Category: Oracle

Sun’s xVM is here…

Sun have announced their revolutionary new product xVM. It’s an open source Xen derivative that installs on bare-metal.

Wait a minute… That sounds remarkably like what Oracle did with Oracle VM, which was released about a year ago…

So now we have four big players wanting a share of the market:

  • VMware ESX (ESXi) Server – A proprietory, bare-metal hypervisor. ESX isn’t free, but the ESXi version is.
  • Oracle VM – A free open source bare-metal hypervisor.
  • Sun xVM – A free open source bare-metal hypervisor.
  • Microsoft Hyper-V – A not-so-free proprietory hypervisor that’s not exactly bare-metal.

You have to take the word “free” with a pinch of salt. With most of these tools, the real power comes with the enterprise tools and they cost money. Even so, as far as basic hypervisors go, it’s looking a lot more crowded in free-town.

I guess the one that stands out on this list is Hyper-V because it isn’t really a bare-metal installation. You run Hyper-V on a Windows Server 2008 box and it effectively demotes the server to a partition, or virtual machine. As a result, if you want to run a bunch of Linux VMs, you still have to have the Windows Server 2008 parition managing the lot. Not what I would call bare-metal. I suppose this is less of a hardship for a Windows shop, but it just doesn’t sound like an enterprise product to me. Just an opinion. 🙂

It looks like the next couple of years are going to be kinda interesting. VMware is still the name on everyones lips, but the profit margins are going to take a bit of a beating as the competition fires up…

Cheers

Tim…

OCA PL/SQL Developer and stuff…

Today has been a bit of a rare day…

I hurt my back last night at Karate. I managed to get in on a cancellation at my osteopath, so off I went this morning to get everything straightened out.

I left the osteopath just in time to get to the Prometric test center down the road to sit the “Program with PL/SQL (1Z0-147)” exam, which I passed. The exam was pretty easy, but then I have been doing this stuff for 14 years. I sat the “Introduction to Oracle: SQL and PL/SQL (1Z0-001)” as part of my Oracle 7.3 OCP, so I guess I’m now an “Oracle PL/SQL Developer Certified Associate”.

The reason for doing this is I quite fancy doing the “Oracle Database 11g: Advanced PL/SQL” exam, currently in beta, to get the “Oracle Advanced PL/SQL Developer Certified Professional”. The OCA PL/SQL Developer is a prerequesite. I’ve been teaching most of the content of the “Oracle Database 11g: Advanced PL/SQL” this year so it shouldn’t be a problem. I just don’t know if I’ll have time before I hit the road, and the beta period will be over by the time I get back…

What made the whole day a bit more problematic, was I had a Diabetes clinic appointment today and I wasn’t allowed to eat before it, so I was really hungry. My appointment was at 15:30 and I hadn’t eaten since about 17:00 the previous day. Back pain and hunger aren’t the normal things you expect to deal with during an exam. Never mind, it’s sorted now… 🙂

By the way, I might be doing a couple of talks at the Swedish Oracle User Group in December (10th-11th). Nothing definite at the moment. I’ve been invited, but it’s all in the ether. The world tour continues… 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Oracle Certified Profesional (OCP) Database 11g…

I passed the Oracle Database 11g: New Features for Administrators (1Z0-050) exam today. It’s a bit of a relief because I feel like I’ve been preparing for this exam for a year. My first OCP revision article was written about 1 year ago, when I was hoping to be ready for the beta exam. Unfortunately, all the presentations and teaching I’ve been doing this year proved to be a bigger distraction than I’d hoped, which meant I missed the deadline for the beta exam, and overshot the start of the production exam by about 6 months. 🙂

Well, now the exam is over it presents me with some new issues.

1) There are some gaps in my revision notes that need filling. I did a lot of reading during the preparation, and pulled out the areas and facts I thought were most important. Based on the events of today, this didn’t necessarily match up with the contents of the exam. It didn’t affect me, as I had done the additional reading, but as it stands I think it’s touch-and-go whether my revision notes alone will get someone through the exam. This means I’m going to have to go through and revise a few of the articles to fill the gaps.

2) There are a couple of OCP revision articles I’ve not published yet. I got a little impatient and sat the exam before I had finished prettying them. They will follow shortly, conferences permitting.

