OWB 11g, a tip of the veil lifted?

It seems Oracle is doing a good job of getting OWB developers to attend the ODTUG events the last two years. Last year they introduced OWB 10gR2 there, and that was some real big news then. This year they could not launch the new version yet, but they made sure we are getting curious about what exactly will be in it.

I already had seen the announcement on the warehouse builder weblog and now Mark Rittman is giving some more detail here.  I will not repeat what Mark said, as he has actually seen the presentation on ODTUG and therefore has described it better than I possibly could. But anybody interested in knowing where OWB is going can now go and read it for themselves.

Always a pleasure to see a light-weight database

Eddie Awad posted about a new feature provided by Google called Google gears. I don’t know yet what it is about and will look into it later, but Eddie seems to think along the same lines as I do. Somebody has a new feature, Google gears in this case, and says it contains a database. So I (and Eddie) want to know what kind of database that is. Eddie investigated and found enough interesting details that I wanted to make a note of to look into it myself. I don’t know yet where I will be using it, but it’s always useful to have it in your back-pocket, so to speak. And a database where the executable is 359KB is rare these days, to say the least.

Photos Miracle DBF

I finally made some time to edit and upload the photos I made before, during and after ‘probably the best Oracle conference ever’, as Thomas Presslie continues to say. Many of the photos have a bit of an odd resolution. I had to edit most of them to cut out a shade from one of the lenses of my camera. The camera did not function as it should have and is currently in repair. But I did not know that it needed repair when I took the photos, so then I had to edit them afterwards. At least it can be done better now with digital photos. I hate to think about doing the same with my slides from several years ago.

The photos are here

Your new development environment just a credit card number away

A very interesting idea today for the short-lived projects that come up now and then. It is easy nowadays to get some server space including a lot of tools to run on that space. Mostly open source tools and therefore free of license costs (yes, there is a support cost, I know). One tool you do not think of in most of these cases is Oracle XE. And it seems most suppliers of server space have not thought about it either. But it can be found. So why not use it for your next proof of concept project?

I kind of like the idea. It must be cheaper than renting the hardware and install everything else  you need, just for a short period.

Releasedate of Oracle 11g

It is starting to buzz around in the web logs that the date for the release of Oracle 11g is announced. I first saw it at Eddy Awad’s blog and shortly afterwards over at Amis technology. Especially the link Eddy mentions to upcoming demo’s might be interesting. Anybody still at Oracle 7

OWB and OWF

Yeah, I love those acronyms.

I just read that Oracle Warehouse Builder will continue to use Oracle Work Flow for implementing the process flow you design, although oracle has announced obsolescence (what a word ) for OWF. Nobody told me they would do that, but apparently that has been announced at the beginning of 2006 here. To me it was News, maybe for the ‘attentive reader’ (het oplettend lezertje, a quote from Heer Bommel) it was not.

Miracle database forum day 2

It is apparently more difficult to get up in time as a conference continues. There were some people really late, but everybody got into Edinburgh castle again to listen to another full day of back-to-back presentations. Which is one of the reasons why it is so difficult to get out of bed. Anyway here is a short summary of what was presented.

Mogens Norgaard (You probably Need RAC) has kicked some sensitive knees (or other parts of the anatomy) with his (in)famous paper about RAC within the oracle corporation. He is still convinced most companies are better off without RAC and is even in the process of getting one of his customers to stop using RAC. The customer has previously been convinced they needed RAC and accepted that it took at least 8 to 9 months to get the RAC production environment anywhere near stability. But after about two years of working with it (and experiencing a max-out on CPU power with 4X4 Opteron processors, where a maximum load of 20% was expected), other (less complex) configurations are considered. If you want to get it stable sooner, you will need a production alike (almost exact) testing environment.

Daniel Fink (No Mogens) did get us thinking. He told us that we just fix what we know, we don’t know any other way. But you can’t resolve technical issues by staying technical. It’s not about the technical issue, it’s about response time as perceived by users. As a consequence of this, almost all performance tools ‘suck’. They only show the issue’s the developer of that tool knows about. Nothing else. Therefore you miss an important part of the big picture. Daniel pressed us there one part that surely should not be missed. That is that we should be looking for SQL developers (or SQL generators) that are using bad SQL. Try to educate both!

