Toolbar Buttons Revisited…

My 9 year old nephew was making a Powerpoint slideshow today. I watched him regularly saving his slideshow using the menu and asked why he was not using the Save button, to which he replied, “Which one is it?”.

I looked at the toolbar and saw a button with a picture of a floppy disk. I don’t think he has ever seen a floppy disk in his life. I’m not surprised he didn’t associate this button with saving his slideshow.

I’ve seen articles suggesting that buttons with icons are not good for new users. This is especially true if the icons reference old technology they have never encountered.

Cheers

Tim…

 

 

 

Which Linux do you pick for Oracle Installations?

There was an interesting thread on the OakTable mailing list the other day regarding the choice of Linux distros for Oracle installations. It was started by one member (the name has been withheld to protect the innocent :)) who said,

“I cannot imagine (but want to understand) why anyone would pick RHEL5.6 for Oracle as opposed to the vastly superior OEL with the UEK.”

I must admit I’ve kinda forgotten that any distro apart from Oracle Linux (OL) exists as far as production installations of Oracle software are concerned.

Some of the reasons cited for people not to pick OL include:

  • The customer has a long relationship with Red Hat and doesn’t want to jump ship.
  • RHEL is the market leading enterprise Linux distro, so why switch to Oracle?
  • The customer doesn’t want to be too dependent on Oracle.
  • The customer has lots of non-Oracle servers running RHEL and doesn’t want a mix of RHEL and OL as it would complicate administration.
  • The customer uses some software that is certified against RHEL, but not OL.
  • The customer prefers Red Hat support over Oracle support. Wait. Red Hat and support in the same sentence. Give me a minute to stop laughing…
  • The customer is using VMware for Virtualization and the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel (UEK) is not supported on VMware.

I guess every company and individual will have differing justifications for their choice of distro.

So why would you pick OL and Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel (UEK) for Oracle installations?

  • You can run it for free if you don’t want OS support. Using OL without support doesn’t affect the support status of the products (DB, App Servers etc.) running on top of it.
  • It’s what Oracle use to write the Linux version of the products.
  • It’s what Exadata uses.
  • Oracle products are now certified against the OL + UEK before they are certified against the RHEL kernel.
  • UEK is typically a much more up to date version of the kernel than that shipped by RHEL and includes all the patches vital for optimum Oracle performance.
  • Single vendor, so no finger pointing over support issues (from Google+ comment).
  • It is the only enterprise Linux distro that supports kernel patching without reboots thanks to Oracle’s newly aquired Ksplice.

For more information you might want to read this whitepaper or watch this webcast.

If you are looking at things from a purely technical perspective, I guess you are going to pick OL and UEK. Of course, many of us don’t work in a world where technology is picked purely on its merits. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Update: Check out this post by Jay Weinshenker for a different angle on this issue.

VirtualBox 4.1 Released…

Hot on the heels of the VirtualBox 4.0.12 maintenance release, shipped a few days ago, comes VirtualBox 4.1. It contains loads of new features, explained here and in the changelog.

The upgrade went smoothly on my MacBook Pro, but on my Fedora 15 servers I had to uninstall the old version manually before installing the new version. None of my settings were lost so everything was easy enough.

It certainly seems applying VirtualBox upgrades is becoming a fulltime job. Of course, the quick release cycle is a lot better than getting no updates, like VMware Server. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Google+ Hangouts and Support…

You open a ticket and wait… When you do get a reply it tells you to send information you’ve already posted, or suggests you try some workarounds you’ve already listed in the ticket as having not worked for you. You get frustrated and write a blog post ranting about how terrible the support service is etc. I guess this could be a story about just about any internet support service I’ve had to use over the years.

Do you remember in the old days, before the internet was popular, when you phoned support lines? Do you remember how quickly some of these annoying issues were resolved by simply saying, “I’ve already sent that!”, to a real person at the end of the line? OK. I’ve conveniently forgotten to mention being put on hold for hours, but this is my blog and I’m allowed to have a totally biased opinion about things… 🙂

Maybe elements of the good old days are coming back thanks to social media. Check out this article where Michael Dell proposes using Google+ Hangouts as a way of connecting to Dell service and sales.

Imagine the joy of being able to rant directly at a real person again. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

InSync11 and more…

The Oracle ACE Program approved my travel for InSync11, so all systems are go for my trip down under.

My current schedule looks a little hectic, but it’s great to be able to pack so much into such a short time:

  • InSync11 – August 16th-17th : Presenting two papers.
  • Sydney Oracle Meetup – August 16th : On a panel with loads of other people. Should be fun.
  • ACTOUG – August 19th : Presenting at a DBA/Developer day in Canberra with Chris Muir.

I was in Australia last year teaching some Oracle University classes, but it’s been a couple of years since my last conference there, so I’m really looking forward to getting back and meeting everyone again.

It’s going to be a very short, crazily busy visit. I think about  50% of my time away from will be spent on planes. 🙂

Big thanks to InSync11 for inviting me and a very big thanks to The Oracle ACE Program, who have made it possible for me to go!

Cheers

Tim…

VMware price changes could be perfect for Oracle VM uptake…

It’s not very often you see Oracle looking like the cheap option, but Oracle VM has always been pretty attractive on that score. 🙂

The latest information about VMware vSphere 5.0 pricing sounds like the perfect cue for Oracle to start another big push on the virtualization front, as I’m sure a lot of VMware customers will be swallowing hard as they read the new pricing model. It certainly makes Oracle VM sound even more attractive than it did before.

If Oracle could just get Oracle VM 3.0 out of the door, it might be able to make some serious inroads into the to VMware user base.

Cheers

Tim…

 

 

 

phpMyAdmin 3.4.3.1…

I’m not a major user of mySQL, but I’ve been a dabbler for quite a few years as I use it for my website.

For my day-to-day poking around I tend to use phpMyAdmin. I don’t always keep on top of phpMyAdmin upgrades, but today I upgraded to version 3.4.3.1, which comes with a new default theme. I know it’s rather shallow, but what a difference a pretty interface makes. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…