It’s been over two years, but I’m finally going back to my second home. I’m presenting at BGOUG Autumn 2016 Conference. 🙂
I get back from the OTN APAC Tour, go to work for three days, then I’m off to Bulgaria. I figure if I confuse my body enough it won’t recognise how many time zones I’ve travelled through…
At the moment it looks like this is the last event I’m presenting at in 2016, so let’s make it a good one. Hope to see you all there!
Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 13c Release 2 (13cR2) was released a couple of weeks ago. In a previous post I mentioned we were going to stop our rollout of 13cR1 agents to production and upgrade from 13cR1 to 13cR2 before we resumed.
I don’t like doing anything at work that I haven’t already tried at home, so the first step in that process was for me to do some clean installs and practice upgrades. After a busy weekend and a late night last night I think I’m happy with the process. That resulted in these articles.
If you’ve done a 13cR1 installation, the clean 13cR2 installation will come as no surprise. They now have multitenant and non-CDB repository templates to choose from. I used the multitenant template in this example. The installation was fine on both OL6 and OL7, so nothing out of the ordinary to report there.
The upgrade process was similar to previous point release upgrades too. We used the non-CDB template, the only one available at the time, to build our 13cR1 installation, so not surprisingly I practised the upgrade using that as a starting point. The upgrade process went fine, but I got a lot of warning messages during the process. It was all working fine at the end though…
I guess we will start rolling this bad-boy out once I get back from the APAC Tour and Bulgaria (BGOUG).
I read Debra’s post this morning and the fact she had to write it was pretty disappointing. I realise there will always be haters out there who find fault with what people in the community do, but even so…
I’ve written about this in the past (here and here). As Debra pointed out, I’ve got a YouTube series called My Glamorous Life, which illustrates just how boring life on the road is most of the time.
I think it’s safe to say people who have never experienced this type of travel will say something like, “Boo-bloody-hoo! You get to see the world for free and all you can do is moan!” Those that have experienced it will realise how far from glamorous it is.
If you get the opportunity to travel with work or a community program you definitely should. It is a great experience. Just don’t expect it to feel like a holiday. I have the privilege of still being in contact with Tom Kyte and when we discussed his plans for the future, one of the things he mentioned was to travel and actually see the places he’s already been to. That kind-of says it all. 🙂
After every tour I promise myself it will be the last. One day it will be, but for now…
I’m feeling pretty nervous about the travelling. The Dubai to Auckland flight alone is 16+ hours. It’s a long way to go for such a short visit, but I’m sure I will enjoy it when I’m there.
I did try to upgrade the flights to business class, but there were no seats left. I’ll keep trying. It will cost me a lot of money, but it will make the whole traveling process a lot more pleasant if I can sort it out.
Hopefully I’ll get to see you there. I’ll be the guy asleep on the floor with his tongue hanging out… 🙂
Yesterday was the OTN Appreciation Day. The plan was to mobilise the Oracle community to say #ThanksOTN for everything Oracle Technology Network (OTN) have done for the Oracle community over the years. You can obviously search on Twitter for #ThanksOTN, but I’ve compiled a list of blog posts here, so contact me if you’re missing! They are ordered chronologically, or at least in the order I found them. There are some posts with similar, or the same, name. Multiple people can have the same favourite feature. 🙂
Check out pieter v. puymbroeck, who wrote a script (here) to scrape the results from Twitter. Ruben Rodriguez did a similar thing using MCS and JET. I did it the long and painful way because I’m an old-timer. 🙂
Thanks to everyone that wrote a blog post. It was good to see some new, nearly new and returning faces, as well as the usual suspects. I was glad to see some of our Latin American community blogging in Spanish. What’s really cool is the diversity of stuff people posted. Some people took it in a completely different direction, which made it more interesting. Thanks to all those people that tweeted messages of support and retweeted content throughout the day. We got people joining in because they saw the buzz you helped create! And of course, #ThanksOTN. 🙂
Data Pump (expdp, impdp) was added in Oracle 10g as a replacement for the rather tired exp/imp utilities, which although useful, were severely lacking in functionality. So why do I like Data Pump? Here are a few standouts for me, but I’m sure other people will prefer others. 🙂
Transportable Tablespaces, and from 12c onward Transportable Database, make moving large amounts of data, or even whole databases easy. This can include platform/endian changes and version upgrade too. This was possible with exp/imp too, but it doesn’t stop it being a useful feature of Data Pump. 🙂
The INCLUDE, EXCLUDE, CONTENT and QUERY parameters allow a lot of flexibility about what you include or exclude from your exports and imports.
