Tag Archives: Oracle

Oracle on OpenVMS – revival

Business, General, Operating Systems, Oracle tips, Technical, User Groups, , , , , ,

Can it be true?

Will there be Oracle on OpenVMS again? Meaning the “regular” (sorry) Oracle (12c) RDBMS on a revived VMS?

As many who have ever lived on OpenVMS have always known:

OpenVMS will never die!

OpenVMS can never die, becOpenVMSause it is still running way to many hidden, hyper-mission-critical environments.
The fact that these environments are hidden, combined with the fact nobody ever spent any marketing budget on OpenVMS at all, created a super solution nobody knows about. And you cannot love what you don’t know.

A lot has been happening around this tormented operating system. OpenVMS is indefinitely bound to Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) which was acquired by Compaq in June of 1998 and then merged into Hewlett Packard in May 2002.

DIGITAL-logo
Personally I have lost access to OpenVMS, and Oracle op OpenVMS, around 1995, when these systems were replace by HP Unix. I never fully recovered 😉

Until a few years ago I was introduced to a Alpha emulator, which creates a virtual machine with (obviously) an Alpha processor, which allows you to run OpenVMS. This was one step closer (back) to Oracle on OpenVMS.

Recently (like the day before yesterday, recently) I learned a number of new things! One is that the ongoing development OpenVMS will be take up by VMS Software Inc. (VSI).
But, more importantly, they will be creating new versions for mainstream hardware (such as x86)!! Wilm Boerhout of VX Company wrote an announcement about this not too long ago (article in Dutch)!

And now these rumors…

A porting of Oracle on OpenVMS!

Will we once again see the day that systems just won’t go down? Oracle environments with an uptime with like a dozen or two ‘nines’ behind the decimal-mark? Wouldn’t that be something?
Your own VMS server running an Oracle database with Oracle Application Express (APEX)? Wouldn’t that be something else? High time to clear some of your calendar and get (re)acquainted with this super OS!

A very special “thank you” goes to my dear friend Gerrit Woertman – OpenVMS Ambassador, who never seized to remain a link to the VMS World!!

If you are from The Netherlands, please also join Interexperience, to stay close to the game.

Live free or die


Big Data: Hadoop and Oracle technologies explained

Big Data, Business, Oracle tips, Technical, User Groups, , , , , , , , , ,

MarkRittmanUnder the title “Hadoop and Oracle technologies on BI projects” Mark Rittman flew to The Netherlands on the 14th of July to visit the Oracle Usergroup Holland.

As I had obviously heard a lot about Hadoop, I never really did anything further with it and left it to a synaptic link to Gwen Shapira. This lack of action created a kind of threshold in the understanding of the technology. When I heard about this session I realized this would be the moment to take a step further. It turned out the be the  first real talk that puts “Big Data” in the perspective it needs to be consumable and realistic.

In these current times where “The Internet of Things”, more and more social media and ever further digitization we are heading to a Big Data Disruption. This is both a conceptual as a very real thing if you take a moment to think about it. According to real world experience it is also not something “which will once be”, it is something which is actually here today!

On the technical side of thhadoopings, data is captured in something that is called a “data reservoir” (or “data lake” or “data dump (yard)”). Compared with “regular” data storage, you can conclude that data-governance, or a data-structure, in a Big Data system is applied later  We are used to apply this structure, this governance, beforehand, by applying data definition. Using Hadoop in combination with noSQL give you “schema on read” capabilities making quering of the Hadoop data reservoir possible.

Adding this structure later is harder! This leads to the following:

  • Data is much easier to get into Hadoop then into a star-schema
  • Data is much easier to get out of a star-schema then out of Hadoop

This could be one of the essential things to consider when thinking about engaging in a Big Data project!

As Tanel Poder concluded: “High value, high density data will remain in the Oracle database” which I think is a very true conclusion. In the end, the high value conclusions (or the engineering of Big Data results) will also happen within the Oracle database.

