A new video on how to make the most out of Collaborate 2019 is up on my YouTube channel.
Along with some handy tips, I also explain how to score a free Oracle certification exam AND how to get Oracle’s new Autonomous DBA certification!
It’s been a while (!) but I’ve made a resolution to do a better job in keeping my blog updated, no matter how busy I might be.
I will be attending Collaborate IOUG 2019 in San Antonio this year. I plan on putting together a collection of hints and tips to get the most out of the conference soon. There are some really cool benefits that you might not be aware of.
Stay tuned.
Blink and you might have missed it, but the Exadata X6 was officially announced today
As has become the norm, Oracle have doubled-down on the specs compared to the X5:
With the X6-2 machine, you still have Infiniband running at 40Gb/sec, but the compute nodes and the storage servers now have the following:
X-6 Compute Node
High Capacity Storage Server
Extreme Flash Storage Server
What does all of that give you when it comes down to it?
Well, remember that the eighth-rack is the same as a quarter-rack, but you have access to half the cores and half the storage across the board (you still have two compute nodes and three storage servers):
High Capacity Eighth-Rack
Extreme Flash Eighth-Rack
Minimum licensing requirements is 16 cores for the eighth-rack and 28 cores for the quarter-rack.
I’m sure you can read through the sales stuff yourself, but aside from the UUUUGE increase in hardware, two new features of the X6 really pop out for me.
Exadata now has the ability to preserve storage indexes through a storage cell reboot. Anyone who had to support an older Exadata machine will remember quite how much of a big deal that used to be: the wait for the storage index to be rebuilt would take hours and often require some major understanding on the part of user population and management to get through the first day or so after some maintenance.
Probably the biggest thing is that Oracle have introduced high availability quorum disks for the quarter-rack and eighth-rack machines. I blogged about this before as I thought it had the potential to be a real “gotcha” if you were expecting to run high redundancy diskgroups on anything less than a half-rack.
No longer.
Now, a copy of the quorum disk is stored locally on each database node, allowing you to lose a storage cell and still be able to maintain your high redundancy.
This is a particularly useful development when you remember that Oracle have doubled the size of the high-capacity disks from 4Tb to 8Tb. Why? Well, because re-balancing a bunch of 8Tb disks is going to take longer than re-balancing the same number of 4Tb disks.
I’ll be going to Collaborate IOUG 2016 next week and I’m looking forward to hearing more about the new kit there.
Mark
According to a Book of Lists survey, 41% of people’s biggest fear is “public speaking”. To put that into perspective, “death” is the biggest fear for 19%, “flying” for 18% and “clowns” don’t even register (which does make me seriously doubt the survey’s credibility).
I gave my first public presentation at IOUG Collaborate 2015 last week in Las Vegas and I didn’t die.
Why did do make your presentation debut at the second largest Oracle event on the calendar? Excellent question.
The IOUG Exadata SIG are holding a virtual conference next week and they’ve got some great speakers:
Wednesday 11th
10:00 a.m. – 11:00 a.m. CST
Exadata X5: Working Smart with Oracle Exadata Database Machine
Speaker: Gurmeet Goindi, Exadata Product Management, Oracle
11:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. CST
Oracle Database In-Memory And Exadata: Do I Still Need Exadata?
Speaker: Matt Steinberg, Oracle
12:00 p.m. – 1:00 p.m. CST
Exadata Performance: Latest Improvements and Less Known Features
Speaker: Tanel Poder
Thursday 12th
10:00 a.m. – 11:00 a.m. CST
Smart Analytics and Capacity Management for DbaaS using R
Speaker: Chaitanya Geddam, Practice Director, Accenture Enkitec Group
11:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. CST
Exadata Best Practices
Speaker: Dan Norris, Oracle
12:00 p.m. – 1:00 p.m. CST
Exadata and Hadoop Integration Patterns
Speaker: Aaron Werman, First Data
I will be presenting DBA 3.0 or “How to Become a Real-World Exadata DBA” at Collaborate 2015 – IOUG’s annual user conference – from April 12th to 16th at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino in Las Vegas. I submitted this as my abstract:
“DBA resources are more scarce than ever before and it can be very difficult to allocate time on anything but keeping the lights on – even when an organization has made a (substantial) hardware investment in Exadata.
However, if Exadata is treated like any other Oracle database, the promised “extreme performance” will likely be very underwhelming to developers, users and managers and can become unwieldy for DBAs to support.
On the other hand, when an organization configures and supports Exadata properly, they can realize exponential performance improvements in key IT infrastructure, can facilitate better business decisions and may actually reduce infrastructure costs.
The customer has bought a sports car – but might not realize that they haven’t taken it out of second gear (yet).
I will talk about the evolution of Exadata and then get into the “nuts and bolts” of how to support a high-performance Exadata environment as a Production DBA.
I will discuss how to get performance improvements of up to 20x, what NOT to do as an Exadata DBA and how Exadata can become the foundation of your organization’s high-performance enterprise infrastructure.”
I hope to see you in Las Vegas!
Dan Norris of the Maximum Availability Architecture team gave what sounded like a very interesting presentation at UKOUG 2014. There seemed to be a lot of really cool stuff at this year’s event, which is to be expected as I no longer reside in the UK!
I encourage you to take a look at the slides, but also at the interesting links he provided:
Naturally, he also quoted a plethora of My Oracle Support notes – some of the greatest hits and some which you might not have seen before:
Happy reading!
This email gem was a great way to start a Monday morning (after my first four-day weekend in years, no less):
“Congratulations! Your session proposal, 775 DBA 3.0 or “How to Become an Real-World Exadata DBA”, was accepted by the IOUG Conference Committee.
COLLABORATE 15 – IOUG Forum will take place from April 12-16, 2015 at the Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino.”
Obviously, this is a really cool thing. It’s a big honor as it’s the largest Oracle user group there is and I’m really excited about it.
Bizarrely, though, it’ll be my first “public” presentation as a DBA. I’m skipping “baby steps” altogether and going straight into presenting in front of (some, hopefully) super-smart boffins … in Las Vegas.
I’d better start thinking of a comedy routine to distract people … !
It Was Like That When I Got Here 