Wednesday, April 25, 2018

COLLABORATE: Day 3

Even though I had to get up bright and early to get ready to be involved in the first two sessions of the day, it was not a chore because I am back in the conference swing! My feet might hurt, and my brain too a bit, but I forgot how much I missed this conference!

Upgrade SIG - Sandra Vucinic, Panel & Me! - 8:30 AM

I enjoyed how little Sandra had to present, but she could barely get through it because the crowd was really into the subject and kept asking good questions which fired off many discussions from the panel! An important takeaway for me is that there is likely no upgrade path from R11 to R12.3 when it comes out because it will be another major technical upgrade like from R12.1.3 to R12.2.1 was.

Analyzing Oracle Workflow Data for Increased System Performance - Me! - 9:45 AM

This is the old standby, the one that first got me on this journey, so it is good to get back to it AND I was able to address a question that had come up during the week at another Workflow event too like when should I purge (always!).

Workflow Administration 101 - Mary Hammes - 11 AM

Even though this is a 101 class, do not be fooled, it is GOOOOOD! I am taking this home and sharing this with the EBS Administrators-to-be so they can see a real world example of what we used to do in the day with workflow a LOT and what they might be asked to do/investigate. I mean, there is a reason that 40-50 people AT LEAST attended this session!! Awesome response, with about 10-15 people hanging out afterwards to chat with Mary and other OAUG members too. That is what COLLABORATE is all about! Oh and did you ever think to add a vacation rule to the SYSADMIN account to route errors to your team? Me neither, that is really smart!

Virtualized Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) - Containers and VMs for RAC - Marcus Michalewicz (@OracleRACpm) - 12:15 PM

I thought this session was interesting, and to start off the comment was made that "generally, the Oracle DB & Oracle RAC could be supported on a variety of virtual platforms". Ohhhhh really? While Oracle VM is the only certified VM solution for Oracle RAC for x86 environments, did you know that Docker Containers are supported for Oracle RAC for test and development environments? Yeah, I did not either!

Workflow Tips and Tricks - (@anand_jp07) - 1:15 PM

I was really looking forward to this one, but in the end the title should have been "Workflow Tips and Tricks for Developers" since the speaker went over what Workflow was, showed a very outdated technical diagram with OAS 10g as our platform, and just generally was going over how you would change things in Workflow Builder if you had different business cases. Kind of disappointing for me, but I hope the other attendees got something out of it!

Hit Refresh with Oracle GoldenGate Microservices - Bobby Curtis (@dbasolved) - 2:30 PM

This topic was all about Release 12.3 for GoldenGate and first off a major thing in this release is moving from a reliance on command line interface and going to a GUI instead! Whoa!! Really??!!? This release seems to be shaking the whole dynamic up, as it is a significant change in the architecture of GoldenGate for pretty much the first time in 20 years by having different REST APIs replacing key components of your architecture and even introducing AdminClient which is your GUI with security actually modeled and defaulted in the tool.

Virtualizing Oracle 12cR2 RAC Databases with Oracle VM and/or VMWare - Kai Yu (@ky_austin1)- 4:15 PM

While I had some RAC virtualization from Marcus earlier in the day, I was thinking this would be more compare/contrast of the options, and maybe even a discussion of why you would pick one, but in the end it was a very technical discussion of how to implement each option. Not what I was expecting, but a good kind of talking point abstract that I can try to get my head around if we decided to go to either option some day. Very interesting how the Dell EMC Ready Bundle (small version) is 6 VMs that can support up to 10 DB instances and they are building much bigger systems to handle larger ecosystems!!

Tuesday, April 24, 2018

COLLABORATE18: Day 2

I may have planned on sleeping in just a bit and missed the robots, AI and the future keynote this morning since I have already seen the Terminator movies, so I know how this ends in Skynet. :}

Working with Oracle 12c Databases in the Cloud - Mark Kurtz (@ToadSC_CHI) - 9:45 AM

I really enjoyed this session a LOT! There was quite a bit of material which added CONTEXT, something I am not seeing a whole lot in some Cloud presentations/papers, around the questions you need to be asking in the meetings where people are deciding to go/figuring out how to go "the Cloud". Why are you going? What are you trying to accomplish by going? Then there are a SLEW of questions you need to be asking your vendor too!

