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?