I was fortunate enough to be invited to the Oracle User Group Leaders' Summit at Oracle HQ in Redwood City this week. Once the Oracle-Sun deal was given the go ahead by the EC last week, we were invited to sit in live for the big announcement. My day started early after about five hours of sleep because my flight was late getting in last night. I met some of my fellow IOUG Board members for breakfast and ran into many others including Ronan Miles, UKOUG Chairman, who went to Brussels with IOUG President, Ian Abramson, to give the User Group position on the acquisition. Also ran into ODTUG President, Mike Riley, Quest President, Sue Shaw, and OAUG President, Ray Payne. That sounds like a lot of name dropping, and it is!
From breakfast, we walked over to the Oracle Conference Center and were ushered into the Auditorium. You can check out all my tweets from the session, but to sum it up, they are pushing hard on the integrated solution, complete platform for applications. We heard from Charles Phillips, who hoped we had a less eventful week than he has... Charles also talked about hiring 2000 people and if the current US Administration is looking for a jobs program, "her we are!" I won't go into politics here, but these are the kind of of things that should be focused on and learned from.
John Fowler, who is now EVP of Hardware Technologies at Oracle discussed the investments in Solaris and Sun hardware moving forward. Mike Splain, who seems to be the real techie, outlined the accelerated road maps for UltraSPARC and SPARC64. Oracle is putting more money into these platforms and they are hiring here too! My question continues to be how many people are getting laid off at the same time that they are hiring all these new positions. I'm sure the layoffs will get some money to walk away, but are they really just shifting positions? That hasn't been asked or answered yet.
The key theme continues to be seamless integrations between existing Oracle technologies and the newly acquired server, storage, and operating system. Supposedly all this testing has been done for many of the Oracle applications. Can they get these all working as they are advertising with flash technologies, new storage options, and newer Sun hardware and Solaris all remains to be seen. They keep selling the fact that they are being built and integrated together and if you have issues, you only have one support organization to deal with.
I'm still in the Oracle/Sun session and I'm sure there will be further information later. I also get a tour of the Usability Lab this afternoon which should be pretty interesting. Tomorrow starts the actual meetings including my first OpenWorld 10 planning meeting. I really wish we could finish one conference before starting planning for the next. Speaking of Conferences, don't forget about Collaborate 10! There will be sessions covering some of the new Sun technologies!
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Stay Competitive: Join Me at the COLLABORATE 10 – IOUG Forum
I invite you to join me at COLLABORATE 10 – IOUG Forum, April 18-22, 2010 in Las Vegas, NV. As a member of the IOUG Board of Directors, I am excited to let you know about the educational content that the conference committee has created for the Forum.
You will have the opportunity to attend educational sessions in all of the tracks offered at COLLABORATE, including: Application Strategy and Services, Infrastructure Technologies BI/Data Warehousing/EPM, Database, Development, Governance Risk and Compliance, Master Data Management/Application Integration and Professional Development.
The IOUG Forum does not only offer top-notch educational sessions that cover a variety of topics, but it’s also a great place to network with other Oracle professionals. We are offering many exciting networking opportunities this year. Whether it’s a technical talk during a Birds of a Feather meeting or an informal conversation at the IOUG Welcome Event, the IOUG Forum is the place to meet contacts who can share solutions to your most pressing business questions.
The IOUG will not be the only user group present at the event. For the fifth consecutive year, the Oracle Applications Users Group (OAUG) and Quest International Users Group (Quest) will be co-hosting this event, which means your registration through the IOUG also allows you to attend education sessions offered by these groups.
The main reason I attend is for the networking opportunities with my peers. In all the years I have been attending IOUG events, the opportunity to discuss current technologies and best practices has been the best way I have found to keep myself current. The technical content is also amazing. These are people that are using the technology on a daily basis.
This isn’t some huge vendor show full of sales presentations…it’s presented by users like you and me. If you have been to IOUG events before, you know that we feature real-world education and best practices. There is far too much content to completely list, but you can visit the IOUG Forum Web site to view the most up-to-date education details.
