Wednesday, April 10, 2019

COLLABORATE19: Day 3

8:00 AM–9:00 AM - Compute Cloud Performance Showdown: Oracle, AWS, IBM, Google, Azure - @Ahmed_Aboulnaga

I really liked the subject matter, but really, really liked how Ahmed presented his findings by mainly focusing on the data results, and how he tried to make sure all VMs from the different providers were the same before he started. One caveat, by way of story, is that Netflix found out that all AWS VMs do not perform the same, so they will build thousands at a time, and then test them, destroying those VMs which do not perform up to expectations; Ahmed's point here was that he did not have the time or resources to do that, so was assuming each vendor would provide a VM that would perform the best they could, and he was not taking dedicated hardware options either as that defeats his purpose of testing actual VMs. In general, he found that AWS has a slight edge over the competition (mostly due to their newer and higher end CPU model), and in most testing Azure was the lowest performer, and Oracle Cloud was roughly half the price of the other options.

9:15 AM–10:15 AM - Enabling Canary Testing with Edition-Based Redefinition - @mohio73

With this presentation, Michael spent a lot of time explaining what canary testing and EBR were, before he did a very extensive demo to show how sessions connecting to the database to the ORA$BASE version would get redirected to the new VERSION1 edition after setting up triggers. I really did like this, and the demo was great, but I would have liked a little more about the canary release strategy. Visit https://www.github.com/mfhaynes/canary_ebr to get his code for the demo and see what he was doing!

10:30 AM-11:30 AM - Automate the operation of your Oracle Cloud infrastructure - @ncalerouy

This was a lot of screenshots and information, but there were a few tidbits here and there which I found useful like making sure you look for the new version of OCI documentation on docs.cloud.oracle.com as any OCI documents on docs.oracle.com actually refer to OCI CLASSIC and now v2. If you want to work with APIs, there are a few links to check out on docs.cloud.oracle.com/iaas/api/ and docs.cloud.oracle.com/iaas/Content/API/Concepts/devopstools.htm and when you are spinning up instances you have to make sure port 22 is open so read MOS Note 2433870.1 for all the details.

Lunch again! Beginning to be a habit here, but I had to make it a short lunch since I wanted to visit a session at noon, and the flat iron steak was pretty good even in a hurry.

12:00 PM-12:30 PM - All you need to know about Backup and Recovery - @fcomunoz

Did you know that Francisco has built a free tool called CrashSimulator that will do just that? I am looking forward to combining this tool, with the vagrant Oracle database from Blaine's blog post, and blowing up the database again, and again, and again!! Then we saw Oracle Backup Cloud Service which keeps your data secure, with the keys on site and not in the cloud, and no ACO licenses needed to compress your data. Oh, and did you know that data pumps and RMAN Backup/Recovery options are actually in Oracle SQL Developer?!? I had no idea!

12:45 PM–1:45 PM - Data Analysis SQL vs Pandas Python Package _ - Rama Koganti

Python is about the speed of code vs. speed of development, and an example of this is how Google was doing video before buying YouTube, but Google had around 1,000 developers using C/C++ and YouTube had around 20 developers using Python to get features into the marketplace quicker and that is why Google decided to stop competing, and just buy them up. Very interesting! Lots of this presentation was demo, but check out his repository at https://www.github.com/ramak919 to get up to date on the panda Python package which turns tables into data frames, and supports a LOT of data sources to get your data from! Again, another tool to combine with something else I learned at the conference since I can use Python to connect via the cx_Oracle package and then call the panda package in order to get my data out, then put it into a data frame, and do analysis or convert it, etc.

2:00 PM-3:00 PM - Devops Tools for Database Developers - @OraBlaineOS

Key in this is how DevOps is more about culture than the tools, and how you interact with your TEAMS. Again there is a GitHub repository available https://www.github.com/oracle/dino-date he used combined with Oracle Application Container Cloud Service to show the application Liquibase which is version control for your DB, change sets, auto generate SQL, tracks changes, rollback, conditions, diffs / reverse engineer, docs and the application utPLSQL which is a unit testing framework for PL/SQL.

