Blog Aggregator - Amardeep Sidhu

I realize I’ve been a little quiet of late, but life has been really busy and something had to give…

Flights for my conference dates are now sorted. Big thanks to Victoria, LaShon and Sylia. I better get on the case and book my hotels. The plan is:

Birmingham > Frankfurt > San Francisco > Auckland > Perth > Sydney > Gold Coast > Auckland > LAX > Frankfurt > Home

Just looking at it is giving me the fear. That’s some serious air time. I’m way to fat to fly coach at the moment. I better lose some weight and get some anti-DVT support socks…

I’ve still got to sort out my talks for the conferences. It’s all stuff I’ve been teaching recently, so the material isn’t the problem. The hard thing is trying to compress something that takes me 3.5 hours to teach into 45 minutes without sounding like a list of bullet points.

Recently, I’ve been doing some work with VMware ESX Server. I may have something coming out on the VMware VIOPS site soon. I’ll post again if that works out. By the way, big thanks to the VMware guys (Steve, Tushar and Chris) for hooking me up with the software. I’ve been wanting to play with this stuff for a long time. I was going to start using the free ESXi stuff, but I’ve now got the pukka gear…

The OCP stuff has hit the back burner for the moment. I was aiming to take the exam this week, but that’s not going to happen now. I’ve got pretty much all of the notes sorted, but I’ve not had time to learn them. Maybe I’ll get time before OpenWorld, or even at OpenWorld…

Cheers

Tim…

All RAC SIG members should have received an announcement regarding the voting that’s now in progress for new RAC SIG board members/officers. There were several nominations received in July and early August and voting is open now to all RAC SIG members. Just login to the site and use the Elections tab to cast your votes. Make sure you vote for each office (nominations for each office are on separate pages).

I’m giving up my spot as the Events Chair and am running for the President position along with several other fine candidates. Please vote today!

In related news, I just posted the RAC SIG Events taking place at Oracle Open World 2008 on the front page of the site, so check those out (and add them to your schedule in the OOW Schedule Builder) if you’re planning to attend OOW this year!

I’d like to share some great news — The Pythian Group and Open Query have become partners!

Open Query is a leading provider of high-quality MySQL, PostgreSQL and related training in Australia and New Zealand. They offer consulting services too, and are also known for their MySQL Graph Storage Engine. Feel free to browse through Open Query web-site for more info.

Open Query was founded by Arjen Lentz, who was employee number 25 at MySQL AB. If you follow the MySQL community then I’m sure you already read Arjen’s blog.

Since you’re reading this blog, I guess you probably already know what Pythian does, but if you want to learn more, please click through to our home page.

Together with Open Query, we are going to extend our service offerings and strengthen our positions in outsourced database management services, consulting, and training.

I’ve just come back from a couple of weeks wind-surfing - so I’ve spent the last few days catching up recovering from sundry injuries and catching up on email. One of the emails raised a point about deterministic function which made me realise that I still had a few items that I had written for Howard [...]

So, you have a binlog. You want to find out something specific that happened inside of it. What to do? mysqlbinlog has some neat features, which I thought we would look at here.

I should first explain what mysqlbinlog really is. It is a tool that lets you analyze and view the binlogs/relaylogs from mysql, which are stored in binary format. This tool converts them to plaintext, so that they’re human-readable.

For the first tip, let’s start with the --read-from-remote-server option, which allows you to examine a binlog on a master server in order, perhaps, to dump it onto your slave and compare master/slave logs for potential problems*.

$ mysqlbinlog --read-from-remote-server -uwesterlund -p mysql-bin.000001 -h 127.0.0.1 -P 3306 | head -5
Enter password:
/*!40019 SET @@session.max_insert_delayed_threads=0*/;
/*!50003 SET @OLD_COMPLETION_TYPE=@@COMPLETION_TYPE,COMPLETION_TYPE=0*/;
DELIMITER /*!*/;
# at 4
#080815 19:25:23 server id 101  end_log_pos 107 	Start: binlog v 4, server v 6.0.5-alpha-log created 080815 19:25:23 at startup

Pretty useful!

Now, let’s assume we have a binlog that is 94 lines long*:

(more…)

This post is a follow up to a thread (”How do you conduct technical interviews?”) that carried on for quite a while on the Oracle-L mailing list (you should consider joining if you aren’t already on the list). Here is my contribution to the discussion that started with the eternal question “How do you find the person with the right attitude, not just technical skills?”