Make sure to register to attend and join me at the IOUG Forum! Please visit the IOUG Web site for further details and to register. Be sure to register by March 18 to save $400 USD off the onsite rate, and choose priority code PC03 during the demographic section (step 4) of the registration process and gain access to a number of IOUG-exclusive offerings. Help me spread the word and send this information to your colleagues and friends who are Oracle users.
Please contact me or the IOUG headquarters at ioug@ioug.org if you have any questions.
I hope to see you in Vegas!
You will have the opportunity to attend educational sessions in all of the tracks offered at COLLABORATE, including: Application Strategy and Services, Infrastructure Technologies BI/Data Warehousing/EPM, Database, Development, Governance Risk and Compliance, Master Data Management/Application Integration and Professional Development.
The IOUG Forum does not only offer top-notch educational sessions that cover a variety of topics, but it’s also a great place to network with other Oracle professionals. We are offering many exciting networking opportunities this year. Whether it’s a technical talk during a Birds of a Feather meeting or an informal conversation at the IOUG Welcome Event, the IOUG Forum is the place to meet contacts who can share solutions to your most pressing business questions.
The IOUG will not be the only user group present at the event. For the fifth consecutive year, the Oracle Applications Users Group (OAUG) and Quest International Users Group (Quest) will be co-hosting this event, which means your registration through the IOUG also allows you to attend education sessions offered by these groups.
The main reason I attend is for the networking opportunities with my peers. In all the years I have been attending IOUG events, the opportunity to discuss current technologies and best practices has been the best way I have found to keep myself current. The technical content is also amazing. These are people that are using the technology on a daily basis.
This isn’t some huge vendor show full of sales presentations…it’s presented by users like you and me. If you have been to IOUG events before, you know that we feature real-world education and best practices. There is far too much content to completely list, but you can visit the IOUG Forum Web site to view the most up-to-date education details.
Make sure to register to attend and join me at the IOUG Forum! Please visit the IOUG Web site for further details and to register. Be sure to register by March 18 to save $400 USD off the onsite rate, and choose priority code PC03 during the demographic section (step 4) of the registration process and gain access to a number of IOUG-exclusive offerings. Help me spread the word and send this information to your colleagues and friends who are Oracle users.
Please contact me or the IOUG headquarters at ioug@ioug.org if you have any questions.
I hope to see you in Vegas!
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
Three Recoveries, Two Refreshes, One Delete
I feel like it's been a month since my last entry. Oh yeah, that's because it has been. I continue to be amazed with how fast time flies the older I get. Kids are supposed to make you feel younger and as they grow up, I just feel older!
The title of this post describes a full day I had a few weeks ago with a vendor application. Another title could have been "Support That Cannot Be Reached is No Support At All." The application in question has a relatively small database, but a couple hundred users. We actually converted to this centralized solution for the application about six months ago and the business owner has been converting locations two or three per week since.
I came into work to a my voice mail light... never a good sign. Apparently, they attempted to convert a large site the night before and had out grown the tablespace. "No biggie," I said and proceeded to increase the amount of allocated space. "We still can't get into the application and we cannot access any of the sites." This was very peculiar because this application has a different schema for each site and the only common information is stored in a "root" schema that manages some information on which databases are available. The user attempted to remove the affected schema from the application and I dropped it from the database, but this still did not allow the users into the application.
I'm not the most experienced person in the world, but I have dealt with quite a few applications during my career. I have never seen an application that just stopped working because of running out of space and especially not when more space was allocated. We contacted the vendor's support only to find out that their most experienced support analyst was out of town at a conference. The person we did get on the phone helped us check several things in the root schema, but couldn't seem to find anything that looked out of sync. The vendor suggested that we recover the database to prior to the load of the new schema. Knowing that the recovery wouldn't be a problem, I did have to warn them that since they had loaded the schema over twelve hours prior. This of course brings up other issues about notifications, etc, but that is a discussion for another blog posting.
Once we made the decision to go ahead and do the recovery, I looked at the dba_users view to find out when the affected schema had been created. Being the good DBA that I am, I copied the current data files to a backup location and started my RMAN recovery. Everything went perfectly and, as expected, the database came back up without the new schema. I called the application owner and told him to check it out. "It still doesn't work..." CRAP!!!!
