Grid DBA

Day 3 of OpenWorld was probably the best day of the conference for me so far.  The sessions were great but the networking was really the highlight of my day. I spent most of day 3 on the DEMOgrounds, fielding questions to vendors from Quest, EMC, NetApp, Oracle and a few others.  I also had an interesting discussion with the EMC representative regarding their Symmetrix storage and its use in ASM.  He shed some light on the reasons why storage admins create LUNs the way they do for ASM, and what they really need to do for each implementation.  Likewise with NetApp, I got a demo of their SnapManager for Oracle tool for doing backups and recovery in a virtualized environment.  I currently use RMAN for all production backup and recovery related tasks but with more organizations moving towards virtualization of their infrastructure - including databases, it was worth exploring how this will be handled by the different products. SMO seemed to do a good job - backup ...

So User Group Forum day has come and gone. The IOUG sessions were pretty good.  Naturally I was focusing on RAC, Grid Infrastructure/ASM etc.  My favourite session of the day was the Grid 2.0 session by Pythian's Alex Gorbachev - high entertainment value (oh yeah I learned stuff too). Running a close second to that was the Oracle Experts panel - pretty informative discussions but there wasn't enough time to answer all the questions. I also got to meet up with some pretty cool guys from twitterland - Chet (oraclenerd), Sunil Ranka and even ran into Alex  in between sessions. Chet and myself met up at the Welcome Keynote where we were expecting to have front-row seats - with our press/blogger pass and all.  Too late.  Safra Catz gave the opening welcome and introduced the HP keynote speakers.  This proved to be the most agonizing hour for most attendees including myself.  After what seemed like an eternity Larry did his own long pre-introductory ritu...

Gonna jump on the OpenWorld bloggers bandwagon this morning with another 'Day 1' post. I arrived in SF last night at about 9pm via OAK. Found my way to the hotel fairly easily apart from going in the wrong direction after coming off the BART. Quickly checked google maps and made a u-turn. There was some difficulty sleeping last night due to all the roadside traffic.  Since I was up at about 2:30am I checked out the OpenWorld iPhone app to do mobile check-in via SMS.  There was a reply from my CHECKIN text message that asked where I wanted to pick up my badge - Hilton or Moscone West.  I chose the latter and a second later I got another reply telling me that I can pick up my badge at that location when it reopens at 10am. Today is user group forum day - MySQL, IOUG, ODTUG etc.  I'll be at the IOUG sessions so I plan on heading out about 10am to pick up my badge and like most other folks on my twitter list check out the first session at 12:30 pm. 3:30pm update -...