Around election time, it is not uncommon to hear someone say, "I'm not going to vote because it never makes a difference." In these uncertain times, my response would be, "when is your vote more important?" Leaving politics aside, there are a couple places that your vote makes a difference right now!
User Group Survey
Several user groups, including the Independent Oracle Users Group have teamed with Oracle to find out how important your user group experience is to you and your company. The purpose of the survey is to show Oracle that their support of user groups is important and to allow the user groups to be able to better serve you, the member. Take a few minutes and let the community know your thoughts on user groups. You have until Friday, July 3 to make your voice heard. Take the survey here:
http://www.oraclesurveys.com/se.ashx?s=251137454671BECB
Oracle Mix Voting
Oracle OpenWorld planning is in full swing for the show in October. Did you know that you can have an influence on the content that is provided? Create an account on Oracle Mix if you don't already have one and vote for sessions that you would like to see. The link to vote is below. I voted for six sessions so far, but haven't looked at all of them. Check it out and make your voice heard so the conference is the best experience for you.
https://mix.oracle.com/oow/proposals
OpenWorld Sunday
Speaking of OpenWorld, while you are registering and making your travel arrangements, don't forget about the User Group Forum on Sunday. Several of the User Groups are presenting some of their best technical content. IOUG alone is participating in nine rooms with five sessions in each. Learn about everything from RAC, Linux, BI, and Exadata to Content Mangement, BEA/Portal technologies, Spatial technologies, and Application Express. Check out all the session on Oracle's Content Catalog at the link below. Search for Session Type of User Group Forum and SIG Meeting to find the content on Sunday. Make sure to be at OpenWorld early and take part in some great technical content.
http://www35.cplan.com/cc221_new/newCatalog.jsp
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Monitoring the Monitor
Occasionally we hear about government officials that are supposed to be watching out for our good and instead look out for their own. When this happens, people will sometimes ask, "Who was watching the watchers." I was reminded of this last week when our Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control server lost network connectivity and we were not notified. A very large thunderstorm passed through and we also found out the next morning that we had switched to generator power at least three separate times during the night. Sometime during one of those switch overs, the network interface lost contact.
Of course we did not realize it was down for about 14 hours. The company uses HP's Network Node Manager which raises alerts to the on-call help desk person, but for some reason, no call was made to the system administrator that the server was unavailable. Not only do we use Grid Control to monitor all of our Oracle and People Soft systems, but we also use it as a centralized job scheduler. Once the server was available again, I figured out that we missed about 150 jobs. No backups, no disaster recovery log maintenance, no nightly application maintenance jobs, no nothing for fourteen hours. The better part of the next day was spent running backups and getting our Data Guard instances caught up since the archivelog destinations filled up.
So now what? We considered writing a shell script and using cron on one of the production servers to ping the Grid Control server and e-mail if it was not available. Obviously, this is a bit "patchwork" but should at least tell us if the server is unavailable. Another option would be to set up Network Node Manager to page the system administrator directly if a server goes down. This would be my choice, and I plan to work to get this implemented, but at this time, I don't have access to that system. In the meantime we decided to use our test Grid Control system (yes, we have one) to monitor the production Grid Control server. Of course this means a separate Agent installed on the production server, but at least we will have visability into the system should something happen agin.
The question through all of this is how much is enough? I guess you could ask the same question about watching our government representatives... although I think they need to be watched even closer!
Of course we did not realize it was down for about 14 hours. The company uses HP's Network Node Manager which raises alerts to the on-call help desk person, but for some reason, no call was made to the system administrator that the server was unavailable. Not only do we use Grid Control to monitor all of our Oracle and People Soft systems, but we also use it as a centralized job scheduler. Once the server was available again, I figured out that we missed about 150 jobs. No backups, no disaster recovery log maintenance, no nightly application maintenance jobs, no nothing for fourteen hours. The better part of the next day was spent running backups and getting our Data Guard instances caught up since the archivelog destinations filled up.
So now what? We considered writing a shell script and using cron on one of the production servers to ping the Grid Control server and e-mail if it was not available. Obviously, this is a bit "patchwork" but should at least tell us if the server is unavailable. Another option would be to set up Network Node Manager to page the system administrator directly if a server goes down. This would be my choice, and I plan to work to get this implemented, but at this time, I don't have access to that system. In the meantime we decided to use our test Grid Control system (yes, we have one) to monitor the production Grid Control server. Of course this means a separate Agent installed on the production server, but at least we will have visability into the system should something happen agin.
