Video : Oracle Data Guard Broker

Today’s video is a quick demonstration of the Oracle Data Guard Broker.

Having recently written an article on it (here), I though a quick run through might help people see how easy it is. Maybe they will get converted like me. 🙂

The star of this video is Liron Amitzi, whose shopping habits have probably boosted the Canadian economy since his move there. By now I expect all the shelves in all the shops in Vancouver have been emptied. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

PS. I know I kept exiting to reconnect when I could have used CONNECT. I told you I’m new to this broker stuff. 🙂

 

OTN Tour of Latin America 2016 : It’s Nearly Here

In a couple of days I will be setting off for this years OTN Tour of Latin America 2016 (Northern Leg). For me, the tour consists of the following locations:

  • Panama City, Panama:  01-Aug-2016
  • San Jose, Costa Rica:  03-Aug-2016
  • Mexico City, Mexico: 05-Aug-2016
  • Guatemala City, Guatemala: 08-Aug-2016
  • Pereira, Colombia: 11, 12-Aug-2016

I’ve had a last minute panic over hotels, but the main thing is I have flights. 🙂

If you’re coming to the events, it will be great to see you!

Cheers

Tim…

How To Learn Real Application Clusters (RAC) Administration

In yesterday’s post about Learning, Career Development and Mentoring I mentioned a specific question I had been asked about learning RAC. I get it quite a bit, and after reading the comments from that post I thought I would write something I could use as a reply to that type of question in future. So here it is.

It’s very much an opinion piece, but I would like to know what other RAC admins think. This is very much a starting point. I’m sure the article will change over time as I think about it and people comment on it. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Learning, Career Development and Mentoring

Yesterday I received pretty much the same question from three different people, or maybe one person pretending to be three people. 🙂 The questions went something like this.

I want to get good at RAC. Will you teach me?

One of the three suggested I might want to use my Sundays teaching them. 🙂

I’m not mad at people for asking this and I don’t want to offend anyone by mentioning this, but it goes back to a recurring theme on this blog. Some people have a very passive approach to learning and want everything given to them on a plate. The education systems in some parts of the world actively encourage this model of learning. If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years, it’s that people who have this passive approach to learning never get good at anything!

This links into another topic I have a strong opinion of, which is mentoring. I know some people are really into this and maybe I just don’t understand it properly, but I hate the idea of mentoring. I’ve seen it done several times and it seems to be more about blowing smoke up the arse of the mentor than helping the person being mentored. Maybe I’ve just witnessed bad examples of mentoring. If it is done badly, it perpetuates the passive approach to learning. The, “I don’t know what to do. Will you tell me?”, attitude.

I think it’s really important that people follow their own path and learn to learn for themselves. Part of that is making mistakes and learning from them. You will invariably gravitate to individuals that you look up to and inspire you, but it’s not up to them to guide you and you definitely shouldn’t try to turn yourself into a pale imitation of them.

Some of the most interesting and useful people I’ve met have come from non-science backgrounds, where free thought and creativity are encouraged. Bad science teaching, of which there is a lot, is prescriptive and discourages innovative thought in favour of learning facts.

Every time you feel you need help from someone regarding learning something new or career development, ask yourself the question, “Is there something I can I do about this?”, before you look for someone else to answer it for you.

Here are some related posts I’ve written over the years.

Like I said before, this is not about offending people. It’s about trying to encourage personal development, and of course, my opinion could be completely wrong from your standpoint, in which case I’m not the mentor for you. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

VirtualBox 5.1.2

You know a major new release is going to be rapidly followed by a bunch of fixes, so about 9 days after the release of VirtualBox 5.1 we now have VirtualBox 5.1.2.

I have got it running on my Windows 7 desktop and work and it seems fine. I’ll try OSX El Crapitan and Oracle Linux 6 hosts when I get home.

Cheers

Tim…

Update: Works fine on Mac (El Craptian) and Oracle Linux 6 hosts too.

Data Guard Broker : 11g and 12c

I’ve been using standby databases, on and off, since Oracle 8i. I first wrote about Data Guard for Oracle 9i. I’ve had an article on 11gR2 Data Guard for ages, but up until recently I’ve always used the manual setup.

We’ve got a project coming up that *may* use Data Guard and *may* be installed by a 3rd party, so I figured I better get up to speed with the Data Guard Broker, in case they go that route. It’s been on my list of things to look at since 10g, but I’ve never got round to it until now. 🙂

At this point, I still don’t know if the project will use 11g or 12c, so I had a play with both, which resulted in a couple of overview articles.

From the overview perspective, the usage is pretty much the same. I really only did the 11g one in case that’s the route this project goes. I didn’t bother putting the 11g one on the front page of the website, because I consider it a “backfill” article. 🙂

After having a play with the broker, I actually quite like it. It definitely feels like a simpler and neater solution than doing all the configuration manually.

Remember, this Data Guard stuff is for EE installations. If you use SE, you might want to take a look at Dbvisit, who have a product that allows you to manage standby databases for Oracle SE.

Cheers

Tim…

PS. I’m not sponsored by Dbvisit and I have no business links with them. I just think they are a great bunch of people and I like what they do.

APEX 5.0.4

You may have noticed people taking about the APEX 5.0.4 release over the last couple of days. I started rolling it out to our databases straight away and it’s now on all the production environments too.

The install/upgrade and patching procedures are the same as normal.

  • Clean install or major version upgrade here.
  • Patch existing 5.0 installation here.

Remember, you can kick the tyres of APEX 5.1 Early Adopter here.

Cheers

Tim…

Exit mobile version