Oracle OpenWorld 2014

Dear Readers,

This year's Oracle Open World 2014 was a lot of learning and meeting old and new friends.
What a fun and great conference!

The big highlights for me were:

Oracle 12c In Memory Database- in sight and everywhere this was a key mantra at the event.

Big Data SQL- another new thing that intrigues me is using SQL to manage Big Data applications with Hadoop, NoSQL and other applications.

Engineered systems- Oracle demo grounds featured Exadata, Exalogic, Big Data Appliance (BDA), etc front and center.

Last but not least, Oracle Public Cloud was a centerpiece in the keynotes and sessions. Oracle is now a serious contender to not only IBM, HP, Cisco, and EMC but to Amazon Web Services (AWS) with public cloud offerings.

Last year, Oracle introduced hands on labs (HOL) to allow participants to learn first hand new technologies aside from the standard product marketing and general conference sessions.

This year the hands on labs (HOL) were greatly expanded and I spent the majority of my time attending a dozen or so of these excellent sessions for learning first hand how to work with Oracle Public Cloud, virtualization, big data and NoSQL.

Prior to OOW, I attended the 2 day Oracle ACE Director summit and had a great experience learning first hand from Oracle's Thomas Kurian, EVP of Product Development as well as many product and engineering folks from Oracle.

Last but certainly not least, I presented at the Delphix booth on performing Oracle E-Business Suite Upgrades with Delphix and had a great attendance. Next month I am presenting at the BGOUG conference in Sofia, Bulgaria which will be an exciting event.

OOW 2014 events

Dear readers,

This year promises to be an exciting Oracle OpenWorld.

I will be presenting in the Delphix booth on using Delphix to perform upgrades with Oracle E-Business Suite. Hope to see you all there and we also will have a Clone Attack with demo software available to learn about Delphix. In addition, DBVisit will be presenting REPAttack to show demos how to replicate seamless Oracle environments with the DBVisit software.

I am headed to the Oracle ACE Director briefing so stay tuned and hope to see everyone there.

Oracle 12c RAC and Flex ASM Overview

Dear Readers,

In preparation for upcoming Oracle Open World 2014 and BGOUG 2014 (Bulgarian User Oracle Group) conferences, I will write a series of tips and tricks for new Oracle 12c RAC and ASM features. Today I would like to review the new Oracle 12c RAC Flexible ASM feature. For our discussion as a reference point you can source details in the useful My Oracle Support (http://support.oracle.com) note FAQ: Oracle Flex ASM 12c / 12.1 (Doc ID 1573137.1)

Which contains a wealth of detailed information for the setup and configuration of an Oracle 12c Flex ASM environment. So, what is Oracle 12c Flex ASM you might be asking? Well it is a new method for managing clustered storage within Oracle 12c RAC environments. In the past releases of Oracle RAC and ASM prior to 12c, one had to build individual ASM instances on each cluster node for an Oracle RAC configuration. If any single node failed, the surviving RAC nodes would take control in a quorum event managed by Oracle cluster ware. However, there were some performance and availability issues with that architecture. To remediate the weak points of the Oracle RAC and ASM environment, Oracle development re-architected the model for ASM. By allowing shared control of ASM within a cluster via a single ASM instance, flex ASM was born. Oracle provides a good architecture diagram below for the design.

Source: Oracle 12c ASM Documentation, Oracle Corporation 2014 Users, applications and database clients can now connect from a single ASM instance in the cluster with makes for better availability and additional failover capabilities. Stay tuned for future Oracle 12c RAC and ASM installments.