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Archive for the ‘Speaking’ Category.

Exadoop

We started on an interesting mad scientist kind of project a couple of days ago.

One of our long time customers bought an Exadata last month. They went live with one system last week and are in the process of migrating several others. The Exadata has an interesting configuration. The sizing exercise done prior to the purchase indicated a need for 3 compute nodes, but the data volume was relatively small. In the end, a half rack was purchased and all four compute nodes were licensed, but 4 of the 7 storage servers were not licensed. So it’s basically a half rack with only 3 storage servers.

Meanwhile, we had been talking with them about Hadoopie kind of stuff. They are in the telecom space and are interested in pulling data via a packet sniffer which captures info directly from the tcp traffic. During the talks we discussed hardware requirements for building a Hadoop cluster as they didn’t really have any spare hardware available to test with. That’s when the crazy science project idea was born. Someone (who shall remain nameless) suggested that we build the pilot Hadoop cluster on the 4 unused storage nodes from the Exadata half rack. Since the storage servers use basically the same hardware as is used in the Oracle Big Data Appliance (BDA), it’s kind of like having a mini BDA. Of course the storage servers have slower CPU’s and a little less memory so it’s not apples to apples, but the servers do have InfiniBand and the same 3T drives so it’s pretty similar. And since they already had the servers sitting there …

So now we have a mini Hadoop cluster installed (CDH3) with 3 data nodes (roughy 100T raw storage). We also set up the Oracle Big Data Connectors on one of the Exadata compute nodes which allows us to create external tables on files stored in HDFS. Pretty cool. Let the games begin!

Oh and by the way. I’ll probably be talking about this project a bit at E4 (Enkitec Extreme Exadata Expo) on Aug. 13-14 in Dallas.

Hotsos Symposium 2012

It’s almost time for Hotsos’s 10th annual Symposium. This year’s conference will be held March 4 – 8 in Irving, Texas. The Hotsos Symposium is probably the best performance oriented Oracle conferences in the world. I am happy and humbled to be speaking at it again this year as the lineup of speakers is once again world class. It’s great to have several other Enkitec’ies on the bill as well. Both Karen Morton and Tanel Poder will be presenting too. Enkitec is also a sponsor of the event this year, so we’ll be hosting a couple of Exadata focused happy hours as well. There’s still time to register. Hope to see you there.

 

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

I’ll be speaking at a couple of conferences over the next month or so. Here’s the schedule:

February 16th, in Denver at RMOUG Training Days 2012 – Topic: DIY Exadata
February 23rd, in Redwood Shores at NoCOUG Winter Conference – Topic: DIY Exadata
March 7th, in Dallas at Hotsos Symposium 2012 – Topic: Exadata Optimization – Case Studies

Hope to see you at one of these events.

 

 

Embarcadero Performance Panel

Karen Morton, Cary MIllsap and I will be participating in a on-line panel discussion about Oracle Performance on July 28th. Since we all worked together in the past we thought it would be a fun to listen to each other answer questions. Embarcadero is sponsoring this event and invited us to participate. Here’s a graphic from the mailer they sent out.

I only point it out because Cary and Karen look like they are posing for a picture, while I, as usual, look like someone just poured a drink down my pants. That’s normal though. I’ve been told I have a great face for radio.

You can sign up here: Register Now!

Exadata Virtual Conference

I will be participating in an Exadata Virtual Conference which has been organized by Tanel Poder on August 3rd and 4th. This conference will follow the same format as the one Tanel and I did last year with Jonathan Lewis and Cary Millsap. It will be two half days which should provide some flexibility for people with busy schedules. The online format allows all participants to interact directly via chat while the speakers are presenting and then via voice during question and answer sessions. This is a great opportunity to talk to some guys that have done a bunch of work with Exadata. Andy Colvin will be discussing patching which has been problematic for some shops. Andy has done more patching than anyone I know. Randy Johnson will be discussing Resource Management on Exadata which is a key to successful consolidation projects. I will be talking about how Smart Scans work under the covers and covering techniques for determining when and where they are (or are not) occurring. Tanel will be covering in depth tuning and diagnostic techniques specific to Exadata. Of course, Randy, Tanel and I collaborated on the upcoming Apress book, Expert Oracle Exadata, which should be out a couple of weeks before the conference. Here’s a link to the page with all the conference details:

Exadata Virtual Conference

Note that there is a discount for early registration. I hope to see you there.

Oracle Open World 2011 – Suggest a Session

Well my lone abstract submission didn’t get selected at Open World this year. But apparently they have a second chance system where you can “Suggest a Session” and users can vote on which papers they’d like to see on the agenda. I went ahead and suggested “Tuning Exadata” – It sounds like something you shouldn’t have to do, but remember that Exadata is not an appliance that has few or no knobs to turn. It has all the power and options of an Oracle database and there are certainly things that you can do wrong that will keep Exadata from performing at its best. So the paper is about how you can know for sure whether Exadata is doing what it should and how to coerce it if you need to.