On the horizon is “Oracle Big Data Discovery” which will help with the time consuming and tedious work of sorting and interpreting raw data in the data reservoir. The use of ‘R’, as the data exploration tool of duty, is expected to be replaced by this discovery tooling, over time…

To sum up the concept of the first half of the presentation, to my taste:

  • Hadoop changes business
  • NoSQL scales business
  • Oracle runs business

“It takes eons to list all names of the Buddha” nicely sums up the number of different applications that make up and are needed to execute a successful Big Data project.
Plus, “You’d better keep the 13 rules for relational databases close at hand“!

presentation

Part two of the evening was spent on mapping these concepts on actually tools, disclosing data through Hadoop to Oracle SQL and making actual use of Big Data. The exercise was completed by demos and illustrated by screenshots from the slides (link below).
A special word of warning goes out to the security aspect of Big Data, which is something to really pay close attention to. Kerberos authentication and apache Sentry are imperative things to implement in your Big Data environment.

All in all, this evening turned out to be 110% more informative and necessary as I expected when I embarked on the journey to Utrecht! Thank you for sharing, Mark!

Thanks to Piet de Visser for the nice quotes! And a great “hi there” to Klaas-jan Jongsma, René Kuipers and Marti Koppelmans.

If you want to work with Big Data on your Smal(ler) Device, please download the Big data light VM from OTN.

The link to the slides for anyone who wants to review the “extended remix”!

My Oracle 2014, what a blast…

Business, Development, General, User Groups, , , , , ,

Twenty-fourteen… What a year!

As the year draws to a close, I just wanted to take a few minutes to look back at the passed crazy 12 months… Crazy from a personal as well as a professional point of view!

ougfIn June things took off for the Oracle stuff with a visit to OUGF14. My second real talk after starting to speak in UKOUG-Tech13. Plus the bonus, the first ever Round Table on Oracle Standard Edition, together with my friend Philippe Fierens and the support of Ann Sjökvist. Always imagined, never experienced, the way technology binds people. For all the events happening in Haltia, Finland, please read this post.
OUFG14 was also where I met Gurcan Orhan for the first time. My partner in (hard) rockin’ Oracle stuff!! Together with my international peers, we have quite a team and this makes me super proud.

I owe an apology to the Scotts! I should have been in Linlithgow presenting. I was honored to be selected to travel to the beautiful city of Edinburgh in one of the most beautiful parts of the world, but there were to many things going on, so I had to cancel. I am so sorry!!Scotland

The next stop on the agenda was Oracle Open World. But before I could pack my bags, up and leave, there was A LOT of work to be done at VIR e-Care Solutions coordinating and rolling out a brand new Oracle infrastructure to all of their clients.
And not alone that, there was a trip to Hamburg for Dbvisit with a presentation at the DOAG Data Replication SIG meeting, organized by Johannes Ahrends. Of course, also Björn Rost was present, plus a number of the other representatives of the data replication scene in Germany.

Oracle Open World was not the high-point of 2014, which was somewhat surprising, actually… I cannot really put my finger on it, because the days were packed with good stuff, unexpected encounters and many more goodies… But somehow, the second time around, and with a lot more OUG-experience, it didn’t crack up to be event Numero Uno of 2014! I can safely say, looking back, that national Oracle User Group events are more interesting. You get to have more quality time with the people you just get to meet a few times a year.
Still, with all the content and with everything that happened… And especially the lunch with Martin NStretchedLimoash in the sun at the CCM as well as the unparalleled drive by Stretched Limo to Treasure Island, hosted by Portrix (Henning and Björn) with Yuri Velikanov, Ilmar Kerm and others. I am not complaining!!

Coming back from America there was a huge surprise and honor for me.

ACEAssociateNominated by my peers, Oracle Corp. saw it fit to award my efforts for the Oracle Community with the Oracle ACE Associate recognition. I had never thought or expected this to be a possibility for me, so this was a complete surprise which started a chain of events, ending at the end of this post.

The final event for 2014 was the DOAG Jahreskonferenz in Nuremberg. I guess the biggest event in Europe and the biggest even for me by means of contributions. I had my “Pre-APEX” talk, there was the second edition of the Standard Edition Round Table, co-hosted by Philippe and chaired by Johannes Ahrends!! What a shock 😉 There was the Data Replication forum and Dbvisit #RepAttack!
DOAG also, and again, brought a sheer endless list of new and re-encounters with Oracle Hero’s. My good friend Peter Raganitsch was also there…

At the end of the year, you would think that you would be “home free”, right?

