As I was putting the finishing touches on one of my presentations I am giving at the upcoming IOUG Collaborate conference a call for papers came in for Oracle Open World 2012. It got me thinking a little.

I attended my first Oracle conference in circa 1987. Oracle was just 10 years old. The conference was held in Washington D.C.. It was known as Oracle International Users Week. State of the art for Oracle back then was Version 4 . From a technology perspective there was no row level locking, cost base optimizer, nor stored procedures.

The presentation I gave at Oracle International Users Week was titled “It’s not in the Manuals”. Oracle world headquarters was located at 20 Davis Drive, Redwood City. It was suppose to be the Oracle office to end all offices. Back then Oracle was the dominant relational database on the market as it is today. Some things never change.

I was so excited to be able to attend the conference and learn first hand from the experience of the other users of the product and the many experts from Oracle Corporation directly. In one day at the conference I would have a chance to walk the vendor floor and see all the product, tools and 3-party solutions available out there. Today at Oracle Open World it would take you days just to walk the vendor floor alone. At the conference General session I would hear first hand the strategic direction for Oracle from Larry Ellison himself. Well its almost 30 years ago and my excitement still builds for IOUG Collaborate conference coming up in about 30 days.

No Substitute For The Real Thing

In these cost-cutting times, many companies are pushing their employees to attend virtual conferences. I do feel there is a place for virtual conferences, but nothing compares to the real thing.

• Walking the Vendor Floor At Oracle Open World/IOUG Collaborate I can learn more 3-party solutions in a day then would take me a month of google searching to find
• Seeing Larry Ellison on stage sharing his passion, there is no substitute that even comes close.
• Seeing a presentation live, being able to interact with the presenter, picking up all the nuances of what they are saying and being able to talk with the presenter afterwards. A virtualize session does not come close.
• Wednesday Night Party’s. Last year at Oracle Open World was Sting & Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Lets face it that rocks.
• Networking, Networking, Networking, Networking. You will be amazed who you will meet at the conference. Many years ago I met Bob Miner (Oracle Founder) waiting in line for an event.
• When you are in the office, you get interrupted. When you are at the conference you are able to take it all in.

My company Ntirety we invest in our people. We try to have a strong showing at events like Oracle Open World & IOUG Collaborate.

Oracle Open World Call For Papers

There are lots of great reasons for attending an event. A great way to make the business case for attending is to present a paper. Your conference fee is waived. That is the case for Oracle Open World and the IOUG Collaborate conference. I would strongly encourage you to do it. If you have never attended an Oracle Open World then you are missing out. It’s a great place to learn, network and see the strategic direction of the industry.

My Presentations At IOUG Collaborate

223: Trends in Database Administration and the Changing Role of the DBA

Databases keep getting bigger and bigger. Business applications that utilize ever-growing databases are expanding at an alarming rate. To stay competitive, businesses require additional functionality, and the technology needed to make that functionality possible keeps getting more complex. To make matters worse, the DBAs needed to keep it all running are hard to find and retain. Good DBA skills take years to acquire, and the role of the DBA is fundamentally changing. This presentation discusses these trends and how they affect your career as a DBA or as a DBA manager. If you’re a DBA manager, understanding these trends will enable you to prevent staff burnout and be better equipped to align yourself with the needs of your organization.

826 Virtualization Boot Camp: Virtualizing Oracle On VMware – Quick Tips

A database is a very resource intensive by its very nature and one of the most resource intensive applications you will ever virtualize. If best practices are not followed, the database will never perform as needed. This presentation will teach the DBA best practices for Virtualizing Oracle/MySQL databases on VMware. The Best practices will carry over to Oracle VM.

If you attend IOUG Collaborate or Oracle Open World this year, please stop by and say hello.

Michael Corey
Founder & CEO, Ntirety
My Personal Twitter Account: @Michael_Corey

Day 4 VMware Partner Exchange

It’s Day 4 and the big event has finally started. Yet I have to be honest, the boot camps have given me really high expectations for the rest of the week. The only way I can equate how I feel today is when I attended my first Oracle conference in 1986 in Washington D.C. It was the first major technology event I had ever attended and back then I felt that Oracle could change the world. Today that’s exactly how I feel today; VMware has technology that will change the world.

I choose to skip the General Session from 9:00-10:30. It’s Vegas after all, I am human and I figure after 3 days of intensive boot camps, I am entitled to a late night. Last Night was it. I knew it was a late night, when everyone I saw had coffee in his or her hands. Very happy to say I am up on the Casinos. Its 11:00 a.m. I am back to work again. Most time slots today, I find at least 2-3 presentations I really want to attend. When I add in the hands-on-labs, Vendor Showcase it’s impossible to see it all. Here is the Agenda I have chosen for the day:

My VMware Partner Exchange Schedule

11:00 AM NetApp and VMware – The Smart Decision to Virtualizing Business Critical Applications

12:15 PM Selling the VMware Advantage for Business Continuity and Security

1:30 PM Building Resilient, High-Performance, Distributed Applications That Are Data Intensive

2:45 PM Oracle Databases on vSphere5 Best Practices

4:00 PM Understanding licensing for Tier 1 ISVs (Oracle, IBM, Microsoft) to build a solid business case to virtualize Business Critical Applications

During a number of sessions it came out a number of times that Oracle sales around the country is filling the Marketplace with a lot of FUD (fear, Uncertainty & Doubt) about VMware not being supported. I know what FUD means but I decided to do a Google search for ”what is fud”. Here is what I received back.