This is the point when I start to wonder what is really going on here. It is also the point when the owner mentions that he actually loaded two locations the night before, not just the one. So, that would be recovery number two. I again figured out when the original schema was loaded and recovered to that earlier time. This time, when the owner tested the application, it worked. Okay, so at least we know which location caused the issue.
Users are allowed back into the application at this point and we plan for moving forward. The application owner says that he had tested that site in the test environment, but that he would do it again. When he tested it the second time, he found an error with the source data. Once the data was fixed, the load into test was successful. Somehow, I was talked into trying the load into production again since it worked in the test environment. I should have known better because as soon as he reloaded the site production was broken again. And that would be the explanation for recovery number three...
After the final recovery, we went ahead and copied the most current production data into the test environment. That would be refresh number one and when the data was loaded into the refreshed test environment, it broke it. At least we now had somewhere to try to figure out the issues. One more refresh and we waited to hear from the support person that new the most about the application. This is the part of the whole story that frustrated me the most. Once we had the right support person available, he was able to look and see that there was a data issue with one of the tables in the root schema. Deleted one row after loading the bad data and everything was fine. They deleted the row from the source data, reloaded into test, and everything worked. Being gun shy, we waited until the weekend to load the data into production just in case, but everything worked as expected, and he was able to load both sites without issue.
I learned a couple lessons throughout this ordeal. First, I had a gut feel that there was a data issue and not the tablespace issue that caused the application to not function. Unfortunately, I couldn't find any way to prove that and therefore had to go with the recovery that was being suggested by the vendor. This also leads to making sure the vendor has people available when needed to support issues. Of course, I didn't have anything to do about this because the vendor was chosen by the business. The other "stick to your guns" moment I had was when they wanted to load the data into production again after we thought it had been fixed. I should have insisted on a test refresh at that time to make sure we wouldn't break production again.
On the other hand, there were several good things that came out of this. My recoveries worked pretty well and I proved that I could go back to a point in time if necessary. The even better part of this was that the original data load was before the backup so we had to go back two nights and roll forward. I used to be a scripted backup and recovery person that could take or leave RMAN. After all these recoveries, to multiple points in time, I am an RMAN fan.
Well, I hope everyone had a great Christmas season, or whatever holiday you celebrated. Have a safe, happy, and prosperous new year. More posts soon. I really hope to get to this more often than I have recently. Also, make sure to look for information on Collaborate 10! See you in Vegas!
The title of this post describes a full day I had a few weeks ago with a vendor application. Another title could have been "Support That Cannot Be Reached is No Support At All." The application in question has a relatively small database, but a couple hundred users. We actually converted to this centralized solution for the application about six months ago and the business owner has been converting locations two or three per week since.
I came into work to a my voice mail light... never a good sign. Apparently, they attempted to convert a large site the night before and had out grown the tablespace. "No biggie," I said and proceeded to increase the amount of allocated space. "We still can't get into the application and we cannot access any of the sites." This was very peculiar because this application has a different schema for each site and the only common information is stored in a "root" schema that manages some information on which databases are available. The user attempted to remove the affected schema from the application and I dropped it from the database, but this still did not allow the users into the application.
I'm not the most experienced person in the world, but I have dealt with quite a few applications during my career. I have never seen an application that just stopped working because of running out of space and especially not when more space was allocated. We contacted the vendor's support only to find out that their most experienced support analyst was out of town at a conference. The person we did get on the phone helped us check several things in the root schema, but couldn't seem to find anything that looked out of sync. The vendor suggested that we recover the database to prior to the load of the new schema. Knowing that the recovery wouldn't be a problem, I did have to warn them that since they had loaded the schema over twelve hours prior. This of course brings up other issues about notifications, etc, but that is a discussion for another blog posting.
Once we made the decision to go ahead and do the recovery, I looked at the dba_users view to find out when the affected schema had been created. Being the good DBA that I am, I copied the current data files to a backup location and started my RMAN recovery. Everything went perfectly and, as expected, the database came back up without the new schema. I called the application owner and told him to check it out. "It still doesn't work..." CRAP!!!!
