speakers, get the topics, get the sponsors. Create contracts, find a facility, get material printed, get goodies to give away, work with the facility and sponsors and speakers to lay everything out. Do Audio and Video. Try to organize everything. Pay for food, materials, goodies (like bags and shirts). I could keep going but you get the idea, it was a lot of work but definitely worth it.

Now that our SOUG Tech Day is over it will allow me to focus on my blog. We have a lot of things going on at work at the moment which makes for some great blogging material : ). We are installing a data warehouse that is on Oracle (of course), and the environment consists of RAC and ASM on Red Hat Linux. We have partitioning and Transparent Data Encryption in place as well as Fine Grained Auditing. I think that alone will give me a lot to talk about. We are also using Grid Control for monitoring and jobs, corrective actions etc… and we are extinsively using RMAN with the Flash Recovery Area, merging Level 0 backups with Level 1′s as well as using the block changing file for the Level 1. When we run it on both RAC nodes and multiple HBAs, the backup screams. We also have an MML link to Veritas Net Backup where we link the libobk.so. We installed it and ran the oracle_script with a device type of SBT. I plan on blogging about all of this.  

One of my coworkers is already working on 11g stuff but because of nondisclosure can’t tell me much about it. As things get closer and with his new book coming out, I plan on getting some good information from him as soon as I am legally able to : ). He is already testing new technologies which will give me a great resource for some blogging information!!!

I am upgrading my Oracle 9i OCP to 10g and am studying for the exam as we speak. As I study each topic, I will even blog about it. I will file it under the category of 10g OCP so that anyone out there who is studying can read my notes to prepare for the exam. One thing I will not be doing is giving any kind of brain dumps after I take the exam. Whatever I give though, I hope it helps.

Let me get back to RAC and ASM for a moment. We currently have built RAC on Linux and AIX. We will also be doing in on Solaris 10 as well. I plan on talking about the specifics of each one along with the configuration of ASM. For example on Linux, we use 125MB Raw Disks for our OCR and Voting Disks and ASMLIB for the ASM disks. I will also talk about how to backup the voting disks using the DD command as well as troubleshooting RAC and Oracle Cluster Ready Services. I think as I post the gotchas people will get more out of it. I will also talk about OCFS(2) and ASMLIB (Linux only). Solaris (until they port OCFS to it and / or ZFS becomes a clustered file system). For now, it will be ASM on Solaris just like it is on AIX and Linux. There are some other things we do with ASM and RAC tuning such as multipathing for the HBA cards on the RAC nodes. Bonding your interconnects : )… Changing the frame size for the interconnect. WOW I feel like my head is going to explode hehe.

 There is also security. I already mentioned Transparent Data Encryption, but I will discuss OID and LDAP integration. Perhaps some SSO. Security Best Practices. DBMS_Crypto demystified. Balancing Security, Usability, Performance, and Cost. Also cover auditing and fine grained auditing. Talk about SQL injection.

Talk about Explain Plans, StatsPack, AWR, some of the management packs inside of GC.

Some of the other things I am working on is Oracle and Hyperion Integration. Perhaps even installing Hyperion. Perhaps talk about Informatica, which is an ETL tool. SQL Loader is another one I use and perhaps even some SQL Plus tricks. SQL Developer etc.

At home I use Linux (Ubuntu)/Windows/Open Solaris/Mac OSX. So as long as Oracle has products on these platforms, I plan to play with that too, including VMWARE and the other virtualization tools like XEN, Zones, etc… It should be fun.

I run a couple of websites and I know HTML, PHP, MySQL, Apache, Java, and C# along with what I do at work which is mainly Oracle and some SQL Server (PL/SQL and TSQL).

As I add more content, I am confident that people will show up to my blog, but for right now, no pressure : )