Here’s a quick reminder of a couple of events happening this week.
On Tuesday evening it’s Oracle Midlands Event #9 in Birmingham. First up is Joel Goodman, who is practically a walking Oracle Encyclopaedia, speaking about “Oracle Distributed Transactions”. Next up is Richard Harrison, a regular Oracle Midlands attendee and returning speaker, this time presenting about “Data Pump Tips & Tricks”. It’s going to be a good evening, so please come out and show your support! It’s sponsored by Red Stack Technology, so it’s free!
On Wednesday it is the UKOUG Systems Event. I’m in the first slot, so it’s going to be an extremely early train ride for me. There is packed agenda, so I’m sure there is something for everyone involved in the systems side of things!
Hopefully I’ll get to see some of you folks at these events!
I know you’ve all been thinking, “It’s about time there was a new release of VirtualBox so I can reinstall the guest additions on all my VMs!” If so, it’s your lucky day!
On Friday I took a day off work to pop over to do my 3rd talk at Birmingham City University (BCU). This one was rather unfamiliar territory for me, because it was directed at the staff and was focussed on student employability…
During a previous discussion with Stuart Hutchison from BCU, he suggested I take the “Community” session I presented at the UKOUG Next Gen event, add in some information about graduate recruitment and Bob’s your uncle. Sounds fine, but what do I know about graduate employment? It’s 20+ years since I left university…
Luckily, the online community came to the rescue. I sent a bunch of emails out to friends, small companies and huge corporate types. Over the years I’ve built up a network of contacts all over the world who were happy to help me out directly, or put me in touch with people in their organisation that could. I’ve already sent out thank you emails, but I’d just like to take the opportunity to say a big thank you once again to everyone that helped me out!
As the session started, people introduced themselves and it became apparent that everyone in the room (except me) was in some way linked to student employment and career development. Needless to say, I suddenly felt completely out of my depth, incredibly nervous and needed a change of underwear! 🙂 I introduced myself and made it very clear I was definitely not an expert in this subject, then proceeded to present the information I had gathered. It was meant to be about 60 minutes, but there was a lot of audience participation, so it ended up being more like 90 minutes. Despite my initial nerves, it went really well and was really good fun.
After the session I chatted with Professor Nick Morton, the Associate Dean (Student Experience) at BCU, and he was keen to get me involved in some of the other stuff they are doing, which also sounds like fun. After that I spent quite a long time chatting with Stuart. I will of course keep doing the technical stuff with his students.
I guess some of you may be wondering about my motivation for doing this stuff, especially the non-technical presentations. This isn’t a career move. I’m not being paid to do this. It’s good to try something different and stretch yourself. I’m not suggesting that technical presentations are easy, because they are not, but doing things like this take you out of your comfort zone and teach you a lot about the craft of presenting. I definitely feel this is making me a better presenter, which is a great confidence builder.
I guess you could call it a list of nice-to-haves, rather than something revolutionary, but I’m sure someone will come back to me saying one of them has changed their life! 🙂
It was 9 years ago today I became an Oracle ACE. Yes, it was April 1st. 🙂
A couple of years ago I wrote an anniversary post called Should you aim to become an Oracle ACE? I think that post still reflects my feelings about the program. 🙂
So that’s 9 years done and I’m starting my 10th year. It’s crazy how quick times flies!
Cheers
Tim…
PS. After 9 years, I still can’t fill in an expense claim properly…
I decided I wanted to play with the newly released Spartan browser on Windows 10. Spartan comes with Windows 10 (build 10049), which does not have an ISO download available at the moment. So instead, I downloaded the x64 ISO image of Windows 10 (build 10041) and installed it on VirtualBox.
To get build 10049 you have to switch the Windows Update settings from “Slow” to “Fast”, which gives you access to the latests builds as soon as they are available.
That done, Windows Update will then download build 10049, which is pretty much a full OS download again. Once rebooted, the OS auto-installs for ages, with a few reboots, but when it is done you are left with the latest Windows 10 build.
It boots to the desktop and feels quite similar to Windows 8.1. If you are interested in the latest start menu, here it is.
If I’m honest, I’ve never seen the Windows 8.1 start menu live. The Windows 8 menu was so bad I installed Classic Shell on the Windows 8 machines for my family. I’ve never removed it since the 8.1 upgrade. As a result, I don’t really know if this Windows 10 start menu is new or like the 8.1 menu. I would probably stick with this menu myself, knowing that Classic Shell is always available if it pisses me off. 🙂
Most importantly, THIS IS SPARTA(N)!
Not surprisingly, it’s a just a browser and any site that sticks reasonably close to the standards will work fine.
So that was the fun bit. Now I’ve got to look at what this is going to break. I’m guessing Oracle Forms isn’t going to like it. 🙂
Cheers
Tim…
PS. Alex – By “and junk” I was not implying it is junk. Este Uimitor!
Update: Installed Oracle Database 12c on Windows 10 without any problems. Happy days!
Mary Ann Davidson wrote a great piece on her security blog today, which basically talked about focusing on the important vulnerabilities, not necessarily the ones that get the most press. Added to that, the risk associated with a vulnerability may well be different for you compared to everyone else, depending on how your system is used. I agree with what she is saying, but I’m going to take a slightly different angle on the subject.
Over the years I’ve come across lots of different attitudes to database patching from management and DBAs. As more DBAs are now involved in looking after middle tier products like WebLogic, some of those attitudes to patching have moved into that world too. It seems to break down into three camps.
We don’t need no stinkin’ patches. If this is the way you roll you are a dumb-ass!
We only patch stuff that represents a vulnerability for us. This sounds kind-of sensible, but life can get very difficult trying to decide what constitutes a threat, especially when you have to consider all layers of the technology stack.
We always apply all patches. This is logically simple, but you are going to apply a lot more patches, a lot more frequently, which is going to require a lot more testing.
Patching is not just about security.
Support of some products is tied into the patch version. We see this with Oracle products all the time. There are some important deadlines coming up soon! 🙂
The rest of the world is moving on around you. You might be happy with your unpatched product, but things might break because of external factors. If someone turns off SSLv3 on their application server, you aren’t doing HTTPS callouts from your database to it unless you patch up to 11.2.0.3 or later. Your applications will probably get browser compatibility issues on newer browsers and mobile devices unless you keep on top of patching your development frameworks.
Patches like the database PSUs come with extra functionality, including backports of features from newer releases (redaction – 11.2.0.4). They can also bring with them features that make future upgrades easier (transport database – 11.2.0.3 onward).
Choosing not to patch is not really an option these days. Your company has to understand this and allocate the correct amount of resource to getting it done. That might mean more staff resources allocated to patching and subsequent testing (rather than doing “productive” work), outsource the work where you can or moving to cloud services where regular patching is part of the deal.
I’ve just found out I’ve got a paper selected for the UKOUG System Event on May 20th. Check out my badge. 🙂
I was a spectator at last year’s event. At first glance you might think much of the content is not directly related to my job, since I’m not a system administrator, virtual infrastructure administrator and I don’t use any Oracle engineered systems, appliances or storage products. Having said all that, it’s hard to be a DBA these days without having a finger in several pies. Most of the information discussed at these events is relevant, even if you are not using the exact same kit or doing the exact same job as the speaker.
Every so often I have a nose around the contents of the Oracle Linux public yum repositories and guess what I found in the OL7.1 base and OL7 latest repositories.
The datestamps suggest they’ve been around since the 5th February, but I think these only became available with the release of OL7.1.
On the positive side, this means installations of 11g and 12c just got a whole lot easier on Oracle Linux 7. On the downside, I’ve got some minor rewrites to do. 🙂