4:30 PM-5:30 PM - Introducting Oracle Database 19c - @SeanStaceyfwiw

Sean is an Oracle PM for the Database product, so he is one of the few authoritative voices on the topic, so I was excited to dip my toes back into my Oracle roots with this session. The 19c product is a "long term release" which you can see as 18c support appears to end around 2021, but 19c support ends somewhere beyond 2026, and the core aim for the release is stability with thousands of bugs fixed and thousands of human years were spent in automated regression testing. There are a lot of new features you need to look up like Stats Only Queries, SQL Quarantine, High Frequency Automatic Statistics Collection, Real Time Statistics Collection, Automatic Indexing, and Partitioned Hybrid Tables! How best to find out? Go to https://apex.oracle.com/database-features/ then click on 19c, click on New Features Only, and then pick your new feature of choice to see the documentation. Oh, and want to know something neat? Try running this on a 19c database: select json_object(*) from customers and see what you get.

Tuesday, April 9, 2019

COLLABORATE19: Day 2

9:15 AM–11:30 AM - Hands on Lab: Migrating WebLogic Applications to Kubernetes in Oracle Cloud - @richardintx & Thomas Palzkill

Picking up where I left off the day before, I'm back in the same room, with the same Oracle experts, back at https://go.oracle.com/hol but this time ready to migrate WebLogic to Kubernetes! Exciting! Except.....when you see most of the introduction of the lab is the same as the day before, yet it does not work at the end this time, and the solution is to delete the Kubernetes cluster. That part is not even the bummer, the bummer is when it is giving the whole class an error message about APIs taking longer and just stalling us all for an hour until the instructors find out the Management backplane is having an issue, and to resolve it we have to switch to another Oracle Data Center. That is.....not really reassuring about going to the Oracle Cloud. Sure, everything in their DC is still running what was running (per Richard) but if the 20-30 people that might have been hitting the Management part of that DC helped to overwhelm it in some way, that seems like a bad thing. When a Cloud is not working, is it a StormCloud then?

Lunch! I finally got to have lunch when everybody else was eating! It was a novel experience! :}

12:45 PM–1:45 PM - Designing Scalable Oracle Database Solutions in AWS - Nick Walter of @houseofbrick

The one big takeaway here from Nick, is that the licensing costs of software going to AWS will be the biggest costs you will have and any AWS options are peanuts comparatively. Also, I loved his quote "a well tuned database is always limited by I/O" which is in relation to how to buy I/O options from AWS and that is good to know/remember! More importantly, instance local storage is fast and dangerous because it does NOT survive instance reboot so you CANNOT put Oracle files there!!

2:00 PM–3:00 PM - An AWS DMS Replication Journey from Oracle to Aurora MySQL - @MarisDBA

Maris' presentation was more of an overview from one perspective, but since I have never touched any of the AWS, DMS, or Aurora MySQL technologies he talked about I certainly did not mind at all! I thought it was smart to start us off on some "basics" going over the motivation (DB contract expiration, company wanted to be cloud native), landscape (6 month hard deadline, multiple schemas, cannot move all apps at the same time, too much risk), and complications (cross schema FKs, other apps needed to have access to the main schema that was being moved). The rest of the presentation went by pretty quick, with the ideas and solutions which were put forward, and eventually rejected, until they came upon a solution which solved all their needs and addressed the complications of the project. There was a lot which Maris went through to get the solution implemented, and I am looking forward to seeing if maybe we can replicate some of what he did in order to get something small over to AWS.

3:15 PM–4:15 PM - Cloud 2020 Where We're Going from Here - Various Panel

Going into this, with only 5-10 sessions available for the entire conference, I knew that the likelihood of this being a sales pitch were high, but it did not start off like that! The main concern about moving to the cloud is not really about infrastructure costs, it is more about people (retire old skills, enable new skills), security (60-85% of all security breaches were preventable), and capabilities. Then going to the next presenter on cloud best practices, it is more a question of WHEN we will go to the cloud, not really a question of IF. Most of their presentation was about what services their company offers, which is not really where the cloud is going, even if they did suggest reading the book Leading Change by John P. Kotter. The last presenter on deck started talking about their cloud conversion story, focused on JD Edwards, and after about five minutes of talking about basic project management and app specific details, I decided to leave the session. This was unexpected as the small room was completely full, and LOTS of people were leaving, likely due to the same reason I did, and the abstract really led us to believe it would go differently.