As has been said often, there are no silver bullets and your “gut” feeling has to play at least some part. Here are some of my thoughts (in no particular order) on how I typically conduct interviews (I interview consultant candidates, but IT candidates wouldn’t be much different):

• My mindset in the interview is about determining whether this person has a high capacity to learn new things quickly and apply/adapt them. This is almost always more important than the knowledge they have in their head now, because at least some significant part of the detail they know will be obsolete or changed in the coming months/years.
• I don’t care if they can recite syntax or quote intricate details (as was mentioned–that’s what reference books and docs are for). If they can explain HOW things work (things like the process of a commit, how data is read into the buffer cache, how read consistency is achieved), that’s more important than whether the command to switch a logfile is alter system or alter database (I always have to stop and think about that one). If possible, in a face-to-face interview, I like to have them draw pictures to illustrate the process. If they can’t communicate something to me in a way that makes me understand it, they may have some communication issues–that’s at least an orange flag for me when hiring consultants where communication skills are absolutely critical.
• While past experiences are important and things like “tell me about the worst project experience ever…”, I recognize that people change as fast or faster than technology does sometimes. So, I’m more interested in very recent history. My questions include “What did you do at your current job in the last week?”, “What did you learn in the last week?”, and/or “What did you teach someone else last week?”.
• Every interview candidate has to answer “I don’t know” or “I’m not sure” at least once (for a technical question). I follow up with “Ok, how would you find the answer?”. See my point #1 above. No one knows all this stuff and if they think they do, then they probably don’t have the right attitude for my team.
• Again, not an absolute, but those that talk about the server they have at home or the VM images they maintain to play with new stuff often have a predisposition to learning new things without being told to. This is a Good Thing(tm).
• Recognize that employing the people with the “right” attitude and presenting them with routine, boring work will eventually lead to them being unhappy and leaving. There has to be a strong manager in place to ensure that the path of learning continues or these individuals will often become restless and look for a better place to work. Short version: employing the “good” ones is often hard as they require challenges to remain engaged. At least I do. And I am hard to employ…ask any of my current/past managers!
• On an interpersonal level, I like to hear a story about an encounter with someone that had a “difficult” personality and how the situation was handled. We all have them and while not a technical issue, we all know that the non-technical issues often hurt work environments worse than technical ones.

Of course, as I’ve published here previously, I always include my “signature” (technical) question: Can uncommitted data be written to Oracle data files? (Of course, I always like the follow up why (not)?)

And, starting from now on, I’ll be asking candidates that interview with me if they’ve read this post or not. I don’t necessarily like anyone to think I’m famous or anything, but I always Google the name of any person I interview with to see what they do/publish online. It’s always nice to know what the other person is thinking about before/after they talk to me.

I got a question regarding Metalink note 296235.1 about a describe bug which causes objects to “disappear” when they are described when database is not open. It was an interesting case involving a bug, so I wrote a quite long analysis with test cases today. However when posting the entry to wordpress, it managed to completely [...]

Doug Burns’ posting of his Open World schedule made me think about mine yesterday evening, and so I fired up the Schedule Builder application (which now uses Oracle Data Mining to predict which other sessions you might be interested in, presumably based on what others who picked this session have also chosen) and got to work building my schedule. Here it is:

Sunday September 21st

08:30 - 10:00 : Extending and Customizing the Oracle BI Applications Data Warehouse
10:00 - 12:00 : Oracle BI - Oracle Business Intelligence SIG
13:00 - 15.15 : OAUG Business Intelligence / Data Warehouse SIG
16.30 - 17.30 : ODTUG Essbase Symposium, Part 3 : Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition
19:00 - ??? : Blogger meetup, Thirsty Bear Bar and Restaurant

I fly in to San Francisco around 2pm on the Saturday afternoon, based on previous years I’ll probably last until around 7pm and then crash out. Sunday, the next day, is a pretty early start for me (why do US conferences start so early - over at the UKOUG conference most people haven’t gone to bed by that point) and I’m doing the first of my five sessions, on extending the Oracle BI Applications data warehouse using the Informatica tool. This is an hour and a half presentation at 8.30 in the morning so I’m not sure who’ll turn up, I’ll probably be surprised though as registration starts at 7am and there are usually more than a few people around at that point. The rest of the day is taken up by user group sessions, I’ll be keen to go along to them, and a session that Borkur and I are doing during the Essbase Symposium, we’ll be going through the integration between OBIEE and Essbase including what’s new with the Essbase 11.1 release. I think the Oracle ACEs dinner is later on that evening around 7pm so it’ll certainly be a long day.