This is the point when I start to wonder what is really going on here. It is also the point when the owner mentions that he actually loaded two locations the night before, not just the one. So, that would be recovery number two. I again figured out when the original schema was loaded and recovered to that earlier time. This time, when the owner tested the application, it worked. Okay, so at least we know which location caused the issue.
Users are allowed back into the application at this point and we plan for moving forward. The application owner says that he had tested that site in the test environment, but that he would do it again. When he tested it the second time, he found an error with the source data. Once the data was fixed, the load into test was successful. Somehow, I was talked into trying the load into production again since it worked in the test environment. I should have known better because as soon as he reloaded the site production was broken again. And that would be the explanation for recovery number three...
After the final recovery, we went ahead and copied the most current production data into the test environment. That would be refresh number one and when the data was loaded into the refreshed test environment, it broke it. At least we now had somewhere to try to figure out the issues. One more refresh and we waited to hear from the support person that new the most about the application. This is the part of the whole story that frustrated me the most. Once we had the right support person available, he was able to look and see that there was a data issue with one of the tables in the root schema. Deleted one row after loading the bad data and everything was fine. They deleted the row from the source data, reloaded into test, and everything worked. Being gun shy, we waited until the weekend to load the data into production just in case, but everything worked as expected, and he was able to load both sites without issue.
I learned a couple lessons throughout this ordeal. First, I had a gut feel that there was a data issue and not the tablespace issue that caused the application to not function. Unfortunately, I couldn't find any way to prove that and therefore had to go with the recovery that was being suggested by the vendor. This also leads to making sure the vendor has people available when needed to support issues. Of course, I didn't have anything to do about this because the vendor was chosen by the business. The other "stick to your guns" moment I had was when they wanted to load the data into production again after we thought it had been fixed. I should have insisted on a test refresh at that time to make sure we wouldn't break production again.
On the other hand, there were several good things that came out of this. My recoveries worked pretty well and I proved that I could go back to a point in time if necessary. The even better part of this was that the original data load was before the backup so we had to go back two nights and roll forward. I used to be a scripted backup and recovery person that could take or leave RMAN. After all these recoveries, to multiple points in time, I am an RMAN fan.
Well, I hope everyone had a great Christmas season, or whatever holiday you celebrated. Have a safe, happy, and prosperous new year. More posts soon. I really hope to get to this more often than I have recently. Also, make sure to look for information on Collaborate 10! See you in Vegas!
Monday, November 16, 2009
My First Two Weeks as an #OracleACE
Life has been a little interesting for me personally for the last couple of weeks and by interesting I mean not necessarily in a good way. Things are much better now, but let's just say that rushing down the hospital hall with your wife on her way to emergency surgery is something I do not want to have to experience again... EVER! She is doing well now and is on the mend, but it was a very scary experience.
Almost lost is all of that was my being named an Oracle ACE! I am very honored to be added to this incredible Oracle community. I have met and gotten to know many from the ACE community over the last couple of years and already feel very welcomed. Thank you to Michelle Malcher, Oracle ACE and fellow IOUG Board of Directors member, for nominating me for the ACE award. Thank you also to George Trujillo. George is a former IOUG Board member and Oracle ACE. He encouraged me to get started on the Enterprise Best Practices SIG when it was in its early stages. I was looking for a way to get involved and George helped make it happen for me.
Oracle has recognized the importance of Users Groups and has an entire group dedicated to supporting us. I have found that I have become a better technologist and have quicker answers to problems since joining and becoming involved with the IOUG. I am looking forward to many more years in the Oracle community and look forward to continuing to contribute as a member of the ACE community.
Almost lost is all of that was my being named an Oracle ACE! I am very honored to be added to this incredible Oracle community. I have met and gotten to know many from the ACE community over the last couple of years and already feel very welcomed. Thank you to Michelle Malcher, Oracle ACE and fellow IOUG Board of Directors member, for nominating me for the ACE award. Thank you also to George Trujillo. George is a former IOUG Board member and Oracle ACE. He encouraged me to get started on the Enterprise Best Practices SIG when it was in its early stages. I was looking for a way to get involved and George helped make it happen for me.
