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Oracle Open World -- Day One

The great thing about flying west to a conference, is that you can wake up at 5:30am get two hours of work done in you're local time zone before having to do any work in your current time zone. It also means I can get up early, write my "Day One" post, on day two. This tactic only has marginal utility of 2-3 timezones, I'm guessing.

Day One started with a bang, or really a slash. Despite the best efforts of my brain to convince me otherwise, I met a handful of really nice folks for a morning swim near the Dolphin Club on the bay. Some enterprising gentleman brought a thermometer and promptly reported the temp was 15 degree Celsius; I have no idea what that means. Pictures were taken, swim caps distributed, and we were off.

I walked into the chest deep water, and was cool, but not cold. However, once I decided to dive in and swim again, my lungs and diaphragm spasmed...the cold literally took my breath away. But I did what anyone would do in this situation...breaststroke, til my breathing regulated, and then put my head down for a 1/4 mile swim. After that, it wasn't so bad. I got an awesome shirt, and a story to tell.

The rest of Day One was comparatively uneventful.

Navigating through security standards: knowing the questions to ask your vendors
This session introduced me to a handful of security organizations and standards for software coding, vulnerability reporting and data interchange. This presentation also outlined the basic strategy and rules for asking questions regarding Secure Coding Standards.

Even through the title of this session specifically mentions 'questions to ask your vendors', the presentation could have just as easily focused on 'questions to ask your developers'. What are your Secure Coding Standards? What is the basis for these standards? How do you document these standards?

Oracle HAS to have rigorous SCS; with 20,000 developers focused on enterprise applications and services, it has the resources to dedicate time to providing quality code. I'm sure that most other organizations do not have this level of rigor, but showing how the largest software company in the world reviews their code was insightful.

Integrating Oracle GoldenGate with Oracle Database
Once upon a time, Golden Gate was not an Oracle product. Golden Gate was designed to interact with database files, at the operating system level, rather than from within the database itself. With Golden Gate 12c, there are some new features which allow for a more secure and robust interaction for replication from within the database. Some of these figures include:

  • supported authentication using Oracle Wallet
  • Integrated Capture
  • Integrated Apply
  • Auto scaling of extract and pump processes to accomodate load
Partitioning and Compression for Performance and Manageability
This was less of a presentation, and more of a discussion (between presenter and audience) regarding some of the considerations when using compression and partitioning.

The fundamental premise behind compression is the removal of unnecessary data from your database, specifically foreign key data in parent-child tables. No need to store data twice.

Partitioning is logically very simple to understand; make big tables smaller by breaking them into smaller pieces. Understanding how the data is being queried is the key here. Range partitioning on an employee id while users query against date ranges may have some, but not necessarily the desired impact to performance. Partitioning also will increase the size of a table (which is already large if you are considering partitioning in the first place) because the database needs to store additional information regarding the partition. Furthermore, there will be additional empty space in segments due to the partitioning as well.

Best Practices for running Oracle Database Instances on Amazon AWS
Without regurgitating the slide, point-by-point, I'll say that setting up a database server in EC2 is complicated. Not necessarily difficult, but complicated. Actually, it shouldn't be that surprising this its complex. After all, you have to setup networks, ip addresses, subnets, vpns, operating systems both on premises or in the cloud; EC2 is no exception. How comfortable do you feel being Network Admin, Sys Admin, and Database Admin, all in the same shoes?

If you want to skip all this, you can use Oracle RMS, from Amazon. Where EC2 is 'Platform as a Service', RMS is 'Database as a Service'. Configure your VPC or VPN to use this service, and Amazon takes care of the rest. There are some limitations to RMS, but if you want to move your database into the cloud, this is an easy way to start.

Text Analytics Using Oracle Text
This was a lab session which introduced me to some of the features of the CTX package. WOW!  In the back of my mind, I knew some database analytics where available for various types of large text fields (varchar2, CLOB, etc). But not like that. Oracle Text allows for gist, perspective and theme indexing.

Think about that for a second...the database can tell you the gist of what users are entering into the system. Think about how valuable that is?! Mine help desk cases for emerging tends, comes to mind. I should be doing this now!

Oracle Application Express BOF

  • skipped in favor of dinner and sleep. 
Bring on Day Two!

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