Grid DBA

Oracle Database 11g XE has been in beta for several months now. On September 2, the production release was made available for Windows 32-bit and Linux 64-bit platforms. This lightweight version of the juggernaut database of world is geared towards students, developer and ISVs. You can find the full feature list here . Having played around with the beta version I decided it was time to take a stab at deploying it in the cloud - more specifically Amazon AWS EC2.  I started off by selecting the  Oracle Linux 5.6 x86_64 - OVM (ami-42778a2b) to launch a micro-instance of Oracle Linux. The micro-instance has 613MB of physical memory, 2GB swap and 15GB EBS storage.  [root@ip-10-242-49-142 ~]# cat /proc/meminfo | grep SwapTotal SwapTotal: 2104504 kB [root@ip-10-242-49-142 ~]# cat /proc/meminfo | grep MemTotal MemTotal: 629760 kB Once you download the installation archive from OTN and save it to your computer, you'll have to transfer it to your EC2 instance. ...

I started off my day somewhat later than planned, although I was up from 4:00 am.  Having been bitten by the dullness of previous day's keynotes I decided to skip this morning's session with John Fowler, Edward Screven and Mark Hurd.  My first session was at 11am so I decided to use the time and do some 'fun' stuff.  The DEMOgrounds was where I headed to try and bag some free swag before any cerebral activities.  There were quite a number of vendors displaying their wares - most of which were giving away some items in return for marketing opportunities.  By far the most popular giveaway item was iPads.  EMC claims that they are giving away an iPad every hour, with several other vendors attempting to follow suit.  I even had time to shoot some hoops in the Game Zone. After all the fun I sat in the the database general session with Andrew Mendelsohn - Why Standardize on Oracle Database 11g.  Andy kicked things off talking about new features in 11g...