Oracle has recognized the importance of Users Groups and has an entire group dedicated to supporting us. I have found that I have become a better technologist and have quicker answers to problems since joining and becoming involved with the IOUG. I am looking forward to many more years in the Oracle community and look forward to continuing to contribute as a member of the ACE community.
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Interview Questions for Collaborate #c10
After much deliberation and thought, I finally decided to go a completely different direction for Collaborate 10 and do something for Professional Development. In the past I have presented on Clusterware, Data Guard, Oracle Portal, and, most recently, the PeopleSoft Management Pack for Grid Control. So, now for something completely different, I thought it would be fun to do something on interviewing.
Over the years, I have probably been on more than my fair share of interviews. Fortunately, so far, all have been by choice. The thing that always strikes me is the different types of questions that are asked. Some really make you think about your own experience and can trigger some good discussion. Others almost make you laugh. Not that I think it is a good thing to laugh at an interviewer, but at the same time they really make you wonder if this is a place you want to work. I have gathered several of these and have put together an abstract of the best and worst questions to ask or be asked in an interview. Some are down right funny and some should be standard because they show how people think and what their real experiences are.
If you want to hear what I think are good or bad, you'll have to attend Collaborate and check it out. What I would like are other examples from people that might be good to put into the presentation. Shoot me an e-mail or leave a comment and let me know if you have some really good, or really bad, interview questions. It should be kind of fun!
Over the years, I have probably been on more than my fair share of interviews. Fortunately, so far, all have been by choice. The thing that always strikes me is the different types of questions that are asked. Some really make you think about your own experience and can trigger some good discussion. Others almost make you laugh. Not that I think it is a good thing to laugh at an interviewer, but at the same time they really make you wonder if this is a place you want to work. I have gathered several of these and have put together an abstract of the best and worst questions to ask or be asked in an interview. Some are down right funny and some should be standard because they show how people think and what their real experiences are.
If you want to hear what I think are good or bad, you'll have to attend Collaborate and check it out. What I would like are other examples from people that might be good to put into the presentation. Shoot me an e-mail or leave a comment and let me know if you have some really good, or really bad, interview questions. It should be kind of fun!
Friday, October 23, 2009
Back to the Real World and RAC Architecture
I find it amazing that my last post was nine days ago already. It really seems like yesterday that I was still in San Francisco for OpenWorld. To close out that thought, the Aerosmith concert was pretty good, but not great. The could have played a little longer and done some more of the older stuff... (I was really hoping to hear "Big 10 Inch"). It is pretty amazing that they are able to put on that kind of a show at that age. I can only hope to be that active.
Thursday was actually not too bad mostly because I knew I had to be up early so I took it easier at the party than in past years. I was invited to the Inner Circle event for Oracle Fusion Applications because of my involvement on the Board of Directors with IOUG. This was my first event like this and it was very interesting. Most of what we saw and heard was not new to many in the audience because they had been taking part in the testing, but to me it was mostly new. The development and testing cycle they have been using was the most interesting part to me. It seems that Oracle is taking customer input very seriously. They have had users looking at the applications all along the way and taking the feedback and putting it into the applications. Hopefully that makes a better product for all of us.
For my company, the best part I heard was the ability to run Fusion apps along side existing applications. We are looking at adding some new modules to PeopleSoft and also bringing in some project management software. From what they showed us, the Fusion applications are built so we could bring in HR and Primavera on Fusion and seamlessly integrate with our existing PeopleSoft Financials system until we are ready to move that over. This sounds pretty nice and makes the switch seem easier than doing a full "fork lift" migration. I closed the trip with a PeopleSoft on RAC presentation and a late night trip home. All in all OpenWorld 09 was a great experience. Reconnecting with many people and putting faces to the phone voices make the trip worthwhile. Adding the content and the new people to be met are icing on the cake!