4:30 PM–5:30 PM - 10 things you should know about Oracle and Kubernetes - @MNEMONIC01

I will not list all of these (mostly because I missed a few along the way) but there were a couple that stood out like: Oracle adopts Kubernetes, you can do it yourself even using Google packages on RedHat Linux if you are not on Oracle Linux, you should look into Helm & Tiller which is a release and package manager, there is a WebLogic migration to Kubernetes tool coming soon which will even migrate 11g.

Monday, April 8, 2019

COLLABORATE19: Day 1

8:00 AM–9:00 AM - Keynote: Be The Leader You Were Meant to be, Monday to Monday® - @StaceyHankeInc

This was an interesting session as the message was one of being brief, not saying too much (think, leaving out um and uh type words), and giving yourself time to think about what you will be saying next. Also, "only speak when you see eyes" and "common sense does not mean common practice" are some very sound pieces of advice we could all use.

9:15 AM–10:15 AM - Oracle Database infrastructure as code with Ansible - @ilmarkerm

The missing piece to this presentation was an introduction to Ansible, which Ilmar said could be found anywhere on the Internet and that is a fair point, but I felt that would have helped us to understand the session a bit more. There were a lot of use cases provided, setting up the OS (easy), automating routine DBA tasks (medium), and DB config and changes deployed as version controlled code (advanced). There are a few projects worth checking out here http://github.com/oravirt/ansible-oracle-modules and http://github.com/ilmarkerm/ansible-oracle-home-mgmt which can help you to do some automation around Oracle DBs and ORACLE_HOME directories.

10:30 AM–11:30 AM - Upgrade SIG Meeting - Various Panel Members

The SIG meeting was kind of short on content, on purpose, so that the majority of the hour was spent on answering questions from the audience and most of those questions were about how to upgrade to 12.2, and not at all about going to the Cloud. Some of the content shared: there will not be a 12.3 EBS release, only Continuous Innovation of EBS 12.2, and future releases will separate technology stack from applications code updates.

12:00 PM–12:30 PM - Provisioning Oracle test environments made simple using Vagrant - @simonpane

This is very similar to the blog post from Blaine I shared yesterday, showing us how to use vagrant to start up an instance and then apply 2 levels of customizations: the VM (done via Vagrantfile), and the build (done via install.sh) but was pretty neat to see it done live after a short presentation about what was going to be happening during the demo.

12:30 PM–1:30 PM - OAUG Geo/SIG Coffee Talk Roundtable Discussion - @OATUG1

This was an internal meeting for Geo and SIG leadership, but the gist of it is that OATUG is looking to be Trustworthy, Relevant, Dynamic, and Relatable, and the name change was because 40% of the sessions at this conference are technology focused and the group has been delivering technical content for years. Some very good points brought up here, and hopefully more discussions will be happening as a result of this change as it is not a bad change, but one we need to get used to.

Time for lunch! Still on Arizona time, and the keynote being presented sounds a LOT like something I saw last year, so I decided a better use of time was focusing on the noon session, and then eating later, so time for a short walk outside for some food.

3:15 PM–5:30 PM - Hands on Lab: Container Native Microservices Development - @richardintx & Thomas Palzkill

If you have not noticed this year, I am a fan of Hands on Labs, and I am also looking to get a lot of new technology under my belt, so I wanted to go to this one and was surprised when there were only 10 of us in the room as I thought it would be standing room only! After signing up for a free Oracle Cloud account as a COLLAB19 attendee, we got down to business following one of the labs at https://go.oracle.com/hol to dig in and start up a Kubernetes instance in the Cloud, and connect to it locally!! I probably need another hour or two to get through the rest of the lab, and then there are more labs available (including one I will be going to tomorrow) which I can use my free Cloud account for until I run out of credit or they turn it off next month, whichever comes first. :} Oh, and you can get $300 of free credits too https://cloud.oracle.com/tryit which I am sure you have heard about by now, but if not, I wanted to make sure you had as this seems like a great way to get your hands dirty a bit with this technology.

Sunday, April 7, 2019

COLLABORATE19: Pre-Day + Me!

Hi folks, I'mmmmmm baaaaack! It is time for another COLLABORATE conference, so that means it is time for me to blog again!