Like all the OCP exams, this is just the first steps towards learning this release…

Cheers

Tim…

PS. I suppose it’s a little premature to call myself an OCP 11g. I guess that’s not official until Oracle send through the certificate. 🙂

PPS. Before anyone asks, I used the Oracle manuals to prepare for the exam, so I can’t give certification guide suggestions…

VMware ESX and Oracle RAC…

It looks like those possible VMware ESX articles I mentioned yesterday are now on the VIOPS site.

If you’re interested in the enterprise VMware kit it’s worth taking a look at the site. New stuff is being added all the time. I think it’s official launch is at vmworld2008 in about 3 weeks.

I’ve also added an overview article for the ESX Server installation to my website.

Cheers

Tim…

Flights, OpenWorld, VMware and stuff…

I realize I’ve been a little quiet of late, but life has been really busy and something had to give…

Flights for my conference dates are now sorted. Big thanks to Victoria, LaShon and Sylia. I better get on the case and book my hotels. The plan is:

Birmingham > Frankfurt > San Francisco > Auckland > Perth > Sydney > Gold Coast > Auckland > LAX > Frankfurt > Home

Just looking at it is giving me the fear. That’s some serious air time. I’m way to fat to fly coach at the moment. I better lose some weight and get some anti-DVT support socks… 🙂

I’ve still got to sort out my talks for the conferences. It’s all stuff I’ve been teaching recently, so the material isn’t the problem. The hard thing is trying to compress something that takes me 3.5 hours to teach into 45 minutes without sounding like a list of bullet points.

Recently, I’ve been doing some work with VMware ESX Server. I may have something coming out on the VMware VIOPS site soon. I’ll post again if that works out. By the way, big thanks to the VMware guys (Steve, Tushar and Chris) for hooking me up with the software. I’ve been wanting to play with this stuff for a long time. I was going to start using the free ESXi stuff, but I’ve now got the pukka gear… 🙂

The OCP stuff has hit the back burner for the moment. I was aiming to take the exam this week, but that’s not going to happen now. I’ve got pretty much all of the notes sorted, but I’ve not had time to learn them. Maybe I’ll get time before OpenWorld, or even at OpenWorld…

Cheers

Tim…

Oracle ACE Office Hours in the OTN Lounge…

There are going to be even more ways to meet Oracle ACEs at this years OpenWorld. The OTN Lounge is going to have some time slots where you can meet and chat with Oracle ACEs about any subject you want. See here:

Some Oracle heavyweights have already signed up for the sessions. If you’re and ACE, sign up. It’ll be fun.

Of course the most important thing is that people turn up with questions. Don’t be shy… 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Oracle AS… WebLogic… What?

I knew Oracle had bought BEA, so I knew they had acquired the WebLogic stuff, but I can’t remember reading that they had practically scrapped their own Application Servers in favor of it. The last I read about it was this:

Yet a quick visit to the Oracle websites makes it look pretty clear that WebLogic is the platform of choice:

I’m sure quite a few people with a vested interest in the original Oracle middle tier will feel a bit annoyed by this…

So all these years I’ve been listening to Oracle tell me their App Servers are the best, then they scrap it overnight…

Have I been snoozing and missed something? Am I mistaken? Am I confused?

Probably all three…

Cheers

Tim…

Update: I’ve just done some more Googling and it looks like the writing has been on the cards for a while, so it looks like I’ve been snoozing and missed it… 🙂

I guess next I’ll find out Oracle have bought Teradata and the database is now called Oracle Teradata 12g… 🙂

Keeping it in the database…

I’ve mentioned a couple of times recently that I’m in the process of installing and moving a whole bunch of servers from our current site to a new location. Well the first phase of this process was completed over the weekend. The move involved a change in platform from Alpha to Linux for a few projects, including some Oracle database servers.

I do pretty well all my Extraction Transformation Load (ETL) processes from within the database using SQL and PL/SQL, which by its nature is portable between Oracle supported platforms. As a result, everything just worked.

Some of the other non-Oracle projects use shell scripts and Perl (containing calls to OS commands), which can prove a little more problematic. I’ve just finished helping debug a Perl script that was failing due to the difference in output of the “ps -p <pid>” command on Alpha and RHEL. Imagine how big the impact would have been if the move had been between Windows and Linux!

This just reminds my how “keeping it in the database” has paid off for me again and again. When I treat Oracle as my platform life is easy. When I treat Oracle as a “bit bucket” and focus on external technologies I run into problems.

Just an observation by a biased PL/SQL junkie… Not flame bait… 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

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