Troubleshooting Workflow Notification Mailer in Your E-Business Suite - Jevgenijs Reuts (@jreuts) - 11 AM

I went into this session expecting a lot of razzle dazzle about everything new, but instead I was pleasantly surprised to see quite a bit of repetition about troubleshooting the mailer because it was done in such a thoughtful way, that for people that have not had these experiences now they have blueprints for how to deal with several different common scenarios! Even picked up some new things along the way, like did you know that FNDCPGSC is the mailer process that you can look for at the OS level? Oh and also there is a Workflow Purge Data Collection Script in MOS note 750497.1 which I will check out later to make sure I am not missing anything obvious in my toolkit!

Survival Tips for an Oracle DBA inside the MySQL World - Nisha Riyaj - 12:15 PM

If you go to mysql.com there is a Community Edition which is free to download and use, so you can get some practice! Look at 1300654.1 for help installing it, but it is as simple as yum install mysql and then you are on your way! SYSDBA = root in MySQL, spfile = my.cnf file in MySQL, schema = database in MySQL, SELECT * FROM V$SESSION = show processlist \G;, also there are many different log files in MySQL and the binary log is the transaction log.

ASM Concepts, Architecture and Best Practices - Pini Dibask (@pini_dibask) - 1:15 PM

This one was not exactly what I thought it would be, but then again, it was exactly as advertised in an odd way. For some reason I thought this was going to go over the internals of ASM, but it was more basic low level concepts and even then I still picked up a lot of information like an ASM allocation unit is the smallest ASM unit, what the 3 ASM redundancy levels are (normal, high, and external), and even tables in ASM to look at for detailed status information like GV$ASM_DISK_STAT and GV$ASM_DISKGROUP_STAT. Getting into this session really made me want to finish up my Oracle Press book on ASM that I started a long time ago, and then get some hands on with ASM.

The Secret to Driving Digital Transformation within Your Organization - Chris Garrity & Shane Eisenhauer (@Terillium) - 2:30 PM

I thought this was going to be a sales pitch, and thankfully I was WRONG! This was pretty good example of how to drive digital transformation in 4 ways: stay informed, evaluate opportunities, set your strategy in motion, and achieve results. It seems simple when you think about it! Along the lines of Tesla outpacing GM in a session yesterday, did you know that by the end of 2019 digital transformation spending is supposed to be $1.7 Trillion worldwide? What about end of 2018 Cloud spend is supposed to be $160 Billion? Change is here, we need to embrace it and use it to benefit us.

Buzzword Bingo -- What does DevOps, IaaS, PaaS, CI/CD mean for the Oracle DBA? - Kirby McCord - 4:15 PM

Right off the bat, one of the first content slides shook me up since it had the regular People, Process, and Technology diagram BUT this time it had Organizational Culture smack dab in the middle which is TRUE and the first time I had ever seen that articulated in the "PPT" discussion! Very interesting! Did you know that for the most part Exadata hardware costs have stayed relatively the same since V2, up to X6, but the software costs have exploded? An example of the changing times where compute power/hardware is getting cheaper (or staying the same cost for more power) but the software to run on them is costing more. Again, The Phoenix Project book is mentioned. I really have to read this sucker! Three main ideas for DevOps: System Thinking, Continuous Experimentation, and Amplifying Feedback Systems. Also, Kirby kind of rocked my world with the statement "Standardize before Automation" which seems SO obvious, but for a complex organization it is incredibly difficult to do! As he said, every database is a snowflake, sometimes on purpose (read: job security), sometimes just out of habit/ignorance/"this is how we have always done things". Sound familiar to you?

Monday, April 23, 2018

COLLABORATE18: Day 1

Yesterday you probably noticed a trend, and today I can tell you was NOT all about me. :} Instead of running or helping run SIG meetings, I decided to spend my day getting outside of my comfort zone and getting into sessions that were not in my wheelhouse so I would have to stretch and pick up new skills or at least knowledge/terminology!

Building A Continuous Development Pipeline for WebLogic DevOps - Eric Mader (@ericgmader) - 9:45 AM

Eric sure knows his stuff! We do have CD were I work, but we are not fully DevOps in my area...yet...AND I have been working on WebLogic for the past year so this was too good to pass up! I liked it, and it helped reinforce some things like the People, Process, Technology pyramid, that I have to read The Phoenix Project book, and what some obvious benefits of DevOps are. Oh, and it was interesting how there is a new role coming out called "Operation Developer" which really embraces DevOps and what a person has to do here in this space.