So, back to the real world. Part of the reason for attending the PeopleSoft on RAC session is that we are currently looking at replacing/upgrading our database infrastructure for PeopleSoft. I have spent part of the last couple of days researching and pricing a few different options for RAC. We currently have a shared HP Rx6600 that has eight cores and is virtualized. The database only has access to four cores and we are almost at capacity. The original plan was to purchase another Rx6600 and continue on that platform, but we are unsure of our growth over the next few years and think RAC would be a better option to give us the ability to scale as needed. That and the fact that the Rx6600 is Itanium are leading us to look at Intel based servers running Linux.
My main research points now are whether to go with more sockets with fewer cores or fewer sockets with more cores. I can see the pros and cons to both and will probably end up with fewer sockets with more cores, again because it gives us more flexibility for growth in the future. The other question is the interconnect. I'm sure gigabit ethernet would be okay, but I want to make sure there are no issues moving to a brand new platform. I'm including Infiniband switches into my design and figure I can always look at something less if we need to cut costs.
I have had to architect new solutions in the past and I always feel a little like I am putting my career on the line. That is where good research and good professional networks come into play. As long as I can back up my recommendations with multiple sources I am comfortable that things will work out. The user groups help here quite a bit (you didn't actually think I'd finish this without a user group plug). I have contacted three different people over the last couple of days for advice on my architecture. All have given me good advice and other sources of relevant information. I still haven't submitted an abstract for Collaborate 10 yet and they are due by midnight. Maybe this architecture research would be a good option...
Thursday was actually not too bad mostly because I knew I had to be up early so I took it easier at the party than in past years. I was invited to the Inner Circle event for Oracle Fusion Applications because of my involvement on the Board of Directors with IOUG. This was my first event like this and it was very interesting. Most of what we saw and heard was not new to many in the audience because they had been taking part in the testing, but to me it was mostly new. The development and testing cycle they have been using was the most interesting part to me. It seems that Oracle is taking customer input very seriously. They have had users looking at the applications all along the way and taking the feedback and putting it into the applications. Hopefully that makes a better product for all of us.
For my company, the best part I heard was the ability to run Fusion apps along side existing applications. We are looking at adding some new modules to PeopleSoft and also bringing in some project management software. From what they showed us, the Fusion applications are built so we could bring in HR and Primavera on Fusion and seamlessly integrate with our existing PeopleSoft Financials system until we are ready to move that over. This sounds pretty nice and makes the switch seem easier than doing a full "fork lift" migration. I closed the trip with a PeopleSoft on RAC presentation and a late night trip home. All in all OpenWorld 09 was a great experience. Reconnecting with many people and putting faces to the phone voices make the trip worthwhile. Adding the content and the new people to be met are icing on the cake!
So, back to the real world. Part of the reason for attending the PeopleSoft on RAC session is that we are currently looking at replacing/upgrading our database infrastructure for PeopleSoft. I have spent part of the last couple of days researching and pricing a few different options for RAC. We currently have a shared HP Rx6600 that has eight cores and is virtualized. The database only has access to four cores and we are almost at capacity. The original plan was to purchase another Rx6600 and continue on that platform, but we are unsure of our growth over the next few years and think RAC would be a better option to give us the ability to scale as needed. That and the fact that the Rx6600 is Itanium are leading us to look at Intel based servers running Linux.
My main research points now are whether to go with more sockets with fewer cores or fewer sockets with more cores. I can see the pros and cons to both and will probably end up with fewer sockets with more cores, again because it gives us more flexibility for growth in the future. The other question is the interconnect. I'm sure gigabit ethernet would be okay, but I want to make sure there are no issues moving to a brand new platform. I'm including Infiniband switches into my design and figure I can always look at something less if we need to cut costs.
I have had to architect new solutions in the past and I always feel a little like I am putting my career on the line. That is where good research and good professional networks come into play. As long as I can back up my recommendations with multiple sources I am comfortable that things will work out. The user groups help here quite a bit (you didn't actually think I'd finish this without a user group plug). I have contacted three different people over the last couple of days for advice on my architecture. All have given me good advice and other sources of relevant information. I still haven't submitted an abstract for Collaborate 10 yet and they are due by midnight. Maybe this architecture research would be a good option...
