Oracle 11G - Database Replay

Database Replay a new feature of Oracle 11G provides DBAs and system administrators with the ability to accurately rerun actual production workloads, including online user and batch workloads, in test environments. By capturing the full database workload from production systems, including all concurrency, dependencies and timing, Database Replay enables you to realistically test system changes by essentially recreating production workloads on the test system -something that a set of scripts can never duplicate.

Technorati : New Feature, Oracle 11g, Real Application Testing

Oracle expansion in Hyderabad

Oracle and its salaries are expanding in Hyderabad Job Market at a very quick pace. During my recent trip to Hyderabad, I noticed that they have moved into their own campus and are continuing to lease a ton of office space in and around their campus. Hiring engines seem to be firing on all cylinders to meet the continued customer and consulting demand for offshore work.

ORA-03113 End of File

ORA-03113 seems to be an error that keeps haunting new dba's over and over again. Metalinks has tons of documentation on this error but a great place to start is on this ORA-03113 Error

Some of the regular readers have complained about ORA-12154 and here is a link to resolving the ORA-12154 error

ORA-00918 ate our weekend

A good explanation about solving the ORA-00918 issue.

Oracle is easier to manage than DB2

An interesting study by Edison Group that announced that oracle saves 38% in RDBMS Management cost over IBM DB2. Looks like this study is based on a study of the administrative tasks and the time it takes to complete those tasks. It claims that Oracle will save upto $30K+ in administrative costs...

More info can be found here and here

Oracle Accelerate for Small and Medium Businesses

Oracle announced Oracle Accelerate that delivers a complete set of applications and implementation tools combined with a partner system that delivers maximum value to small and medium enterprises implementing Oracle Applications.

More information can be found here

Hacking Oracle through Google

Hope you all got your hands on "Google Hacking for Penetration Testers” by Johnny Long by now.. if not, you can read a summary by don burleson over here

OOW Oracle announces Unbreakable Linux Support

Oracle Unbreakable Linux is a support program that provides enterprises with industry-leading global support for Linux. Recognizing the demand for true enterprise-quality Linux support and seeing an opportunity to significantly reduce IT infrastructure costs, Oracle is now offering Linux operating system support.

More information about this program can be found here

Oracle CRM on Demand Release 10

Siebel Acquisition and Integrations activities are known to be moving at a very fast pace. Today oracle announced the CRM on demand release 10, based on siebel's hosted CRM application. It claims to deliver the powerful sales, marketing and service fuctionality per the new release at Oracle DBA Spot

And the heat is on for Sales Force.Com ......

"One of the key features that led us to Oracle CRM On Demand, instead of Salesforce.com, is the mass list updating that helps us keep our data as clean as possible and reassign mass records for our new sales staff," said Dave Hannum, National Sales Manager from Technogym USA Corporation. "We have seen huge productivity gains just with these advanced list management capabilities. In particular, the context-sensitive help quickly and easily guides sales people through defining list criteria for their own outbound marketing efforts giving them more time to spend selling instead of on administrative overhead.

Oracle 10g Express Edition Wins LinuxWorld Award

Oracle Database XE is the free starter edition database that is known to work on a wide range of 32-bit Linux operating systems, including Mandriva, Power Pack+, SUSE 9 and SUSE 10, Red Hat 4, Fedora and Ubuntu. This product has received an award at the recent Linux World in Boston.

More information can be found here

Oracle and Novell to Offer Grid-Ready Solution

Novell and Oracle today announced availability of a new Accelerator service designed to help customers streamline the deployment of a grid-ready infrastructure for the data center, featuring Oracle(r) Database 10g, Oracle Real Application Clusters, Oracle Application Server 10g, and Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g for customers running on SUSE(r) Linux Enterprise Server from Novell. The solution takes advantage of Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Grid Control (Oracle Grid Control) and the Automated Storage Management feature of Oracle Database 10g to provide a complete, customer-ready management solution for monitoring and managing grid applications and infrastructure software and storage.

This new Accelerator is a service engagement wherein skilled personnel from Oracle will work with Novell, HP and Egenera to expedite implementation and deployment of Oracle's Grid Computing infrastructure software onto SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. Already field-proven with existing joint customers, this accelerator helps minimize risk while speeding time-to-market for enterprise grid-based applications. The new Accelerator is offered with flexible optional pricing designed to fit into customer budget and deployment requirements.

Back after a long Outage on this blog

I had been away for a couple of weeks, in Hyderabad, India to meet some of my vendors and to see them in action.

