Tag: Oracle

InSync11 : 16-17 August 2011…

A few weeks ago one of the AUSOUG committee asked me to submit some abstracts for InSync11. I got the official acceptance through today, so travel approval permitting, I’ll be in Sydney on August 16-17 to speak at the conference.

I’m not looking forward to the flights, but it will be really cool to see the Aussies again. I was teaching some Oracle University courses in Australia last year, but it’s a couple of years since I’ve spoken at a conference down there.

Cheers

Tim…

Oracle VM [not] running inside VirtualBox… (update)

I mentioned a few days ago I was having trouble running Oracle VM inside VirtualBox. I had tried with multiple versions of VirtualBox (including the latest 4.0.8), so I finally decided that is must be an issue with the host OS (Fedora 14).

Today I worked up the enthusiasm and trashed my server by replacing the host OS with CentOS 5.6. Regarding Oracle VM and VirtualBox, the news is good. I now have a functioning OVM installation inside a VirtualBox VM, so I can get back to playing with OVM again.

I don’t know exactly what the problem was, but for the moment I’m going to bury my head in the sand and think happy thoughts. I’ve wasted far to much time with this already. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Oracle: It’s not for newbies…

I had this comment today related to RAC installation.

“thanks for the feedback, but for newbies this is where it gets confusing. No clear guidelines”

This post is not specifically about this comment, but it does bring up the issue I keep going back to again and again…

One of the things that annoys me about the Oracle marketing machine is they still try to make out all Oracle products are accessible for newbies. Oh really? Are you seriously telling me that Oracle RAC and Oracle Grid Control 11g are accessible for newbies?

I’ve been using Oracle products for about 17 years. I’ve been using Linux for about 13 years. I’ve been administering RAC for about 10 years. I don’t claim to be an international consultant to the stars, but I have a long history with this stuff. I’m not saying this to brag, just to put this into context. With all this experience I still don’t think this stuff is easy.

Check out the Oak Table Members list. Excluding myself, this is a “who’s who” of the people you would love to have on your site to show you how Oracle stuff really works. If you were part of the Oak Table mailing list you would see these people are still struggling with the idiosyncracies of some of this Oracle stuff. There are lots of RAC related issues under discussion all the time.

Knowing all this, do you really think you can roll up off the street and do a good job of installing and administering this stuff in a production environment? Do you think it is OK to be an SQL Server DBA on Windows today and start a job as an Oracle DBA on Linux tomorrow? I see this happening all the time because bosses don’t understand how complicated this technology can be. People do one Oracle installation on Windows and think the logical next step is RAC or Exadata.

I’m happy that Oracle have invested time and money in making Oracle *easier* to install and administer, but trying to tell people that it is easy is totally the wrong message. A week long course or a 2-Day DBA manual is not going to get someone up to speed.

For the next marketing slogan I suggest,

“Oracle. It’s f*ckin’ complicated, but it’s really cool!”

Rant over … until the next time… 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

No Linux servers for Oracle Support…

I was just mailed a bug update and it included this text (spelling mistakes theirs, not mine).

Note customer is on Linux but could not find an available
11.2 Linux database to test on.  Reprocided problem on Solaris
confirming that there is some generic problem here.

Really?

And here’s me thinking that firing up a VM with any version of Linux & Oracle was quick and easy. Perhaps their VMs are running on Amazon, hence the lack of available systems. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Oracle Database SQL Expert (1Z0-047) Notes…

About 7 months ago I wrote about sitting the Oracle Database SQL Expert (1Z0-047) exam. Since then I’ve been promising myself I’d write some articles about some of the sections tested by the exam. Lots of the content is pretty straight forward if you’ve been writing SQL for a few years. Also, there are lots of things that are covered in existing articles on the site.

I finally got round to writing a few posts about some of the exam content that isn’t covered, or is a bit “dispersed”, on my site.

OK, so the last one is not tested in the exam, but it should be. 🙂

With a bit of luck I’ll remember to link to these articles when people ask me questions in the future.

Cheers

Tim…