oracle unbreakable linux with Wim Coekaerts

Today we had an Oracle partner meeting with Wim Coekaerts.
For those who don’t know who Wim Coekaerts is, he is vice president of Linux Engineering for Oracle (and originating from Belgium, but living in the US for more then 10 years now) and is also known as Oracle’s Mr. Linux.
Needless to say that when I received an inventation to attend a partner meeting with him, I was quickly to confirm my presence.

The presentation that Wim gave was divided into 2 parts: Oracle unbreakable linux and Oracle VM. Both parts where very interesting and at the end we had more then enough time to ask questions.

Some key points that I have written down:

Enterprise linux:

• Oracle did not launched oracle enterprise linux to bully Redhat or to push Redhat out of the market.
  They came with their own linux support because they felt that oracle customers where not helped sufficiently by Redhat support. As oracle software can be freely downloaded for testing and this is not possible with Redhat linux, oracle came with an own rebuild.

• Oracle Enterprise linux is not a separate fork and never will be. It is, and stays completely compatible with Redhat linux.
  In fact, when oracle tests its software, they don’t differentiate between Oracle Enterprise linux and Redhat linux as os platform.

• Oracle did not include an option to the installer to provide it with “preset” options suited to host an oracle database (needed rpm’s, kernel parameters, …), because they did not want to create the appearance that they are creating a fork.
  Instead oracle created the “oracle validated configuration” rpm. When installing this rpm, it will also install all rpm’s necessary, creates the oracle user and sets the kernel parameters and user os limites.

• Linux (32bit) is the reference platform for all development.
  It is also the platform for all internal servers.

Oracle VM:

• Wim claimed (and a paper about this would be appearing soon) that an oracle database running in oracle VM will perform at about 90% compared to running it on a real server. With VMware this would only be 70%.

• You no longer have to license your database for all physical processors on the oracle VM server, but only the number of cpu’s defined in the guest.
  According to Wim there should be a document about this on the oracle site, but the document I found stated that this was only true when using hard partitioning with Oracle VM (http://www.oracle.com/corporate/pricing/partitioning.pdf).
  I will check this further.

• The license policy for oracle on vmware was not going to change.

• Grid control 11g will have buildin functionality to manage Oracle VM servers (deploying guests, performing life migrations, …), but the VM-Manager will not disappear.

• The oracle supplied guest images will be certified for production use somewhere during the second half of this year.
  This would mean that you could download a database image from the oracle site and use it as a production database.

That was about it.
After the presentation I felt more assured that OEL would be here to stay and that the compatibility between Redhat linux and OEL would not disappear in the future.
Not to sure about Oracle VM though, I’m still a little bit anxious of running production databases in a virtualized environment (according to my shrink I have a problem with losing control).

Askimet spam filter

I have noticed that the spam counter has been going up without new spam messages being listed in the spam filter.  So it looks like the askimet spam filter is marking some posts as spam without giving me the possibility to moderate them.

If you notice that a posted comment is not published on the blog, then please send an email to the address listed in the “about” section.

Teaching

Part of my job is to occasionally give oracle trainings to customers.
Although this has never been my favorite part of my job, I find it most times an interesting experience. It forces you to realy take a good look into the material you are teaching and by explaining something to others, you ofter gain a better insight yourself.

The downsize of these kind of trainings is that you don’t have much time to actually learn the students something. I mean, you can guide them through the course material and learn them the facts, but that still is something different then giving a real understanding of things. You know, the level of understanding that you have reached when you are able to reason why something works a certain way.

A good example of this is the question (I’m currently giving a 9i backup and recovery course) : “do I have to backup my undo tablespace?”
The simple answer is that yes, you should backup your undo tablespace, but if you understand how oracle processes data changes and how oracle performs recovery (with the roll-forward and roll-back phases) then you just know that the undo tablespace has to be backed-up.

However, as I said, it takes time to gain understanding and I am afraid that a 4 days of training are only enough to scratch the surface. Therefore I find that these training courses are only suited as a kind of starting point and that you have to learn the details afterwards on yourself.
One way to do this is by organizing regular internal workshops or hand-on trainings, in which each time a fellow dba explains one specific part of oracle. Another option can be to hire somebody for a couple of days per week to coach the internal dba team.

I want to end this blog entry with a couple of questions: How did you learn oracle? Are there regular internal workshops at your company? What are your feelings about oracle courses? Do you find them usefull or not?

8 trivial things about me

Looks like, thanks to Chen Shapira, the tagging storm has hit me as well:

1. I was born on December 27, 1978 in Lokeren, Belgium and have 1 younger brother. He has also studied computer science and is currenlty working as a sysadmin.
   As you can imagine we had some animated discussions at the dinner table that where hard to follow by our parents.

1. My father is a lifeguard in a swimming pool ( I could swim before I could walk ) and my mother is a laboratory technician (yes, we had petri dishes stored in our fridge).

1. I got maried in 2003, and we are expecting our first child in about 6 weeks.

1. Every August I spend 10 days working as a barkeeper at a music festival ( lokerse feesten ).

1. I have the bad habbit of always arriving late. So if the baby looks like me, he/she will be born in about 8 weeks :)

1. I drive a Toyota Prius, but I would really need to use my bike more often.

1. My favorit beer is Hoegaarden (an unfiltered white beer) and I also like to drink whisky (single malt, that is).

1. I like reading, mostly fiction (sci-fi, thrillers, detectives, that kind of stuff). When I’m reading I tend to forget about time and other duties and keep on reading until late at night, which explains a bit the late arrivings.

My time to tag.
Hmm, I tag Geert De Paep, Arul Ramachandran and Howard Rogers (call it a flaw in my character)