Well 2014 had a last trick up it’s sleeve! The year ended with me saying goodbye at VIR e-Care Solutions BV. After 16 years we had to decide to break up. It’s like tearing off a band-aid. You do it quick and it hurts less, but still…

So, I am a free man!

With this last development, set in the light of everything I had the chance of doing this year, it has been a great deal to handle. The first visit to Oracle Open World, back in 2010 has started a chain of events that has invoked some quite unforeseen twists and turns. It all looks and feels like it has been worth it, but it has indeed taken it’s toll.
Currently I am enjoying some well deserved but also much needed time off with my wife and family and I will start thinking about new ventures in a bit.
Please take a look here and here for some more information!!

Rest assured, there are some new ideas and they are EXCITING!!!
One of them being that  I will be speaking at #OUGN15, better known as the boat conference, with a brand new talk.
But hey, we’re looking back here and I wouldn’t want to spoil too much of the surprise.

Stay tuned…

Post #OOW14

Oracle APEX, Standard Edition, User Groups, , , ,

Back at San Francisco International. Unfortunately in the knowledge that Alex Nuijten and I (probably amongst others) found out to be standby for this flight. –> During the writing of this post we found out we will be home in time, which is great news in any case.

This time around Oracle Open World has indeed been different. Usually I always like to post a list of people I had, until now, just met on-line. Each and every gathering I went to, there would be a bunch of new people.
I am going to skip this habit because the post would just get too long 🙂 There is a big difference attending a conference of the magnitude of Open World, knowing people or being here as a solitaire visitor, which I did in 2010.

As I wasn’t just a visitor at Open World, I actually had the chance to actively contribute to this technology fest. #RepAttack, as an opportunity to share knowledge about logical data replication. Together with a fine crew of Dbvisit replication specialists!

DataTitansMy colleague Vit Spinka spoke about the evolution of redo logs, which gives a great background to this technological solution. Vit spoke, as did other members of the Dbvisit crew, like Arjen Visser and Mike Donovan.

The major highlight for me personally was to have the ability to host #RepAttack at the Oak Table location. Together with the champions of Delphix and Confio, we occupied the Children’s Creativity Museum Community Lab and explained and taught about different technologies. Our subject being Logical Data Replication (of course).

RepAttack CCM

Un-very-fortunately, I attended Oracle Open World on an exhibitor pass. This meant I got to see no session at all (Okay, except the on or two I snuck into). All the more time to stroll around the exhibition terrain, see the demo-grounds and have lunch with Martin Nash in the sun (which was a very nice experience), especially since Martin persuaded my to go out and hand out the left-over lunch to some homeless people around the Moscone Center. Thus heading the call of Connor Mc’Donald.

Okay, so before I forget… A big thank you to Björn Rost and Henning Voss of Portrix Systems for making the Appreciation Event a night worthy of remembrance! And to my friends at Dbvisit of course, for getting me to San Francisco in the first plance!!

Time flies when you’re having none…

A saying all too true! Having spent too little time with too few of my Oracle friends in the great city of San Francisco, it was again time to fly home… As you saw, in the beginning of this post.

Next stop… #DOAG14!!

OUGF Harmony 2014 #ougf14

Oracle APEX, Oracle tips, Standard Edition, User Groups, , ,

ougf

I flew out today to Finland. And I ended up having the opportunity to share my flight with Björn Rost.
The reason this time was to participate in the (meanwhile legendary) Oracle User Group Finland presentation.

After arriving I got picked up by Ann Sjökvist and we travelled to Oracle Finland HQ for a meeting in preparation for the World Premiere of the Oracle Standard Edition Round Table. After this meeting Ann dropped me of at GLO art Hotel, which looks like an ancient castle for her to proceed in the preparations for OUGF14.
A little later I went out on the town with Alex Nuijten to find the rest of the international crew, and we did! We joined forces with some of the biggest names in the Oracle community today like:

we took the legendary Helsinki City Sight Seeing tour by Heli which led us to the Speaker Dinner, where the crew was complete, adding:

and many more!!

