Month: October 2015

Oracle OpenWorld 2015 : ACE Director Briefing – Day 2

ace-directorI started the day with a jog around the lake. Believe it or not, I got lost a couple of times. We checked out of the hotel and headed off for the second day of the ACED Briefing. 🙂

Once again, it’s mostly under NDA, but the agenda for the day was as follows.

  • Tom Michelini and Jeff Welsch : BDaaS and IaaS Update.
  • Edwin Desouza : MySQL Update.
  • Wim Coekaerts : Linux and Virtualization Update.
  • Steven Feuerstein : Strengthening the Oracle Database Developer Community Together.
  • Roland Smart and Vikki Lira: Oracle ACE Program and OTN Update.
  • Andy Mendelsohn : Oracle Database Development Update
  • Oracle Database Development Update – the details. This was presented by a group of people whose names I forgot to note. Sorry. I missed the second half of this session because I went outside to chat to some of the guys presenting the first half…
  • David Peake : APEX Update.

After refreshments, it was a coach ride to the Hilton San Francisco, where we will be based for the main Oracle OpenWorld conference.

Just before I left I noticed WebLogic 12c (12.2.1.0) and Oracle Forms and Reports Services (12.2.1.0). That was a little surprising, since the timeline for the Forms release is not what were were told the day before! Sigh. Good news though. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Oracle OpenWorld 2015 : ACE Director Briefing – Day 1

ace-directorThe day started at 03:00 local time. I was in denial for about 60 minutes before I threw in the towel and got up. A couple of new release blog posts (VirtualBox 5.0.8 and MySQL 5.7) later, it was off to the gym again. I told you, it’s the new me…

After the gym I spent ages chatting to people in the foyer, whilst still stinking of gym and drinking coffee++. After getting cleaned up, I met up with a bunch of folks at 08:00 to walk across to head office for the first day of the ACE Director Briefing.

As usual, this couple of days is all under NDA, so we can’t talk about specifics, for fear of leaking some of the big announcements for OOW 2015, or because we are being told future direction. As a result, the following is really an idea of the agenda, where that doesn’t imply the content of an announcement… 🙂

  • Vikki did some quick introductions and basically told us to behave. 🙂
  • Jeremy Ashley and co. : Spoke about Cloud User Experience. Jeremy’s UX team has a hand in the design of many Oracle products. I have a lot of time for the work they do, and I can think of a few Oracle products I wish they had more involvement in. 🙂
  • Thomas Kurian : Gave an executive address. I’m saying nothing more about this, for fear of getting “disappeared”. Lots of interesting things coming. Something for everyone. 🙂
  • Vikas Anand, Kaj Van De Loo, Greg Stachnick and Kuldip Oberoi : Cloud update, with each person speaking about their respective parts of the cloud.
  • Interjeet Singh : Oracle Fusion Middleware update. This was quite a “vibrant” session during the question and answer part. 🙂
  • Mike Lehman : This session focused on WebLogic.
  • Shay Shmeltzer and Joe Huang: Oracle Development Tools and Mobile Platform Update.

After the sessions were over, we had some refreshments, then headed back to the hotel. A few of the folks went out to eat, but I just headed to bed.

For a generalist like me, today contained lots of interesting and sometimes confusing stuff. Tomorrow is more focussed on Linux and database stuff, so it is like a fun day for me. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Oracle OpenWorld 2015 : The Journey Begins

The day started at 05:30, which was not much different to normal, so that was good. A quick taxi ride to the airport was followed by a 1 hour sleep on the floor next to the departure gate. It’s wonderful having no shame. 🙂

The first flight from Birmingham to Frankfurt was about 80 minutes and it was fairly straight forward. I had a 2 hour layover before the next flight, so there was no real drama there. I ended up boarding as the last person in the last boarding group. 🙂 I tried to buy a business upgrade, but it was going to cost $2500, so screw that.

The United flight from Frankfurt to San Francisco was about 11.5 hours and a little annoying.

  • The plane interior was a really old refit. It was pretty terrible compared almost every other airline I’ve been on in the last few years.
  • The “entertainment system” was one of those old shared screen things, not a personal system, so you had to watch the same thing as everyone else.
  • The shared screen froze for a few seconds every 5 minutes or so, which kind of ruins your suspended disbelief.
  • My special meal was “missing” again. I mean, come on!

It’s hard to believe it’s 2015 when you are on a United plane. 🙂 Luckily, the staff were really nice. There was one lady doing her last flight after 46 years of service. Awesome!

We landed a little late. Getting though US customs was actually pretty quick, which makes a change. I took the hotel shuttle with Osama, Gurcan, Simon, Cary and Arup, who all converged from different flights.