Christophe Dobroschke. AMD is the main sponsor of the event and Cristophe had the difficult task of interesting all those oracle adepts in the AMD processor all should be run on. And after sponsoring this event, they will have moved a place up on the list of preferred suppliers for many a representative.

Jonathan Lewis (Understanding statspack data). It is always with mixed feelings I see presentations by Jonathan. On the one hand it is always useful to follow his ideas and he is a good presenter. But on the other hand it becomes so clearly obvious there is so much you don’t know about Oracle that he does. Jonathan took us through several examples of statspack data on systems ‘with a problem’. He showed us the lines of attack he did follow and urged us to read statspack reports of correctly performing systems. If you practice it’s much easier to spot the things that are different. A presentation that was both discouraging and invigorating.

James Morle (Brewing Benchmark) is the founder of Scaleabilities and author of Scaling Oracle8i. James therefore sure has some right to talk about scaling. He took us through an Open Source project he has started called SimOra and showed us how he is doing it currently. The software resulting from the project is able to generate test data based on a trace file (mainly a 10046 trace) of activity that has taken place on the database. That way a user can use an application to get some data in (or out of) the database and representative test data can be generated from that. The result of the generation is a tcl based script that can edited and expanded which provides a flexible and accurate way to load test a database.

Frits Hoogland (Tuning Multi-tier J2EE applications). As has been discussed by several of the other speakers before him, Frits focused his presentation of many of the things that transpire outside of the database. More specific, he was looking at the stack ‘above’ the oracle database; the web server (mostly Apache) and the application server (Oracle iAS, but Tomcat/JBoss as well). He showed several places Apache could be configured wrong, but concluded that the best place to focus on, would be the application server. He has been looking for tools to make it possible to measure the performance of the total stack, from webserver through the application server to the database and back again. He did not find any, but as the main bottleneck is with the application server (the database server we have all tuned excellently of course) he did find a freeware tool called Glass box. Very useful to have that in your toolkit.

Bill ‘Shrek’ Tater (It’s not paranoia if they’re really out to get you). Bill is from the The Austin (Texas) Independent School District and initially you would not expect someone working there to be concerned with security. Until you think about it. Every grade given is administrated in some database, so every student is interested in getting his/her hands on unlimited access to the database. Bill had some sane advice about using all the possibilities oracle provides out of the box, with schema’s having create table rights, other schema’s that only have access to the data in the schema’s and still other schema’s that have no rights at all but get them granted through roles within applications. Seems simple, but everyone is so busy preventing access on any level that the simple things tend to be forgotten. Unfortunately, Bill had lost his presentation due to a faulty computer, so we have something to look forward to for his next appearance.

Graham Wood (You probably don’t need SQL*Trace). As one of the architects of ASH (Active Session History) and AWR (Automatic Workload Repository), which are both new in 10g, James was showing us many of the virtues of both. And his conclusion is that you won’t ever start an SQL*trace again if you use these tools. Especially ASH is a lightweight, non-intrusive tool that provides performance insights after the fact with virtually no (CPU) cost. Measurements show that there is less than 1% overhead on a database when both are activated. Of course, ASH and AWR are separately licensed features but if Graham had his way they would become a free available part of the next major release. Oh well, we can always hope.

Tuomas Pystynen (RMAN incremental backups) showed the capability to recover a database is one of the major virtues of a good DBA (you won’t need DUDE then). So a presentation about rman is to be part of a good conference. And Tuomas did indeed present excellently. Giving the overview that is needed, explaining some definitions and get down to the gory details that every DBA should know. Reading through the manuals you get into so much detail, you easily forget about the big picture. The big picture is clear again!

And that was a full day of conference. Learned a lot, I must say.

We had some drinks in the oldest pub in Scotland (The Sheep Heid Inn, but I have seen more ‘oldest’ Pubs in Scotland though this one looked genuine) and went to bed early. For some that meant early in the evening, most decided to make that early the next morning.