Novell and Oracle today announced availability of a new Accelerator service designed to help customers streamline the deployment of a grid-ready infrastructure for the data center, featuring Oracle(r) Database 10g, Oracle Real Application Clusters, Oracle Application Server 10g, and Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g for customers running on SUSE(r) Linux Enterprise Server from Novell. The solution takes advantage of Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Grid Control (Oracle Grid Control) and the Automated Storage Management feature of Oracle Database 10g to provide a complete, customer-ready management solution for monitoring and managing grid applications and infrastructure software and storage.

This new Accelerator is a service engagement wherein skilled personnel from Oracle will work with Novell, HP and Egenera to expedite implementation and deployment of Oracle's Grid Computing infrastructure software onto SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. Already field-proven with existing joint customers, this accelerator helps minimize risk while speeding time-to-market for enterprise grid-based applications. The new Accelerator is offered with flexible optional pricing designed to fit into customer budget and deployment requirements.

Source : Oracle King Blog

I had been away for a couple of weeks, in Hyderabad, India to meet some of my vendors and to see them in action.



Things are moving fast and the Indian Economy is on a fast pace to achieving record growth. China should be worried now, considering that this vibrant democracy is able to sustain an 8+% growth rate inspite of the corruption that is rampant in every corner of this country.



My host gave me a tour of the available real estate and land prices are comparable to Manhattan, NY



Anyway, I am back and lookfoward to more rants about Oracle Operations soon.Source : Oracle King Blog

Today while browsing around on OTN I stumbled upon this link called "Getting Started with Oracle". Embedded in that page was a quote "DBA's : Learn Oracle in 2 days ". The page goes on to explain the 10 steps in Learning Oracle Database Administration.



Another link on this site took me a Oracle 10g 2 Day DBA Document that says that the audience of this material are Developers who want to acquire part-time DBA Skills, Folks who need to manage departmental servers and Administrators managing Oracle for small and medium businesses.



God Help Us All !!Source : Oracle King Blog

Oracle recently announced the acquisition of Sleepy Cat, a maker of embedded database systems. Sleepy cat is famous for its Berkeley DB Engine that comes as Berkeley DB, Java Optimized Berkeley DB and the Berkeley DB XML Edition. This is an exciting expansion of Oracle's product line since Oracle never had a strong hold in this area. The most prominent user of Berkeley's products has been google in all its personalization systems that include gmail, google groups etc.



Typically embedded databases are different from conventional databases by the fact that they run in process with the application and store the data locally instead of requiring a separate installation. They are used in many devices that we see and use in our daily lives including appliances, networking gear like switches and routers.



Oracle announced that it intends to continue the dual license mode where they will continue to let the database to be used in Open Source Implementations as well as a closed source distribution where the product Oracle has no plans to change the dual license, and we will continue to serve both open source and commercial users.Source : Oracle King Blog

If you consider a post on Tom Kyte's blog, it gets around 20+ comments making it hard for a typical blog reader to pay attention to some of the great advice given out there. I wanted to highlight one such comment made by Kevin Loney in one of the comments. This was taken verbatim from this blog post



kevin loney said....

When people are testing out DR, they should hand off their DR process documents to outsiders. In a real disaster, you lose people or you have people who cannot get to your DR site. In a real disaster you lose your email server. In a real disaster you lose your voice mail system. You lose your office space. You lose people.



In a real disaster you start by re-establishing C3I - Command, Control, Communications, and Intelligence. Who survived, where are they, how can they help you, what is left to work with, and how do we move it to someplace where we can use it effectively.



If you're not dealing with that level of disaster preparedness then you are just preparing for fake disasters. I've been on fake disaster trials before - we all drive downtown to the DR site and do our steps that we wrote. In a real disaster no one would drive downtown, or the downtown may not exist.



I agree 100% with the simplification advice. You must be able to do a blind handoff to people uninvolved with your systems. Imo if you aren't preparing at that level then you'll be only be prepared for fake disasters. The technology for the recovery should be the easy part of the process; you'll have much more difficult issues with the other parts of the recovery.

Oracle Disaster Recovery, Disaster RecoverySource : Oracle King Blog

Had a major outage due to SAN issues in one of our Oracle Databases. Shop Floor Computers cache 1 hour of data and the total expected ETA for restoration of the SAN was 3 to 4 hours.



Rewind to Feb 2005 : A review of all critical systems was done by the Systems Group and a recommendation was provided to replace the old SAN like BOD. Business rejected the idea saying that the proposition to spend $250K was too high and " systems team was trying to bring in new toys".



Now the System is back to normal, we have to go in front of the executives including CFO with a post-mortem... Director of Manufacturing blames CIO and says that some one has to be held responsible and made to pay for it.



I knew I had Google Desktop Index everyone of my emails.. Search for "Manufacturing Proposal" pulls up the email chain where the SVP himself rejected the idea of replacing the old hardware. ... Not sure who is going to pay for this now, atleast I am not..Source : Oracle King Blog