The question through all of this is how much is enough? I guess you could ask the same question about watching our government representatives... although I think they need to be watched even closer!
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
Collaborate 09 - Wednesday
I wasn't able to write an update yesterday, but not because there wasn't anything to write about. On the contrary, I was so busy that I didn't have an opportunity to sit down long enough to write. The week has been very productive so far and will continue to be. Of course, everyone is looking forward to the party tonight and Universal Studios Islands of Adventure.
A few things that I didn't cover last time. Sunday evening we had the IOUG SIG Welcome Reception. This was very well attended and was a great opportunity to meet some new people and reconnect with people I haven't seen in a year. The Special Interest Groups each had a table and many people were interested in what the SIGs are doing. I was talking to many people about the Linux SIG and we should get some new blood into the group. Many thanks to SAP for sponsoring this event. We are always looking for vendors and friends that are willing to sponsor these events for us and SAP always seems to come through.
As one of the new IOUG Board of Directors members this year, I had my orientation yesterday to learn some more about my new responsibilities. I'm looking forward to the challenges and exciting times over the next two years of my term. My role on the Board will be Director of RUGs and SIGs. Joining these two groups under one Director makes a lot of sense. We should be able to jointly advertise for both groups as well as draw on each other's experiences and resources. Between the RUG Leader meeting yesterday and the SIG Council meeting this morning, I can already tell there is a lot of energy and great ideas from both communities.
The technical content this year is as good or better than it ever has been. All the new features of products and the new stuff people are doing with old things have been very interesting. Of course I have also been immersed in SIG meetings and Board of Directors meetings. I'm now in the last session of the day and learning about recovery scripts. An important topic, no doubt. It is very hard to believe that tomorrow is the last day already. I'm looking forward to a great time tonight with new and old friends. My presentation is finally tomorrow at 11:00. I'll be talking about the PeopleSoft Management Pack for Grid Control. I'm the very last session of the conference so I have a few giveaways to try to lure people in. Actually, I'm hoping that will get me some good reviews on my surveys!
See you on the roller coasters!
A few things that I didn't cover last time. Sunday evening we had the IOUG SIG Welcome Reception. This was very well attended and was a great opportunity to meet some new people and reconnect with people I haven't seen in a year. The Special Interest Groups each had a table and many people were interested in what the SIGs are doing. I was talking to many people about the Linux SIG and we should get some new blood into the group. Many thanks to SAP for sponsoring this event. We are always looking for vendors and friends that are willing to sponsor these events for us and SAP always seems to come through.
As one of the new IOUG Board of Directors members this year, I had my orientation yesterday to learn some more about my new responsibilities. I'm looking forward to the challenges and exciting times over the next two years of my term. My role on the Board will be Director of RUGs and SIGs. Joining these two groups under one Director makes a lot of sense. We should be able to jointly advertise for both groups as well as draw on each other's experiences and resources. Between the RUG Leader meeting yesterday and the SIG Council meeting this morning, I can already tell there is a lot of energy and great ideas from both communities.
The technical content this year is as good or better than it ever has been. All the new features of products and the new stuff people are doing with old things have been very interesting. Of course I have also been immersed in SIG meetings and Board of Directors meetings. I'm now in the last session of the day and learning about recovery scripts. An important topic, no doubt. It is very hard to believe that tomorrow is the last day already. I'm looking forward to a great time tonight with new and old friends. My presentation is finally tomorrow at 11:00. I'll be talking about the PeopleSoft Management Pack for Grid Control. I'm the very last session of the conference so I have a few giveaways to try to lure people in. Actually, I'm hoping that will get me some good reviews on my surveys!
See you on the roller coasters!