Day two, the start of OUGF Harmony 2014, started with a nice stroll down to Helsinki City Center where we met up with all the speakers and participants of the convention to travel down to Haltia Finnish Nature Center.
At this greatest of all venues, you could be for a tech convention, we had breakfast to kickoff the convention by a keynote presentation by Heli Helskyaho.
And this day got to be even better than it started.
The keynote by James Morle  made it clear that opinions matter where IT is concerned. Arguably the best keynote seen in many years! Mindless following of Marketing-ized ideas, best practice and Google will turn you into an idiot instead of a genius.
There were a lot of good session, more than anyone could attend…

The sessions I attended (besides the keynotes) were:

  • Gurcan Orhan: How to handle DEV & TEST & PROD for ODI – with a perfect example of how quickly a smart implementation can become utterly intricated for nothing
  • Björn Rost: The Ins and Outs of Flashback Data archives – explaining the use of flashback even within a Standard Edition environment
  • Keynote: Bryn Llewellyn: PL/ SQL Enhancements in Oracle Database 12c

At 14:00 I had the opportunity to host my own talk on APEX for Electronic Patients Records (if you are interested in the slides, please drop me a line), having a good attendance. The day ended with a nice musical performance of a band formed by Oracle employees while some preferred the sauna experience and a dive in the lake near the venue.

SaunaJumpMost of the participants returned to Helsinki while a small group of heroes stayed on site for a camp close to the venue.

Day three, the second day of the convention started with a keynote by Graham Wood of the Real World Performance Group while the twitter-stream on #ougf14 was revived showing camping and jumping pictures (a tradition initiated by Yuri Velikanov) from the day before!
In preparation of the Oracle Standard Edition awareness campaign I followed the well attended session from Ann Sjökvist talking about the Standard Edition DBA, a different approach to the trade.

SE-RT-OUGF
At 12:00 we kicked off the first ever Oracle Standard Edition Round Table which was quite a succes! In a very lively discussion we got to discuss CPU’s, sockets, tooling, investments, bridging gaps and creating awareness to leverage the #1 database in the world for even many more situations and projects as we are all used to!! We even got to launch a brand new three letter IT acronym “TCL” which represents the Total Cost of (data) Loss for an organization.

With many unique get togethers this day also slowly drawn to a close. On request of Björn Rost the entire remaining gathering of Oracle enthusiasts made The Jump which, for me, was a unique experience, captured by Philippe (we had to jump a few times, yes :-))

OUGF Jump
As often, the best is kept for last! By ways of being the cherry on the cake, during the “hunt for food” by The Pragmas, downtown Helsinki, we stumbled on the Helskyaho-company at Yume (or even Twitter), possibly the best restaurant of Helsinki and they were so good to invite us to join them. This way we got to spend a dinner in the company of the legendary Chris Date which will possibly be a once in a lifetime experience.

Legendary impomptu get togetherWith OUGF Harmony 2014, the standards for Oracle Usergroup conferences again was raised by a magnitude! A great job by our Finnish friends and a promise for next year.

Increasing the reach of your SE database license

Business, Database Replication, General, Oracle tips, Standard Edition, , , , , , ,

Imagine the following situation…

Since a few years your business has been investing in centralizing valuable business information. After some research in the market you have found the Oracle database to be the best fit for your requirements.
Using the free Oracle Application Express (APEX) framework, helping you to rapidly develop the web-applications needed to support both internal and external users, was a premium. Making this installation available based on the Oracle Standard Edition One database, you have created this solution against the lowest possible investment!

As many great projects go, the use and the number of APEX applications is growing. With the addition of ready to use applications to inspire you, many cool plug-ins to ever increase the usability and integration possibilities you get caught up in the data growth dogma!
With an ever increasing user population and expansion of data-reporting for ever faster business reporting your initial system is starting to fail, showing ever more frequent performance lags or system unavailability. These problems form a risk for your business, a risk you need to eliminate as soon as possible!
The standard advise here would be to upgrade your environment, the standard advise here would be to upgrade to a bigger machine and to an Enterprise Edition database. This is what your investment would be then…

  • Medium Oracle Sun Server X2-4 with 4 x 10 core CPU’s at € 42,500
  • (40 cores x 0,5 core-factor **) 20 Oracle Database Enterprise Edition licenses               at € 914,800

Without rendering your application infrastructure worthless by the required investment, a more reasonable step would be to migrate to Oracle Database Standard Edition.