After getting to the hotel, I dumped my stuff and went to the gym. It’s the new me. 🙂 After getting changed, I went down to the bar for a few minutes to say hello to some people, then headed off to bed by about 22:00 local time.

Allowing for the time difference, I think that’s about 24 hours from bed to bed. 🙂 Tomorrow is the first day of the ACE Director Briefing!

Cheers

Tim…

Multitentant (Pluggable Database) Videos

It’s been over 2 years since 12c was released and there still seems to be a lot of confusion about the pluggable database stuff. I think most people know the top-level concept, there’s only so many times you can see the memory stick analogy before it gets burned on your skull, but that doesn’t do much to help with the reality of working with it day-to-day.

I’ve written a whole bunch of articles on pluggable databases (listed here), but even then I think there is quite a bit of text for what in many cases is a feature that consists of a single statement. 🙂

I’ve recently been pushing out some videos on this stuff and I’ve got some more already recorded for release while I’m at OOW. Of course, the articles allow you to copy/paste your way through an example, but I think the videos give a more accurate representation of just how simple some of this stuff is from a functional perspective. If you are interested, all the multitenant stuff will be added to this playlist as it is released.

Cheers

Tim…

Internet Communities Are Selfish. Deal with it!

The Community?

I was reading Heli‘s blog post called The Oracle Community this morning, which directed me to posts by Jari Laine and Denes Kubicek. I think everyone that is involved in any type of community hits this issue at some point. For internet communities, it’s probably a much quicker realisation.

Very early on in my internet participation I read about things like the 1% rule and the 90:9:1 rules. I like to think I can make a difference and encourage more people to get involved, but the reality is, that’s not going to happen.

The latest example of this is the Oracle Developer Choice Awards. There are some great people nominated, some of which you might not have heard of, but all worthy of nomination! In fact, being nominated is fantastic in itself, regardless of who wins. So with a well publicised vote and some great people to vote for, you just know there will be a massive number of votes right? Wrong! The number of votes is pitiful. This can only be because people can’t be bothered to vote. Like I said, it’s not for lack of advertising!

I had my own little epiphany last year before OpenWorld 2014. 🙂

Examine Your Motives

It’s kind of easy to rewrite history. I’ve been pushing out content for over 15 years. I’ve been involved in the Oracle ACE Program for over 9 years. So I’m all about community right? Not really. If I’m brutally honest, I do all of this shit for me! I like to do it. I find it fun. It’s part of my learning process. If nobody read my stuff I would still do it. I was doing it for years before I was even aware of a community.

Having said that, once I became part of the community, great things started to happen, so I am extremely grateful and I would recommend getting involved to everyone, but it would be wrong for me to make out I’m some sort of altruistic saint of the internet. I’m as selfish as all those folks that read everyone else’s content and can’t be bothered to vote for them!

Do It Because You Love It!

So this all comes back to the message I keep pushing. Do it because you love it!

Doing it for the money? I don’t think so! There are certainly easier ways to earn money, and much more of it. 🙂

Doing it to “get famous”? Famous with whom? Other speakers? 🙂 I walk around conferences and nobody knows who the hell I am until I get on stage and show a picture of my website. 🙂 My hit rate in a single day is more than many “famous” blogs have had in their entire lifetime, yet the vast majority of the people reading my content haven’t got a clue who I am. 🙂

If you write good content, people will find you eventually, but many of them will be selfish arseholes, just like me!

Conclusion

I push community really hard these days. I think it is a very positive thing for the individuals involved and the people who get to experience their content, but you will only stick with this stuff if you enjoy it. Forcing yourself to be involved when you hate it is not going to work out.

You’ve also got to manage your expectations a bit. When I started my YouTube channel I kind-of expected to be inundated with people wanting to be in a cameo at the start of the videos. In reality, getting people to send you a 2 second video of them saying “dot com” is like trying to pull teeth! 🙂 Yet another example of my unrealistic expectations. 🙂

If you are one of the nominees in the Oracle Developer Choice Awards, well done for a great achievement, but the result doesn’t matter and the number of votes is not a measure of your worth. You contributions and how you feel about them personally is all that matters!

I hope this doesn’t sound too damning. It’s not meant to be. It’s just a reality check. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

PS. This is not a post where I am fishing for complements. I’ve not got time to read them anyway. I am too busy watching videos of kittens on YouTube and refusing click the “Like” link against them… 🙂

PDB Logging Clause… Again…

About 14 months ago I spotted a problem with the PDB Logging Clause. I opened an SR and several months later I got a patch, which unfortunately didn’t fix the issue, just altered the symptom somewhat. I wrote about that patch here.

Yesterday I got a new patch, which actually does fix the problem, so now the PDB Logging Clause works as documented!

I’ve updated the PDB Logging Clause article to reflect the change.