Monday, May 4, 2009
Collaborate 09 - Day 1: Charles Phillips
What a great start to Collaborate already! Charles Phillips, President of Oracle, had our keynote presentation this morning. Some highlights from the talk include some new releases, extension of support and a demo of Beehive. Charles mentioned that PeopleSoft 9.1 should be available around OpenWorld time. Not much more on that because the big deal was the announcement of EBuiness Suite 12.1. Along with that comes 9 new products that have been updated to 12.1 and 14 production that can run on 11i10 with no upgrade required. One of the main threads that came through was Oracle's sensitivity to the economic times and that not everyone can afford to upgrade. Along those lines he also announced extended support for several products without any additional cost. These included 10gR2 database, which was extended to July 2011, PeopleSoft 8.9, which was extended to Jun 2011, and EBusiness 11.9. I neglected to get that date, but they basically added a year. There were a couple other products that were extended, so I guess it's time to check out the support grid again.
Much of the discussion covered integration and collaboration. The Application Integration Model (AIA) has been expanded to include more applications and uses Oracle Middleware and web services to integrate applications. Oracle is selling the Process Integration Packs (PIP) in order to automatically integrate the applications. These are used to let Oracle worry about your integrations. Sounds great... I'd like to see it in action.
Speaking of seeing in action, there was a demo of Beehive. For many of us, we have heard the term, but are not sure what Beehive is or does. Collaboration and projects are becoming a big focus and this helps to address those issues. The big announcement today for Beehive is the release of the Team Collaboration module that goes GA tomorrow. This allows project teams to create Wikis, team calendars, versioning and check out of files all through one server. Beehive alos includes chat and e-mail and can integrate with other e-mail solutions. The demo was pretty cool and Charles said that Oracle is running this with ten to fifteen thousand users being hosted on one server.
One interesting side comment was about Exadata. Charles was talking about Exadata and how it currently uses Linux. Then he said that the Sun acquisition will not have any effect on Exadata, but that there will probably be a Solaris version at some point... interesting, very interesting.
I am now in the Darwin Awards for IT security. Some of these examples are a little funny and even more scary. I just hope never to be a recipient! More about Collaborate later.
Much of the discussion covered integration and collaboration. The Application Integration Model (AIA) has been expanded to include more applications and uses Oracle Middleware and web services to integrate applications. Oracle is selling the Process Integration Packs (PIP) in order to automatically integrate the applications. These are used to let Oracle worry about your integrations. Sounds great... I'd like to see it in action.
Speaking of seeing in action, there was a demo of Beehive. For many of us, we have heard the term, but are not sure what Beehive is or does. Collaboration and projects are becoming a big focus and this helps to address those issues. The big announcement today for Beehive is the release of the Team Collaboration module that goes GA tomorrow. This allows project teams to create Wikis, team calendars, versioning and check out of files all through one server. Beehive alos includes chat and e-mail and can integrate with other e-mail solutions. The demo was pretty cool and Charles said that Oracle is running this with ten to fifteen thousand users being hosted on one server.
One interesting side comment was about Exadata. Charles was talking about Exadata and how it currently uses Linux. Then he said that the Sun acquisition will not have any effect on Exadata, but that there will probably be a Solaris version at some point... interesting, very interesting.
I am now in the Darwin Awards for IT security. Some of these examples are a little funny and even more scary. I just hope never to be a recipient! More about Collaborate later.
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
My (Almost Solid) Collaborate 09 Schedule
With less than a week before Collaborate 09 in Orlando, I have been working on the schedule of sessions that I don't want to miss and trying to fit in as many as I can around meetings. Every year, I have the same issue. Do I attend sessions for things I'm working on now to see if I can better my current processes, or do I look for new features and future products? This is actually a good problem to have and is an indication of the level of content that will be available.
Meetings for Special Interest Groups and now the IOUG Board of Directors take about half of my time, but that leaves plenty of time for some great session content. I will be dipping into some of Quest' International's content this year also since I am back to supporting the PeopleSoft world. Besides PeopleSoft I am trying to balance my time between new topics and improvements to current projects I am working on.
I'm especially looking forward to the Darwin Awards for IT Security and New and Improved Features in 11g RMAN. There should be several things in both of these that I can use right away back at the office. Backup scripts without restore scripts??? Who would do that? I guess that will be one session I will have to check out and make sure my restore scripts are up to snuff. Of course, my own session, which happens to be the last technical session on Thursday will be of interest to anyone that supports PeopleSoft. We are implementing the PeopleSoft Management Pack for Grid Control and my presentation covers some of our headaches and successes.