FUD sands for Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt. It is a marketing technique used when a competitor launches a product that is both better than yours and costs less, i.e. your product is no longer competitive. Unable to respond with hard facts, scare-mongering is used via ‘gossip channels’ to cast a shadow of doubt over the competitors offerings and make people think twice before using it.

Oracle Support Policy Concerning VMware

Sounds about right, does it not. So for all you Oracle DBA’s here lets set the record straight.

Oracle Official Support Policy Document 249212.1 States they will support Oracle Databases, Applications & Middleware virtualized on VMware.

VMware has the world best virtualization technology. Oracle cannot win a head to head battle versus VMware on the technology front they know it. VMware has at least a 3-year lead in my opinion.

Oracle Licensing Stance on VMware

A lot of discussion happened around Oracle Stance that if you have a 4-node VMware configuration, that Oracle expects you to pay as if the Oracle database was running on all 4 nodes. Even if your Oracle database in only used on one node. That even if you set affinity rules preventing the database from running on the other nodes they still expect you to pay for all 4 nodes. I can see why Oracle would want you to do this. As the paying customer I am sure you might have a different opinion.

Lets take a really simple case.
If you buy a computer, the vendor’s software is never installed or is used on the physical computer. No vendor has a right to expect payment. Not even Oracle.
We all know life is never that simple? A lot of discussion happened in detail on how to handle this issue, so that you did not violate your contracts with Oracle and at the same time prevented you from having to pay for 3 nodes you never used.

For example for long-term customers of Oracle (circa 2007, if memory is right), you have the right to run on a fail over computer for up to 10 days. So you are within you rights to pay for the one node you use and also fail over on another for up to 10 days without violating your contract. If you happen to have one of these license agreements don’t loose it.

I could write pages more on this topic. Suffice to say, before you go pay for 3 nodes you are not using. Learn the facts. I am happy to talk to anyone who want’s to discuss this in more detail.

This blog does not come close to how much great information was exchanged at VMware Partner Exchange. It has been 4 very long days. Yet every one with me agrees, its been an awesome event so far.

Michael Corey
Founder & CEO, Ntirety
My Personal Twitter Account: @Michael_Corey

I am on my 3rd day of attending VMware partner exchange. The official conference has not even started yet I expect this day to be really busy. This is the first day the hands-on-labs become available.  At VMworld last year, there were always very long lines for the hands-on-labs that never seemed to end.

Todays Boot camp is Virtualizing Business Critical Applications. The Intended Audience for this boot camp is a sales professional. After careful discussion with my V.P. of Sales Andy Sherman we decided that a number of the Ntirety Database Administrators should attend this session. We both feel it’s important for the DBA’s to understand how Virtualization will be positioned from a Sales perspective. At Ntirety we had already vetted VMware from a Technical perspective. We strongly feel it was the only platform we would recommend our customers run an Oracle Database on in production. The VMware terminology is the only virtualization platform ready to support the most intensive business critical applications like Oracle, Exchange or Microsoft SQL Server.

This reminds me of a situation that happened recently that illustrates why I would only run a Business Critical Application on a VMware platform. We were working on a critical application that was hosted on Citrix Zen.  To facilitate the upgrade we needed to back up the SQL Server database then restore it. The backup appeared to work, but every time we attempted a restore it failed. When we contacted the vendor. We got that there was a little know bug affecting the quality of the database backups. The application vendor was also aware of this bug and rightly so only recommend it be virtualized on the VMware platform.

To VMware’s credit, there is not a single know problem in the Oracle bug database that has ever been attributed to virtualizing on VMware. That clearly is not the case for Citrix Zen.

My expectations going into the boot camp that it would be a deep dive on how VMware technology stacks up against the competitions Technology.  VMware clearly has a 3-5 year lead from a technology perspective. Being a technologist at heart, I figured that would be the pitch. To put thing in perspective according the Gartner Group VMware currently has 85% market share.

To My Surprise, that never happened. Along the way I learned some interesting facts. Interesting Facts. According to an in-depth customer survey by VMware 42% of Microsoft Exchange instances, 28% of all Oracle database and middleware deployments, and 47% of Microsoft SQL Server deployments are currently running on virtualized environments.

At the boot camp the VMware approach is all about talking to the business and addressing what it needs.  The instructor for this boot camp was Mike Dargos. He was outstanding. VMware Partner Exchange is 3 for 3 at this point.

As I think about VMware’s approach it really makes sense to me. VMware knows they have the best virtualization technology. This is not about who has the best technology, they have already won that battle. This is about mapping the Business needs to an appropriate solution.

By focusing on what the business needs, it puts them in a great position to capture a lot of Oracle RAC business. Don’t get me wrong, as a Technologist Oracle RAC is awesome technology. It was one of the greatest technologies in the last 20 years. I am proud to say I was one of the first 2 DBA’s in the world to ever deploy it in production. Back then it was know as Oracle release 6.2.

To quote David Welch from the boot camp “I love Oracle Rac, I love Oracle Rac, I love Oracle Rac but I would not wish it upon my worst enemy”.  Oracle Rac is very complex and costly technology. By leveraging virtualization and the many features in the VMware architecture like High Availability companies would save money and reduce complexity compared to an Oracle Rac database.

It’s been another long day drinking out of the firehose. The more I learn, the more excited I get.  As a technologist I love the technology. As a business owner I love the idea of saving money, reducing complexity and putting an infrastructure in place that can scale horizontally and vertically. VMware gives my customers a virtualized infrastructure that has their Tier-2 applications performing on the level of thier most demanding Business Critical Applications.

Michael Corey
Founder & CEO, Ntirety
My Personal Twitter Account: @Michael_Corey