I realise it’s a small issue, with an easy workaround, but 14 months seems a bit excessive. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Cloud Control 12.1.0.5 : Some minor issues (fixed)

em-12cSince the upgrade to Cloud Control 12.1.0.5, we’ve been having a couple of issues, mostly around EMCLI.

Some of our databases use Service Guard, so you don’t know which node they are running on. Rather than having an agent per package, we have one on each node. One of my colleagues wrote a little script to check which node the instance is running on, and relocate it if it has moved. This is done using EMCLI and was working fine before the move to 12.1.0.5. Since the upgrade it’s been rather erratic. It would work for a while, then fail. After watching for a while I noticed a couple of things.

EMCLI calls to the OMS that sent SQL were intermittently killing in the Agent on the Cloud Control server itself. It seemed to cause Out Of Memory errors. The heap size for the agent on the CC server was set to something like 1860M. Changing it to 2048M seemed to fix that issue. The setting is in the “agent_inst/sysman/config/emd.properties” file. We now have this.

agentJavaDefines=-Xmx2048M -XX:MaxPermSize=128M

Note. The agents on the monitored servers have a tiny heap size. Nothing like this bad-boy. 🙂

After running OK for a few days, we started to get the following type of errors from EMCLI.

$ emcli sync
Error: Session expired. Run emcli login to establish a session.

We fixed this by running the “setup” command again.

emcli setup -username=sysman -password="MyPassword" -url="https://myserver.example.com:7799/em"

Since then, EMCLI has seemed to behave itself.

Note. As part of the upgrade, we downloaded the latest EMCLI jar file from the server and did the setup, so this part was working fine for a while. Not sure why it started to screw up…

Anyway, all seems fine now. I’m guessing if we weren’t using EMCLI, we would never have had a problem in the first place.

Cheers

Tim…

El Crap-itan

In the comments from yesterday’s post, Jonathan Roden mentioned the release of El Capitan. At that point, I hadn’t even heard about it. 🙂 Being the naive idiot I am, I jumped head long into it.

The download was about 3G, which didn’t take too long. The upgrade itself took quite a while. That included one failure. During the installation, the system rebooted, as it said it would, and I thought it was over, but it was still running Yosemite. I manually started the upgrade again by running the installer, which was sitting in the Applications folder. The second time it completed.

The first snag was my external monitor didn’t work. A bit of Googling and it seems this is not uncommon. Some people said they couldn’t get the HDMI connection to work, so I switched to a display port connection. No luck there. The “Detect Displays” button is hidden these days, but it shows up if you hold the “Options” key (see here). Apparently, this happened in a previous release, but I’ve obviously not needed it up until now. 🙂 Anyway, that didn’t help. I just kept switching between cables, each time with a hard reboot. Eventually, it noticed the monitor on the HDMI cable and all was working fine. This does of course make me worry what is going to happen when I plug this laptop into a projector. Am I going to need several hard reboots each time before it notices the new display? 🙁

During the repeated reboots, I noticed how long it takes to do a hard reboot under El Capitan. I know some fanboys whould have you believe you never have to reboot an Apple device, but that it clearly not true. This is running on a 8 month old i7, with 16G RAM and a 512G flash card. It was crazy fast to reboot under Yosemite. Not so much under El Capitan. Once it’s started, I can’t tell a performance difference (at the moment), but bootup time is shocking. Much worse than Windows 7 on my crappy i5 PC at work. Some of the folks on the interwebs are claiming general performance sucks since the upgrade, even on new gear. We shall see.

Since the upgrade, the laptop doesn’t seem to turn the screen off when it’s been inactive for a while. I woke up this morning to find it had been on all night. My first thought was I had left Caffeine running, but I hadn’t. As far as I could see, there was nothing running that would cause this. I didn’t have time to figure out why. I’m marking this as a fail, because I’m forced to investigate something that was working fine before.

During my Googling for solutions to my issues, it seems lots of people are complaining about poor battery life since switching to El Capitan. My laptop is permanently plugged in when I am at home. It will be interesting to see how it copes when I travel. I won’t give this a fail yet, as I don’t have any personal experience of it, but you might want to think twice if you are a battery user. 🙂

Visually, I’ve not been able to tell the last few releases apart. There are allegedly new features in this release, but I’m not sure I will ever notice them. I don’t care about new eye candy that much, but I don’t see the point of giving this a new name and all that, when it feels like a minor patch.

Overall, I’m giving El Capitan a resounding fail at this point. Hopefully, Apple will take note of the complaints on the net and fix this shit soon. If you are trying to decide to switch, or not, I would say wait a while and see what Apple do in the coming weeks. Maybe you will have a different experience. Maybe not. 🙂

 

Cheers

Tim…