Collaborate wouldn't be complete without catching up with all the people I have become friends with in the past and making some new ones. Talk about value for the money. My contacts from past conferences have saved me a ton of time and my company some cash in the process. If you think you might be missing out because you won't be in Orlando next week... you're right! You still have two days to get $200 off the on-site registration rate and discounted hotel rates. Make sure you don't find yourself stuck in a situation that you could have learned about by attending Collaborate 09!
And when Collaborate is over.... I'M GOING TO DISNEY WORLD!
I plan on Tweeting from the conference and will hopefully find some time to write blog entry or two. I hope you follow along! Find me on Twitter... toddsheetz.
Meetings for Special Interest Groups and now the IOUG Board of Directors take about half of my time, but that leaves plenty of time for some great session content. I will be dipping into some of Quest' International's content this year also since I am back to supporting the PeopleSoft world. Besides PeopleSoft I am trying to balance my time between new topics and improvements to current projects I am working on.
I'm especially looking forward to the Darwin Awards for IT Security and New and Improved Features in 11g RMAN. There should be several things in both of these that I can use right away back at the office. Backup scripts without restore scripts??? Who would do that? I guess that will be one session I will have to check out and make sure my restore scripts are up to snuff. Of course, my own session, which happens to be the last technical session on Thursday will be of interest to anyone that supports PeopleSoft. We are implementing the PeopleSoft Management Pack for Grid Control and my presentation covers some of our headaches and successes.
Collaborate wouldn't be complete without catching up with all the people I have become friends with in the past and making some new ones. Talk about value for the money. My contacts from past conferences have saved me a ton of time and my company some cash in the process. If you think you might be missing out because you won't be in Orlando next week... you're right! You still have two days to get $200 off the on-site registration rate and discounted hotel rates. Make sure you don't find yourself stuck in a situation that you could have learned about by attending Collaborate 09!
And when Collaborate is over.... I'M GOING TO DISNEY WORLD!
I plan on Tweeting from the conference and will hopefully find some time to write blog entry or two. I hope you follow along! Find me on Twitter... toddsheetz.
"Virtual" Test
Budgets, budgets, budgets. We all have to deal with budgets. Making sure we can pay the mortgage, make the car payment, and feed the family fit into the home budget. For anyone that is a member of an organization, such as IOUG, we may want to start a really cool project, but being a volunteer organization, the budget will not support it this year. Even sending my daughters to school has become interesting as the private school system that they attend has run into budgetary issues. Most everyone in the technology field, definitely has run into budget constraints at work. In my case, the most recent budget "issue" has been creating a test system for our latest project.
A project was started to consolidate some remote MS Access databases into a centralized Oracle database. This is a vendor application and either installation method is supported. As the application becomes more mission critical, however, the decision was made (and the correct one, in my opinion) to consolidate to our Network Operations Center. The issue that came up though was dollars. When the original budget was written for the project, dollars for a test system were forgotten. The production system was budgeted as a two-node cluster to support two different application databases. This was fine and should support what we want to accomplish, but test was completely overlooked.
So, how do you create a test cluster to support a production implementation when dollars are limited? In our case, the decision was made to purchase one physical server and user Oracle VM to create a test cluster. Not exactly the same as production, but at least we will have somewhere to test out operating system, database, clusterware, and ASM upgrades and patches before going directly into production.
Of course, we have had issues. There is a larger VM learning curve than we expected especially as it relates to storage. We are also feeling our way through resource allocation. Originally we underallocated CPU resources and couldn't install anything. The virtual guest machine showed that the CPU was pegged, but the physical host showed no activity. Allocating an extra virtual CPU took care of that issue, but we still had issues installing and configuring ASM. The normal installation of 11g and configuration of ASM was hanging and showing full CPU utilization, although it was creating the instances. My coworker has spent a couple days with Oracle support trying to figure things out and finally ended up creating everything manually instead. Just one instance of how virtualized environments are not quite as seamless as the are touted to be.
In any event, we have the viritual servers up and running. So now we need to create the databases and away we go! That is just one example of how, if necessary, budgets can be saved. Of course, we haven't proven that we can support any kind of test load on this architecture, but we should at least be able to see if the applications still function after an upgrade or patch.