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Wednesday at OpenWorld
So, today has been a busy day for me. Several meetings with Oracle execs. IOUG is very fortunate to be supported by such great people within Oracle. The day started with a breakfast meeting with a Director in the BI area. He will be supporting us in our regional BI efforts. Mark is totally supportive of what we are doing and will be helping to promote the event within Oracle.
My next meeting was with a senior manager in Oracle North American User Groups. I have worked with Tina over the last six months on our regional user group programs. She is totally supportive of us and we had a great meeting talking about where we are going with the programs and how to better support the members in the regional areas. This support structure within Oracle has been great for IOUG as we grow our membership. They give us the support we need while letting us remain independent. Excellent partnership...
IOUG president Ian Abramson and I met with a database development director to talk about offerings in the DBA developer space. Oracle has been working on some specific training for DBA's to introduce them to some of the development tools. This training is also good for developers, but in general they are targeting the training to the database development tools. APEX, PL/SQL, JDBC, C, C++, etc are all on the radar screen. Oracle feels they are losing some database development because people are setting up smaller database environments to do the development and then going to production with those instead of moving to the enterprise RDBMS. This makes complete sense and the IOUG can work very will with this team to promote the training and hopefully even deliver some of it.
I did make it to one session today which was PeopleSoft BI Tools. This was pretty good and was timely for me since we are looking at some PeopleSoft BI options at my "real job". There are some great tools out there that can be implemented quickly without building a bunch of new stuff. I also went to my first "unconference" session ever. This was on Oracle Warehouse Builder and even though a lot of it was over my head it was great information.
Larry seems to be finally winding down... wait, maybe not. Anyway, tonight is the big party. I'm looking forward to some more networking opportunities. Last night I was at the Oracle Publisher's reception and met someone from Land's End in Dodgeville, WI. He is an Oracle Press author and wants to get involved with the Wisconsin regional Oracle users group. Amazing how small the world really is and part of why I like being here. Limitless opportunities to meet with peers.
I should be closing out tomorrow as I head home to the family. A couple days away are nice, but it is always better to go home to Mary, Grace, and Abigail. See you tomorrow Sheetz girls!
My next meeting was with a senior manager in Oracle North American User Groups. I have worked with Tina over the last six months on our regional user group programs. She is totally supportive of us and we had a great meeting talking about where we are going with the programs and how to better support the members in the regional areas. This support structure within Oracle has been great for IOUG as we grow our membership. They give us the support we need while letting us remain independent. Excellent partnership...
IOUG president Ian Abramson and I met with a database development director to talk about offerings in the DBA developer space. Oracle has been working on some specific training for DBA's to introduce them to some of the development tools. This training is also good for developers, but in general they are targeting the training to the database development tools. APEX, PL/SQL, JDBC, C, C++, etc are all on the radar screen. Oracle feels they are losing some database development because people are setting up smaller database environments to do the development and then going to production with those instead of moving to the enterprise RDBMS. This makes complete sense and the IOUG can work very will with this team to promote the training and hopefully even deliver some of it.
I did make it to one session today which was PeopleSoft BI Tools. This was pretty good and was timely for me since we are looking at some PeopleSoft BI options at my "real job". There are some great tools out there that can be implemented quickly without building a bunch of new stuff. I also went to my first "unconference" session ever. This was on Oracle Warehouse Builder and even though a lot of it was over my head it was great information.
Larry seems to be finally winding down... wait, maybe not. Anyway, tonight is the big party. I'm looking forward to some more networking opportunities. Last night I was at the Oracle Publisher's reception and met someone from Land's End in Dodgeville, WI. He is an Oracle Press author and wants to get involved with the Wisconsin regional Oracle users group. Amazing how small the world really is and part of why I like being here. Limitless opportunities to meet with peers.
I should be closing out tomorrow as I head home to the family. A couple days away are nice, but it is always better to go home to Mary, Grace, and Abigail. See you tomorrow Sheetz girls!
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