Back from UKOUG 2007

UKOUG is really a very well organized conference. A conference I look forward to attend every year, either as speaker or as an attendee. This years conference was no different as usual great. Unbelievable set of presenters on great topics. It was interesting to see some excellent RAC related topics this year. I did give a presentation on “Exploiting Parellel Queries in a RAC Environment” just focusing on RAC related areas. Apart from this I also had the opportunity to chair a RAC roundtable on the final day.

Julian Dykes presentation was different compared to last year. Those who attended last years UKOUG presentation, Julian had done a presentation where he requested some attendees (including myself) to act as Oracle instances to demonstrate Cache Fusion. Here are some photographs from this session last year (courtesy Connor McDonald) Picture 1 and picture 2. This year his presentation focused on Interconnects. Was excellent as usual. Here is another view from Alex’s blog on this presentation..

There were 4-5 papers from CERN on RAC topics, two of the ones I had attended are 1) Real Life experiences of RAC Scalability with a 6 Node Cluster, 2) Installing and Managing Hundreds of RAC Servers. Its interesting to see more and more companies undertaking challenging projects using Oracle RAC.

Another outstanding presentation was on Oracle Clusterware By Bernhard de Cock Buning. He explained the clusterware details with such great detail. Showing all the components of the clusterware and then drilling down into each component at a greater detail. The new component piece that I learnt from this presentation was the oclsomon, which was introduced in Oracle 10.2.0.2 and I have not covered this in my Oracle 10g RAC Grid Services and Clustering book. Great job Bernhard..

I will discuss about oclsmon later on this blog.

I hope these presenters can do a webcast on these topics for the Oracle RAC-SIG.

Back from OOW 2007

Just returned from OOW’2007. As usual this is one of the events that tend to be pretty hectic with several sessions and events that get scheduled in parallel and you end up confused on which one would be better to pick. Though several times, several of us think that OOW is Oracle’s show case to show off what is coming or some kind of marketing talk. Over the past couple of years, I have noticed that this is not completely true. There are presentations that contains product and new release overview, if you carefully select the presentation titles, you can get some good technical presentation.

Some of the good technical sessions I had attended were the performance tuning for data warehouses, performance tuning roundtable, performance tuning RAC and several of the IOUG and SIG events.

OOW started on Sunday with various SIGs presenting in their respective areas. I had presented a topic on Parallel queries in Oracle RAC for the RAC-SIG on Sunday.

At OOW, we also released a book on Oracle Automatic Storage Management (ASM) published by Oracle Press. This book is a combined effort of Nitin, Rich Long and myself. I am happy that the contents are pretty well covered from the basics of storage management to some internals and also to topics such as how to change the paradigm of the current of storage management implementation.

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This week had another great importance, a dream had come true, and a dream I had been working on for several years had become a reality. While every country had an Oracle Users Group that provided knowledge and information sharing to Oracle users, one such group was long past due in India. I had been working on getting one started over the past several years. I am happy to say we officially went live with this group. Those interested should check the user group website at www.aioug.org