  • Medium Oracle Sun Server X2-4 with 4 x 10 core CPU’s at € 42,500
  • 4 Oracle Database Standard Edition licenses at € 67,400

Still requiring a total investment of more than a hundred thousand Euro and leaving you with the old server and licenses to be decommissioned.

In many implementations, not data entry but data-mining or information aggregation are the costly processes. So probably this will be true in this situation too. With a little investigation it is possible to separate a number of functions that will only query data and not necessarily modify data. Especially in this situation you can also increase your application performance by moving these specific processes to a new environment.

But… how…

The information in the new environment needs to be real-time consistent with the “production” or primary environment. Here we introduce a real-time data replication solution like Dbvisit Replicate which will create just this real-time consistent query environment for you! This makes for the following investment:

  • Medium Oracle Sun Server X4-2 with 2 x 8 core CPU’s at € 19,500
  • 2 Oracle Database Standard Edition One licenses at € 11,200
  • 4 Dbvisit Replicate XTD at € 16,180

With this installation you add another € 50 k. of licensing in stead of € 100 k. with the Standard Edition migration. With this choice, you separate your time-critical data-entry process from the query environment, making sure a mis-fired query will not influence the availability of your data-entry process environment, which is a cool extra advantage!

* All prices are based on list-prices, excluding VAT and including 1 year of support.
** Based on the Oracle Processor Core Factor Table.

UKOUG technology conference 2013

User Groups, , , , ,

Air-born again, December first 2013. Heading to Manchester for the UK Oracle User Group technical highlight of the year, or for short: #UKOUG_Tech13 as the twitter handle sounds.

This time it will be a little different since I have been granted a speaker slot. A great honor and also a great responsibility since there will be a number of people offering their precious time to spend in my session and all that in a VERY EARLY time slot.
But first, find my way to the Manchester Convention Center, my hotel and the sessions I plan to attend this afternoon. Through Twitter there have already been several contacts made with friends inbound to Manchester or those who are already there. These will again be a few full, fun and exciting days spend in the companionship of what will call “The Pragma’s!”:
Joel Goodman, Iloon Wolff, Philippe Fierens and myself.

It turned out to be a great conference! Manchester proved to be a fine venue with a lot of possibilities and compact enough to have everything close-by, where even OTWUK13 (Oak Table World 2013) found its venue close by!
Although I planned to visit many more sessions, there is where I ended up:

  • How to Avoid to Struggle with the APEX Listener by Iloon Wolff
  • Next Generation GoldenGate vs. Streams for Physics Data by Zbigniew Baranowski
  • PL/SQL Enhancements Brought by Oracle Database 12c by Bryn Llewellyn
  • Installing Oracle Database on LDOMS by Pragma Philippe Fierens
  • Goodbye KVM… Hello KVM by Martin Nash
  • Beginners’ Guide to Cost Based Optimization by Jonathan Lewis
  • Roundtable Development Tools, chaired by Andrew Clarke

racattack-51Then, on Wednesday it was time for my own talk. This was my premiere talk on an international stage and I guess it went quite well and It was good to see a few famous Oracle people amongst the audience! In a 45 minute session I discussed a project where we replaced an Oracle Forms application front-end by an APEX implementation on Oracle Standard Edition. This implementation is currently running production with Dutch Healthcare providers.
Thank you, my good friends for your support!

But, first and foremost, UKOUG_tech13 turned out to be the event to meet all my friends and heroes again… (in no particular order 🙂 and without the hope not to forget anyone)

Tim Hall, Simon Haslam, Ronald Luttikhuizen, Osama Mustafa, Peter Raganitsch, Heli Helskyaho, Frits Hoogland, Uwe Hesse, Lonneke Dikmans, Björn Rost, John Scott, Patrick Barell, Alex Nuijten, Alex Gorbatchev, Mogens Nørgaard, Øyvind Isene, Bryn Llewellyn, Kuassi Mesah, Martin Nash, Alex Zaballa, Martin Widlake, Brendan Tierney and even a few more.

And so, Manchester, we say goodbye. Until we meet again!