Before I get to the schedule, if you want to catch up with me during OOW — tweet me @alexgorbachev. You are likely to see me in the OTN Lounge or in “The Cave” if you know what I’m talking about.

Here is a quick summary of my presentations:

My first presentation starts on Sunday as part of the Oracle User Groups Forum. It’s one and a half hour long session and as far as I know it’s the only long slot available on Sunday. The penalty is to start at 8:30am so I’ll see you all fresh that morning! :) I have presented on Sunday last year (also a long session with demos) and it was great success — it was standing room only and I know few people could get in (that’s why I’m repeating the session this year as part of unconference — see below). If you want to make sure to have a spot — use Schedule Builder and register for the session. Last time, I’ve done this presentation as the master class at the UKOUG Conference 2008 and it was very successful session. I will most likely pre-record the demos to make sure we fit in the allocated time — there is lots of content.

The next presentation is on Monday and I’m very much looking forward to that one. While the presentation is about building monitoring plug-ins for Grid Control, the example is based on the MySQL plug-in, which I wrote and that Pythian published as free software and Oracle validated the plug-in working closely with us. I had proposed this session for the last year but I guess I’ve made a mistake of adding the MySQL in the title. :) This year I removed MySQL from the title and the presentation passed through the Oracle Mix voting being in the top 10.

The last of my “normal” conference sessions in on Tuesday at 11:30 — just in time before the lunch break. This is a rather unusual area for me as the talk is about E-Business Suite and how to design EBS environment for high availability. While I’m not an Apps DBA, I’ve been digging into that area quite a bit recently and I’ve done this talk here in Sydney during AUSOUG InSync 09 conference.

Finally, I’m doing couple unconference sessions. Many people asked for a repeat of my last year’s presentation “Under the Hood of Oracle Clusterware” which was a huge success so I decided to put that session into unconference schedule. I have reserved a double slot as there is a live demo and it takes some time. In addition, there is always quite a bit of follow up during this presentation so I don’t mind to get side-tracked and dig into live environment that I will have setup for this demo. In addition, we should check out what’s new in 11g Release 2 Clusterware (re-branded as Grid Infrastructure).

The last unconference session is on Wednesday and I decided to make it less of a presentation but more like a roundtable. I hope that my role would be as just a moderator as I would be looking forward to get more participation from the attendees and share methods and tools that various companies adopted to make their teams highly available. I’m also excited to have Paul Vallee by my side as he has lots of insights on this topic. The idea behind this session is that very little is told about organizing a proper round the clock support team. I’ve seen lots of situations when companies deploy expensive HA solutions without thinking about organizing seamless support from their engineers so it’s “normal” for one or two engineers to be “chained to the desk” and on the hook 24×7 no weekends and vacations. I would be more than happy to bring forward and discuss how we handle it at Pythian but I would like to see more contributions from the attendees and not make it look like a Pythian marketing plug. :) It’s not about DBA support only — it’s just that “HA DBA” sounds really cool!

And don’t forget about Bloggers Meetup this year. I’m organizing it with the help of OTN and it should be good fun this year.

The rumors are that Oracle Exadata v2 and Oracle Database Machine v2 are going to be announced within few weeks and my take is that it’s going to happen at the Oracle Open World. I don’t think it comes as a surprise to anyone that it will be configured with Oracle Database 11g Release 2.

Moving on to predictions and speculations…

Oracle Database Machine — beyond data-warehousing

Oracle Database Machine will not be targeting ultimately data warehouse environments — it will attack OLTP applications and marketed extensively for consolidated environments. “Old” HP Oracle Database Machine was an ideal consolidation vehicle but there were few design elements incompatible with OLTP and consolidated environments. For example, very thin communication pipe with the external world — no way enough traffic could enter (and leave). Have you paid attention to what Oracle did in 11g Release 2 with its Grid Infrastructure component and how well it now can truly manage the grid including database, storage and application tiers? 11g Release 2 delivered inside Oracle Database Machine v2 — this is the ultimate answer to data-center consolidation… the ultimate data-center consolidation appliance.

Oracle Database Machine — truly Oracle hardware

Did you see the title is missing something? You would if you compare it carefully with the year old entry — “HP” is missing! Yes, I believe that Oracle Database Machine v2 will be delivered on Sun hardware.

The exact figures are not published but Oracle claims that adoption of HP Oracle Database Machine is high. If Oracle makes Database Machine available for generic use and data-centers consolidation (those are very “popular” projects now for our customers) then demand will surge immensely and Oracle will need to meet supply. Of course, Oracle could let HP pocket quite a bit of cash but why not leave it all for themselves?

Oracle is committed to Sun hardware if you didn’t notice.

Why on earth would Oracle continue to use HP hardware for it’s Database Machine v2? This is rather highly improbable and the natural choice is… Sun Oracle Database Machine!