Introducing Kafka to the Oracle DBA - Mike Donovan (@dbvisitmike) - 11 AM

I was totally not ready for this session, and that is great! It was ALL completely new to me!! "The truth is the log. The database is a cache of a subset of the log." Whooooooaaaaaa!! Boiling Kafka down to the nitty-gritty, it is pretty much just a log writer/reader that is really good at what it does. I need to get over to http://confluent.io to see about getting some free books which may include Kafka: The Definitive Guide book, or otherwise just find it online at a retailer since this seems like a wide open space which is interesting.

The Self-Driving Oracle Database of the Future (or Present) - Rich Niemiec (@RichNiemiec) - 12:15 PM

DBAs need to become data experts, not database experts to survive the future, which includes moving closer to the business and innovation. Awesome stuff to hear! Data will become the new oil, which we see with Tesla becoming worth more than General Motors who shipped 92 TIMES as many cars as Tesla in a quarter recently. On-Prem 18c DB WILL exist. Also, try it out by going to http://cloud.oracle.com/tryit with some free credits.

Going Serverless - An Introduction to AWS Glue - Michael Rainey (@mRainey) - 1:15 PM

In this context, serverless is going to a fully managed provider which allows developers to focus on developing instead of supporting. There are challenges facing this such as: monitoring, debugging, integration testing is difficult, maintaining state of application across multiple functions is tricky, startup latency, built for small short functions, vendor lock-in. AWS Glue - "a fully managed extract, transform, and load (ETL) service" straight from their manual.

General Session: Oracle Cloud - How to Build Your Own Personalized Path to Cloud - Steve Daheb SVP (@OracleCloud) - 2:30 PM

This one was a lot of general things I have heard before, including some data/examples Rich shared at lunchtime (like AWS only offering 99.95% availability which comes out to 20 minutes of downtime a month NOT including several other reasons there could be an outage, yet Oracle is offering 99.995% which means less than 2.5 minutes of downtime a month WITH NO CAVEATS), but one thing I heard which caught my attention was Oracle Autonomous Cloud is coming at some point, in addition to the OLTP version of this (18c) coming this Summer.

Advance from DBA to Cloud Administrator - Erik Benner (@Erik_Benner) - 4:15 PM

This echoed a lot of what Rich was saying too, where DBAs need to go from Database Management to Systems Management. Example of how many people in the audience (most) that were using Outlook 365 which is just an instance of a workload/system moving out of your DC and into the Cloud. New skills you need to get include: DATA administrator, small environments (focus on the application), large environments (focus on all of that plus, automation, security, integration). Brand new product to help with this called Oracle Management Cloud, which is NOT replacing Oracle Enterprise Manager, but this is an evolution of OEM in that it is using a big data repository to put just about everything into the same bucket so it can learn about the whole system. After it learns, it allows you to drill into what it has aggregated so you can get down to the specific transaction/SQL statement/error message at any time in the past. Heady stuff!!

Sunday, April 22, 2018

COLLABORATE18: Pre-Day

Hello faithful readers, I have returned to regale you with stories of the OAUG COLLABORATE conference for 2018!  I will try to start returning to some kind of regular blogging this year, but we will see how it goes.  :}

Workflow SIG Meeting - Why Won't My Workflows Purge!?!?!?!? - Karen Brownfield (@BrownfieldKaren) and I

Karen put together the presentation for this session which pulled together a lot of what she has done, things I have done, and even things that former SIG Chair John Peters has done over the years, so it was really awesome to see things come together like that. I'm going to change what I do a bit this year, and NOT detail everything little thing I see in a session, BUT I will post some of her tips and tricks later this year because some of them were really good, and deserve their own spotlight.

EBS SysAdmin SIG Meeting - James Marrow (@jjmarrow) and I

Brandy Robert w/Oracle from Proactive Support had a really great presentation for us!
Are you using Online Patching Log Analyzer Utility for ADOP?  What about Online Patching Diagnostic Reports for ADOP too?
Check out 1901242.1 for ADOP diag information.
Of course there is always 432.1 on MOS.  :}
There are changes to analyzers detailed in 1939637.1 to allow them to autoupdate!

Database SIG Meeting - Michael Brown (@MichaelBrownOrg) and I

News about a new EBS Advanced Architecture and High Availability SIG coming out!
Santiago Bastidas from Oracle had a presentation on licensing EBS on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
EBS - BYOL (Bring Your Own License), only PROD instances, still pay yearly support
Cloud - subscribe to basic IaaS services
Differences between BYOL for app server EE on Compute, BYOL DB EE on Compute, BYOL DB EE to DB Cloud Services, and Exadata Cloud Service
Cloud pricing = automation + infrastructure + (licensing) but (licensing) gets waived with BYOL