The mix.oracle.com site where this voting is supposed to take place is a little difficult to navigate (in my humble opinion) so here’s a direct link to the page where you can see the abstract (and vote if you deem it worthy). 😉

Tuning Exadata

You will have to log in with your Oracle Single Signon account (what you use for My Oracle Support – or Metalink for the old guys) or I think you can create an separate account if you want. By the way, Andy Colvin has submitted an abstract for a talk on Exadata Patching, which should be very informative if it gets picked. He’s done more Exadata patching than anyone I am aware of. Here’s a link to his abstract:

Rolling with the Punches – Adventures in Exadata Patching

There will undoubtedly be many deserving abstracts. For example, several of my OakTable brethren have suggested sessions as well. So please look around the site for others of interest as well. You can vote for as many as you want.

Extreme Performance with Oracle Exadata Executive Dinner

I spoke at an Oracle marketing event in San Antonio last night. Here is a link to the promotional page for the event (it will probably disappear soon). I promised to make a copy of my slides available so here it is:

I’ve Updated the White Papers/Presentation Page

I finally took a little time to update the page with some of the presentations I’ve done over the last couple of years. You can get there via the menu bar above or by clicking here: White Papers/Presentations

Maybe some day I’ll have time to organize all the scripts.

Oracle XMonth

I spent most of the last week in California at Oracle’s XMonth (it was really a week so I’m not sure why they called it XMonth). Which reminds me of a tuning engagement I did a few years ago. I showed up at the client’s facilities and we started discussing the problem. They told me that their daily job was running too slow and it was causing major problems. So I asked them what time the daily job ran each day. And they told me that it ran every 20 minutes. Ha! “And why do you call it the daily job?”, I asked. They weren’t really sure. The job was taking about an hour to complete as I recall, but I digress.

At XMonth, they had three tracks: Exadata (and two others that I can’t remember). I did learn a few things I thought were worth sharing.

  1. Exalogic is not shipping yet, but we did cover it in some detail. Exalogic’s biggest advantage appears to be the Infiniband fabric. It can be connected directly to any DB server using IB (Exadata for example) and can communicate with the extremely low latency RDS protocol.
  2. Oracle has relaxed their “no changes to the Exadata configuration” stance (but only very slightly). They said that it was OK to change out the Cisco switch and replace it with some other equivalent switch.
  3. A competitive analysis of Sun’s server line was provided. It included T series, X series, and M series servers along with Exadata. Exadata pretty much kicks all other options in the teeth (in my opinion). M series are still suitable for very large applications that are unable to scale out via RAC – such are Oracle’s own MRP package which uses the dbms_pipe package limiting its ability to scale in a RAC environment. But in general, the advice to the sales team was that if you are in a competitive situation, in most cases you should lead with Exadata.

So that’s about it. Oh they also let me talk about our experiences with Exadata. That was fun and I got to try my hand at a virtual presentation, as there were participants all over the world following along with Webex. The software has gotten pretty good for doing these kinds of presentations by the way. It was good practice for the Virtual Oracle Conference we have coming up next month. (note that there are only a couple of days left to sign up at the discounted rate)

Virtual Oracle Conference

Tanel Poder has put together an Online Virtual Oracle Conference and he asked me to participate. I had to think about it for about 2 seconds before I said yes. The speakers are Tanel, Cary Millsap, Jonathan Lewis and myself. Wow! How did I sneak into that line up you might wonder. Apparently Tanel asked Tom Kyte first, but Tom had to decline. It’s not the first time I’ve played second fiddle to Tom – and hopefully won’t be the last. I feel like I’m in pretty tall cotton (as we say in Texas).

Here’s how Tanel pitched the idea to me:

My reasoning is that we start from higher level and then drill down:

1) Cary talking about how to approach things right (and eventually find the problem SQL or operations)
2) I’m drilling down inside a SQL with row-source profiling (and eventually find where is the problem)
3) Jonathan talks why it happens and what to do about it (how to help CBO by writing better SQL)
4) Kerry talks how to help CBO and fix SQL when you can’t actually change the SQL text to any better

The whole idea of running a seminar on-line without anyone traveling is a very interesting topic. The technology has progressed to the point where it is quite possible. The idea of a short conference with multiple pretty well known speakers is also pretty cool. It will be interesting to see what kind of participation we get.

The conference is scheduled to be 8 hours spread over two days, Nov. 18 and 19. Follow the link below to read more about the event including the schedule, cost, how to sign up and abstracts for the talks.

Virtual Oracle Conference

Hope to see you there!

P.S. – There is a pretty good discount if you sign up before Nov. 1.