First off, the major news is that the OAUG has now become the OATUG (Oracle Applications and Technology User Group) as of a few hours ago! LOTS of talk about that happening! Learn more about the change here on the new OATUG website.

9:15 AM–10:15 AM - Hands-on Lab: Using Python with Oracle Database - Blaine Carter - @OraBlaineOS

While not exactly the same, but Blaine's blog post https://learncodeshare.net/2018/07/30/execute-pl-sql-calls-with-cx_oracle/ details most of what we were doing, including the linked documentation at the end of the page to the cx_Oracle module. Want to do something like this, a bit different, but still in the DevOps space? Check out another page he posted https://learncodeshare.net/2019/01/29/how-to-build-an-oracle-database-developer-toolbox/ and get your hands on Vagrant!

10:30 AM–11:30 AM - Hands-On Lab: Low-Code Development with Oracle Application Express (APEX) - David Peake - @orcl_dpeake

Go to https://apex.oracle.com and click on Get Started for Free to get the same experience we did!
This was pretty awesome to get my hands on this technology and actually get to do some development without touching ANY code!

12:30 PM–1:30 PM - Workflow SIG Panel: Current, Future, and Cloud - Me!

Shameless plug time, but this was a pretty exciting panel since Bill Burbage with Oracle Proactive Support was able to share a few ERs (Enhancement Requests) that are making their way through the development pipeline! He also showed a demo of a new Analyzer framework they are working on, to make it easier to do a lot of data gathering all in one place which does not take as much effort to download and add onto your Oracle SR (Service Request). Plus, never forget about MOS Note 432.1 to get the latest on ALL the latest from Proactive Support, including analyzer updates!!

I wanted to go to the Extend Oracle E-Business Suite with Oracle SaaS Applications: Your Journey to the Cloud session, but due to the running around from Convention Center back to the Grand Hyatt room and setup, meant I did not get lunch, so I absolutely had to eat at this time and skip the session, but I am going to try and get my hands on the material Oracle presented so I can get up to speed on this subject! That is almost like attending, right? :}

3:00 PM–4:00 PM - OAUG SysAdmin SIG - James Morrow - @jjmorrow / @kansasdba

As the Vice Chair of this group, I felt I should go, and was looking to get out of the role as it is voted on every two years, and this was the year that role came up for renewal, but Michael Brown @MichaelBrownOrg re-nominated me, with nobody else volunteering, so I have graciously accepted the Vice Chair role yet again. :}

Besides the housekeeping, there was a BUNCH of stuff that came out of this like 12.2 DB support goes until 2030! (Look at MOS Note 742060.1)
MOS Note 2522948.1 shows you how to get a fee waiver for Extended Support fees for older DB versions up to 2020 ONLY IF USED FOR EBS.
The EBS application version 12.2 has Extended Support through March 2026, but you'll notice that EBS has not yet been certified on DB version 12.2. There are reasons for that, and apparently Oracle is SKIPPING certifying EBS on that version of the DB, and will go straight to certifying it with 19c (12.2.0.3) which is the terminal release of the DB 12.2 code line. It is important to note, that with the 19c release UTL files will no longer be supported, and it will only be certified in a single container setup.
Check out MOS Note 2409163.1 or patch 28574967 to get the latest about Enterprise Command Center, which is baselined on EBS 12.2.4, which gives you dashboard information about your EBS installation. It absolutely sounds and looks like something some customers might want to investigate, in order to be able to give your executives some very high level details very quickly!

4:00 PM - OAUG Popup Event - @OAUG1

OAUG becomes OATUG! This was an almost emergency meeting that was shared and posted about an hour it happened, and was not even in the conference app/website listing of sessions, but I was pretty glad I had an essentially front row seat to the event after James and Michael mentioned this was going on!

5:30 PM–7:00 PM - OAUG Welcome Reception - @OATUG1

The first ever OATUG event! Which also, was probably the best Welcoming meeting I have been to at COLLABORATE! An outdoor event with the Riverwalk running through it, wonderful Mexican food, and various musicians roaming around playing, was VERY festive!

Happy to be back at COLLABORATE again, enjoying the company of some great people I have met over the years, excited to met new people, and get my hands on some new technology in the process to advance my career just THAT much further!! I will be seeing you in most blog posts over this week, and maybe I will even post after COLLABORATE is over too. :}