Monday September 22nd

09:00 - 11:00 : Oracle Keynote, Charles Phillips and Chuck Rozwat
11:30 - 12:30 : Using Cube-Organized Materialized Views (Bud Endress)
13:00 - 14:00 : Oracle Business Intelligence Roadmap & Strategy (Paul Rodwick)
14:30 - 15:30 : Automating Business Decisions using Oracle Real-Time Decisions
17:30 - 18:30 : Oracle Essbase Products, What’s New and What’s Coming (Dave Collins, Aneel Shenker)
19:00 - ??? : Oracle ACE Dinner (I think)

Monday starts off with the Keynote from Charles Phillips and Chuck Rozwat; I wouldn’t normally rush to a Charles Phillips keynote (particularly if its the morning after the blogger meetup) but what I’ve heard on the grapevine and that Chuck Rozwat is presenting as well, I wouldn’t be surprised if (a) they formally announce the first release, proper, of the Fusion applications, and (b) announce the key features for Oracle Database 11gR2. What I might do is pitch up at the OTN lounge and watch it from there, it depends on whether I’ve got myself into the queue in time. After that is one of the presentations I most look forward to, Bud Endress’ annual talk on what’s new in Oracle OLAP; this year it’s the cube organized materialized view feature where you can register OLAP analytic workspaces and use them instead of a number of separate materialized views.

Following Bud’s talk is the Oracle Business Intelligence Roadmap and Strategy talk, it’ll be interesting to hear any more on release dates (by my reckoning OBIEE 11gR2 is at least six months to a year late now, at last year’s Open World they were showing off key features of this new release and we seem no nearer to a production release, or even a beta, yet) and any more news on some of the new features coming with the 11g release, including the balanced scorecard application, the new version of Answers and the Action Framework. After this it’s my session on Oracle Real-Time Decisions, and with this presentation, something I’m working on for this iteration of the talk is to show integration between RTD and a calling application, probably Oracle Application Express if I can work through the documentation for the RTD SOAP interface. After that it’s an update on Essbase and then off, I think, to the ACE’s dinner later in the evening.

Tuesday September 23rd

09:00 - 10:00 : Data Modeling Techniques using Oracle BI Server
12:00 - 13:00 : OTN Office Hours Duty
13:00 - 14:00 : New Technologies in Oracle BI Suite Enterprise Edition
14:30 - 16:30 : Thomas Kurian Fusion Middleware Keynote
17:00 - 18:00 : Oracle’s Strategic OLAP Technologies (Oracle OLAP for the Database, Oracle Essbase for Middleware)

Whilst running my BI masterclasses in EMEA this year and last some of the most positive feedback I got was around the data modeling section, where I show how features such as logical table sources, physical and logical joins, fragmentation and time dimensions work. I’ll be delivering the highlights of this section first thing in the morning, together with some new material on resolving circular joins and the handling of SCD2 dimensions in both OBIEE and the BI Applications. Following on from this session is the first of my sessions in the OTN lounge, I’ll be joined this morning by Debra Lilly (UKOUG Director and Oracle Fusion specialist) and staying until around 1pm.

The session after lunch is probably one of the three key Open World sessions for me (the first is the BI Roadmap one, and other is the one on OBIEE performance optimization on Wednesday). The abstract for this sessions suggests that it’ll cover the integration between Hyperion and OBIEE, SmartSpace and OBIEE and what’s coming in Answers Plus, and given that much of my consulting job is knowing the roadmap for these products, this’ll be a “don’t miss” session for me. After that it’s Thomas Kurian’s Fusion Middleware Keynote (expect lots on BEA and how Fusion Middleware/IdM/BI is going to power the Fusion Applications that Charles Phillips launches on Monday). Following that is a joint talk by John Kopcke and Ray Roccoforte on Essbase and Oracle OLAP positioning, I guess I know the score on this one now but it’ll be interesting to see how they handle the inevitable questions and whether any new features of Oracle OLAP are mentioned (I’ve heard one rumour, but it’s so interesting (he says, somewhat mysteriously) that I’ll just have to keep it to myself unless they announce it at the session)

Wednesday September 24th

09:00 - 10:00 : Enabling Actionable Business Intelligence and Business Process Management (Nick Tuson, Adam Bloom)
13:00 - 14:00 : Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher Roadmap and Planned Features
14:30 - 16:00 : Larry Ellison Keynote
16:00 - 17:00 : OTN Office Hours Duty
17:00 - 18:00 : Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition Performance Optimization