Things are moving fast and the Indian Economy is on a fast pace to achieving record growth. China should be worried now, considering that this vibrant democracy is able to sustain an 8+% growth rate inspite of the corruption that is rampant in every corner of this country.

My host gave me a tour of the available real estate and land prices are comparable to Manhattan, NY

Anyway, I am back and lookfoward to more rants about Oracle Operations soon.

DBA's Learn Oracle in 2 days

Today while browsing around on OTN I stumbled upon this link called "Getting Started with Oracle". Embedded in that page was a quote "DBA's : Learn Oracle in 2 days ". The page goes on to explain the 10 steps in Learning Oracle Database Administration.

Another link on this site took me a Oracle 10g 2 Day DBA Document that says that the audience of this material are Developers who want to acquire part-time DBA Skills, Folks who need to manage departmental servers and Administrators managing Oracle for small and medium businesses.

God Help Us All !!

Oracle Expands its Offerings in Embedded DB Software

Oracle recently announced the acquisition of Sleepy Cat, a maker of embedded database systems. Sleepy cat is famous for its Berkeley DB Engine that comes as Berkeley DB, Java Optimized Berkeley DB and the Berkeley DB XML Edition. This is an exciting expansion of Oracle's product line since Oracle never had a strong hold in this area. The most prominent user of Berkeley's products has been google in all its personalization systems that include gmail, google groups etc.

Typically embedded databases are different from conventional databases by the fact that they run in process with the application and store the data locally instead of requiring a separate installation. They are used in many devices that we see and use in our daily lives including appliances, networking gear like switches and routers.

Oracle announced that it intends to continue the dual license mode where they will continue to let the database to be used in Open Source Implementations as well as a closed source distribution where the product Oracle has no plans to change the dual license, and we will continue to serve both open source and commercial users.

Google Desktop Saves the DAY

We recently had a major outage in our shop floor systems due to a SAN Outage. The outage was due to an outdated SAN hardware and the supporting components that were not even available with the vendor when the outage happened. ETA for restoration was 3 to 4 hours.

Rewind to Feb 2005 : Our team reviewed all critical systems and provided a recommendation for replacing the SAN on the shop floor. One of the business leaders rejected the idea with a comment that went as " This is nothing but an attempt by systems group to buy some new toys.. rejected ". Why fix something thats not broken.

System is back to normal, but during the RCA phase, the CFO blasted the recently anointed manufacturing leader/SVP. The new leader walked out of the session with CFO called a meeting of the systems group and said that heads are going to roll for not taking care of this and that some one would have to pay for this in the next 24 hours.

I had been using google desktop since beta and thought that it was time to put it through the much awaited litmus test. A quick Search for "Manufacturing Proposal" pulls up the email chain where the SVP himself rejected the idea of replacing the old hardware. ... Quietly forwarded an archive of the email chain to Director of IT and rested my case and thought to myself.. "Wonder who is going to pay for this .. atleast I am not.. "

Oracle Application Express ?.. Who comes up with these names ?

Oracle recently announced that it had renamed the HTMLDB tool as Oracle Application Express. Link Here ...

Now thats confusing as hell, considering that this product has nothing to do with the Express Products or Application Server. Lets hope that this product will live longer than WebDB which got integrated into App Server in the later stages. Considering that oracle moved metalink to this, I have high hopes for the longevity of Application Express aka HTMLDB

Routine Oracle DBA ? : A rant in support of TK

I stumbled upon Tom Kyte's Rant about the people who are aiming for instant knowledge. My experience has been that "many" new entrants into the field start categorizing work as "Routine Oracle DBA" from the second day they are on the job.

Routine Work as defined by the newbies is Anything or Everything that they may have executed even if they didnt know what exactly they were doing. The trend seems to be on identifying an activity, learning the basics on the process and execution and then moving on to a newer job with additional skills added to the resume.

My org policies now dictate that every newbie is going "manual" for 3 months instead of automated Cloning and Replication Procedures. This helped some, but I dont think we as Managers or Tech Leaders can force a change in how they acuqire their knowledge.

Oh Well.. We can only take the horse to the water.. or is that a Routine Task ?

My Leap into Blogging..

Hi,

Taking a big leap from Forums to Blogs..

I am Oracle King, a 14 year DBA Veteran in the South East, that kicks himself everyday for giving up technical line and taking a leap to become a "weepy" VP of database Operations.

Here is my foray back into sharing my perspectives on Life in the techno managerial operations world. Who am I kidding .. its just another outlet for me to vent ;-)..

DBA King