One final plug, by the way, for the IOUG Forum at Collaborate 09. If you are looking for more ways to save budget dollars, there are lots of tips and tricks you can learn from your peers. I'm hoping to learn more about virtualization and how we can better tune our test system. Since budgets are tight everywhere, make sure you register online before April 30 to save $200. Also, the conference hotel rates have been discounted. There is not better bargain for training than learning from people that have actually used the technology...
A project was started to consolidate some remote MS Access databases into a centralized Oracle database. This is a vendor application and either installation method is supported. As the application becomes more mission critical, however, the decision was made (and the correct one, in my opinion) to consolidate to our Network Operations Center. The issue that came up though was dollars. When the original budget was written for the project, dollars for a test system were forgotten. The production system was budgeted as a two-node cluster to support two different application databases. This was fine and should support what we want to accomplish, but test was completely overlooked.
So, how do you create a test cluster to support a production implementation when dollars are limited? In our case, the decision was made to purchase one physical server and user Oracle VM to create a test cluster. Not exactly the same as production, but at least we will have somewhere to test out operating system, database, clusterware, and ASM upgrades and patches before going directly into production.
Of course, we have had issues. There is a larger VM learning curve than we expected especially as it relates to storage. We are also feeling our way through resource allocation. Originally we underallocated CPU resources and couldn't install anything. The virtual guest machine showed that the CPU was pegged, but the physical host showed no activity. Allocating an extra virtual CPU took care of that issue, but we still had issues installing and configuring ASM. The normal installation of 11g and configuration of ASM was hanging and showing full CPU utilization, although it was creating the instances. My coworker has spent a couple days with Oracle support trying to figure things out and finally ended up creating everything manually instead. Just one instance of how virtualized environments are not quite as seamless as the are touted to be.
In any event, we have the viritual servers up and running. So now we need to create the databases and away we go! That is just one example of how, if necessary, budgets can be saved. Of course, we haven't proven that we can support any kind of test load on this architecture, but we should at least be able to see if the applications still function after an upgrade or patch.
One final plug, by the way, for the IOUG Forum at Collaborate 09. If you are looking for more ways to save budget dollars, there are lots of tips and tricks you can learn from your peers. I'm hoping to learn more about virtualization and how we can better tune our test system. Since budgets are tight everywhere, make sure you register online before April 30 to save $200. Also, the conference hotel rates have been discounted. There is not better bargain for training than learning from people that have actually used the technology...
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
Collaborate 09 - Early Bird Registration and Special Offer
Okay, so I know I already posted today, but I don't think I put enough information about Early Bird Registration for Collaborate 09. You only have one more day to save $400 and get some extra stuff by using one of the special registration codes.
Register for the IOUG Forum by this Thursday, April 2 at http://w3.ioug.org/COLLAB09/LinkedIn using promotional code AD01 (choose this code during the demographic section – step 4 – of the registration process). You will receive a free Oracle Technology Best Practices Booklet and have your name entered into a raffle for an Apple iPod Touch. Of course, you also get access to the entire conference – more than 1,600 sessions! Oracle database, RAC, PeopleSoft, eBusiness Suite, Grid Control, and much more all in one place. All this training for one low price will save your company money by not having you go to multiple classes and you will be able to put the lessons learned into practice as soon as you get back to the office - and don't forget the networking.
Okay, enough marketing! I only blog about this because it is very important to me and I have benefitted from it for many years. I promise, you will not be disappointed!
Hope to see you in Orlando and make sure you get that registration in by tomorrow!
Register for the IOUG Forum by this Thursday, April 2 at http://w3.ioug.org/COLLAB09/LinkedIn using promotional code AD01 (choose this code during the demographic section – step 4 – of the registration process). You will receive a free Oracle Technology Best Practices Booklet and have your name entered into a raffle for an Apple iPod Touch. Of course, you also get access to the entire conference – more than 1,600 sessions! Oracle database, RAC, PeopleSoft, eBusiness Suite, Grid Control, and much more all in one place. All this training for one low price will save your company money by not having you go to multiple classes and you will be able to put the lessons learned into practice as soon as you get back to the office - and don't forget the networking.
Okay, enough marketing! I only blog about this because it is very important to me and I have benefitted from it for many years. I promise, you will not be disappointed!
Hope to see you in Orlando and make sure you get that registration in by tomorrow!
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