The FLASHBACK_TIME parameter allows you to do an export of the data based on a point in time, undo permitting, which allows you to make truly consistent exports.
The REMAP parameters allow you to rename tablespaces, datafiles, schemas, tables and even alter the data during operations.
The DBMS_DATAPUMP package provides a PL/SQL API, allowing you to perform Data Pump operations without having to shell out to the OS. That makes automation a lot simpler.
The NETWORK_LINK parameter can be used to perform export and import operations over a database link. This allows you to create a dump file on a remote database, or even import without an intermediate dump file.
I’m sure beginners think Data Pump is just for doing exports and imports of small databases, but it’s got loads of features. If you’ve not kept up with the new releases, you might be surprised just how much it can do!
If you’re interested in reading something more technical about Data Pump, here are some articles from my website.
You know that thing where you buy a new car and suddenly everyone else seems to be driving the same model? That’s how I am with Internet of Things (IoT) these days. Having had my interest peaked at OOW16, I’m suddenly noticing it getting mentioned everywhere, especially related to security. IoT+Security is now in the same position that Cloud+Security was a few years back. You can just hear the cries of “Won’t someone think of the children?”
We’ve spent years trying to encourage people to patch their PCs, servers and applications in an attempt to not be the next big attack vector, then along comes IoT and kind-of forgets all those lessons of the past (see here). This is common for any emerging tech. Let’s get it to work and worry about making it safe later!
The cheapness of IoT devices make them feel throwaway, so it’s a no-brainer to include them in everything. The problem comes when that throwaway tech is put inside something you plan on keeping for a few years, like a fridge, washing machine or internet-enabled underwear. 🙂 If security hasn’t been considered up front, is it going to end up being a problem long term? Either that, or am I going to have to “flash” my internet-enabled underwear on a regular basis to keep them safe? 🙂
I, for one, welcome our small internet-enabled overlords! But only if they come in peace! It will be interesting to see how thing goes…
Cheers
Tim…
PS. Cloud image taken at my nephew’s football match yesterday. Saucer from PixaBay. Bluring by SnagIt. Two minutes and I now have better “evidence” than most UFO videos on YouTube. Let’s see how long it takes for this to end up on one of them. 🙂
In the 80s and 90s the Sierra was an incredibly popular, but boring saloon car from Ford. Today I upgraded to macOS Sierra, which will eventually be an incredibly popular (for Mac owners), but boring operating system from Apple.
So what’s new? You get Siri! Oh yes, you also get Siri! There is also Siri! And finally, for good measure you get Siri!
If you own multiple devices, there is some fluff, like shared clipboard, but I don’t own multiple Apple devices, so basically this OS is what I had before with a sprinkling of Siri.
What was the experience of upgrading like? An absolute nightmare! It said it was going to take about 18 minutes, but it seemed to hang for a couple of hours. I ended up doing about 5 hard reboots before it actually came up. After all that hassle and wasted time, I got El Crapitan + Siri. Amazing. Way to innovate Apple!
Of course, Apple fanboys will love it and it will change their lives… Whatever!
We’ve finished the rollout of 13cR1 agents to all dev and test environments, but haven’t started the production rollout. Good job really as 13cR2 has now been released.