I reckon that Sun Oracle Database Machine (or simply Oracle Database Machine) will be still based on the same x86 architecture and not SPARC. Oracle Exadata software is generic and will run on Oracle Enterprise Linux on any x86 platform (it even runs inside a virtual machine if one wants to play with it). So the only work left is to polish and integrate components flawlessly as it’s been done with HP hardware.

The step to introduce SPARC platform is not huge — Solaris on SPARC is still one of the most stable platforms that Oracle Database runs on. What’s left is to make Solaris SPARC playing nicely with InfiniBand and Oracle’s DDP (Direct Data Placement) protocol. I don’t think Oracle could go as far as having it implemented it on SPARC platform already now but I think that database servers can easily be running on SPARC in the future as well as Linux x86_64 while Exadata Storage Server will most likely stay on Linux.

As a summary, I want to quote what I said back in April:
What Oracle intends to do now is to keep all those new acquired products, continue development while work heavily on integration solutions. Integration products and services is where Oracle will find its new direct revenue stream.

Comments are most welcome as usual.

MySQL

Blame it on MyISAM, says Mark Callaghan of High Availability MySQL, on considering sql_mode and type coercion. “I think that MyISAM has its place,” writes Mark. “It does fast table scans, but InnoDB is much faster on just about everything else. I am just not thrilled with the impact it has had on MySQL.”

Not that those other engines are without flaw. Peter Zaitsev reports on an InnoDB performance gotcha with larger queries.

Here on the Pythian Blog, Singer Wang unearthed a MySQL 5.1 and InnoDB hot backup gotcha.

Eric Bergen offers his InnoDB deadlock count patch, which he introduces thus: “[Deadlocks] usually aren’t a problem until they start happening too frequently.  . . .  [SHOW ENGINE INNODB STATUS] can be useful for debugging but it’s almost impossible to get the rate at which deadlocks are occurring. [This patch] adds a counter to show table status that tracks the number of deadlocks.”

Baron Schwartz, had a script snippet to relative-ize numbers embedded in text to share.

From Planet Geek! came a fix for a OSX Snow Leopard MySQL startup problem.

SQL Server

While we’re on the subject of flaws, let’s begin our look at SQL Server blogs with Musings on Database Security and its post on passwords leakage from MS SQL Server. “Turns out that SQL Server saves in memory in clear text user credentials (passwords) of users logging in using SQL Server native authentication.  . . .  We . . . were convinced that SQL Server administrators out there should be aware of the danger and also should have a way to mitigate it so we’ve decided to publicize it and release a free tool to remove the clear text passwords from memory.”

Anyone who reads code of any kind can tell you that unreadable code is a sometimes fatal flaw. With that is mind, Buck Woody of Carpe Datum collected some T-SQL prettifiers.

Jamie Thomson examined extracting insert, update, delete rowcounts from T-SQL MERGE. Jamie writes, “Just lately I’ve been using T-SQL’s MERGE statement . . . and one thing that I needed to do was extract rowcounts for each DML operation . . . conducted by a MERGE. I was surprised to find that while @@ROWCOUNT is supported for MERGE, it only returns the total number of affected rows and there are no built in functions for getting the counts for each DML operation . . . ” Jamie’s workaround code follows.

Pythian’s André Araujo shared his procedure making for easier SQL Server database restores.

Kalen Delaney wondered, What’s a SQL Server Education Worth?. It’s not just a rhetorical question, either. It’s addressed to you. Yes, YOU!

Maybe conferences such as the PASS Summit are worth it? But the cost! Here’s Jeremiah Peschka with his tips on getting to PASS on the cheap.

Oracle

11gR2 was released. Let’s see what Oracle bloggers had to say about it. Here’s Doug Burns’s take on the 11.2 release—two highlights: Parallel Query, and changes to ASH.

The Oracle Security Blog itemizes new security features Oracle 11g Release 2.

On the AMIS Technology Blog, Marco Gralike writes, “I noticed yesterday a new feature that could have the potential to be a small, by me unnoticed, gem called ‘Flash Cache’.

It was quiz night again at the Oracle Scratchpad. In this second one, Jonathan Lewis and his contestants submit their explanations for bundle of statements in the library cache using bind variables.

Kevin Closson related his experience using Linux /proc To identify ORACLE_HOME and instance trace directories. In the post, Kevin writes, “ . . . you’ll see how to find the ORACLE_HOME and trace directories for an instance by looking at /proc//fd and /proc//exe of the LGWR process.”

DB2

Rav Ahuja says, moving to DB2 is easy, sharing a video that he writes, “ . . . highlights some of the new features in DB2 9.7 that make it very easy to enable Oracle applications to DB2.”

Easy and fun, apparently. Willie Favero, for instance, knows how to have fun and learn about DB2 LUW. It involves tuning in to the new “DB2night Show” on September 24^th.

Over and out, for now. Please add your favourite DB blogs from this week in the comments, and we’ll meet again next week. Till then!