The morning starts off with what I presume will be a walk-through of the new Action Framework in OBIEE 11g, the feature that lets you define actions as first-class metadata objects in the semantic layer (email a colleague, start a marketing campaign, raise some human workflow etc) and attach them to data items in a dashboard report. I first saw and heard about this from Phil Bates at last year’s Open World and I’m keen to hear how this new area of the product is progressing (so that’s four must-hear presentations, then). After that is Mike Donahoe and Osama Elkady on BI Publisher’s new features; I’m always keen to hear about BIP as they seem to have a fairly innovative and fast-delivering development team, lots of new ideas seem to come out of that product area although I suspect actual releases are getting held back because of the need to sync with OBIEE in general. Hopefully we’ll hear a release date for the web-based template builder, maybe they’ll even release it prior to the full 11g release of OBIEE (here’s hoping).

Following the BIP session is the Larry keynote, followed by an hour in the OTN lounge (bring your BI and DW questions!) followed then by the session I’m most looking forward to, the one of OBIEE performance optimization. Something I’m really keen to find out about OBIEE, given that it’s a virtual database engine, is how it handles things such as indexing, join types and so on, from looking at the abstract it’s covering “a toolkit and systematic approaches to help improve performance and scalability in Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition Plus deployments, including wizard-driven aggregate persistence and navigation setup, cache configuration and seeding design, parameterized nested-loop joins in federated environments, clustering, and use of usage tracking to spot problems.” which seems to fit the bill, no doubt I’ll be hanging around after the session and making a few contacts as I’m keen to make contact with anyone else working on OBIEE performance optimization.

Thursday September 25th

09:00 - 10:00 : Advanced Topics in Ad-Hoc Reporting with Oracle BI Suite Enterprise Edition Plus
10:30 - 11:30 : Oracle ACE Directors Birds of a Feather Tips and Techniques Panel
12:00 - 13:00 : Oracle Business Intelligence Management using Oracle Enterprise Manager
13:30 - 14:30 : Oracle Business Intelligence Applications architecture, security and integration overview
15:00 - 16:00 : Integrating Oracle’s Hyperion Technology with Oracle Fusion Middleware

The first session of the day looks like being an update on Answer Plus, plus a look at “its new direct query features from Oracle Essbase, with practical use cases and best practices” - I wonder if this will be the standard “relational query against a metadata layer over a relational-multidimensional translation layer” that OBIEE and Essbase currently use, or whether Answers Plus will feature a proper multi-dimensional OLAP selector that generates raw MDX against an Essbase cube, to replace Web Analysis? We’ll have to wait and see. After that is the panel session organized by Lewis Cunningham and featuring such names as Arup Nanda, Bradley Brown, Eddie Awad (and myself), followed by a session on what must be the new OBIEE management features in Oracle Enterprise Manager that must be coming in the next releases of these two products.

The final two sessions of Open World for me are a talk on the BI Applications (I haven’t seen much else on the BI Apps at Open World, certainly not from a technical standpoint, maybe everyone will come to my session at 8.30am on Sunday morning after all) and then a final closing session on Essbase integration into Oracle Fusion Middleware - if you were an Essbase developer a few years ago I bet that’s one session you never thought you’d be going to.

So, that’s my Oracle Open World plans. Like last year, I’ll be going as a guest of the Oracle courtesy of the Oracle ACE Director program (thank Vikki for this) and I’ll be hoping to meet up with fellow Brits (Doug, Tim Hall, Debra and the others), my colleagues Jon and Borkur, all my friends and colleagues from across the pond that I get to meet up with once a year. I’ll be frantically taking down notes (why, oh why don’t Oracle release the slides for the roadmap and keynote talks on the Open World site, so that we don’t have to frantically make notes or surreptitiously take photos of the presenters’ slides so that we can get everything down?), I’ll probably try and get along to the Unconference sessions and maybe even get to see a bit of San Francisco as well. Oh, and nurse increasingly desperate hangovers during the week as the nights get later, drinks get more plentiful and you start to run into all the people you’ve been meaning to catch up with all week. Until then, it’s time to finish off the presentations and work out what we can afford from the Apple Store just around the corner from the Moscone Center.

I had a chat with a friend of mine on the phone last night and he asked me a question. I won't reveal his name in case he doesn't want me to but he knows who he is. He asked....[Read More]

Posted by Pete On 13/08/08 At 10:33 PM

We have been away for the past 8 or 9 days on a familly holiday so no blog posts over this last period. This holiday was strange, [Keep reading there is some Oracle security content coming!] OK not strange but....[Read More]

Posted by Pete On 11/08/08 At 03:43 PM