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Achieving a balance


 

Please think this through carefully?

Cite a single occasion when a woman did not receive shaming, threats of job termination, counter-accusations, death threats, and personal shunning after she finally found herself unable to continue in the abrasive hell created for her, solely because she appealed to (or didn’t appeal to) a self-obsessed self-righteous forever-child?

 

The assertion that women are doing this to “enrich themselves” or “because they want to” is simply ludicrous.  Just look at the facts…

 
  • Who ever benefited financially from bringing harassment charges?  Nobody.
  • Who wins? Nobody.
  • What is gained? Justice, nothing more.
  • Who loses? Everybody, at one time or another.
It has always been easier to just bury it and move on, which has been the time-worn advice always given, and which is why so many of these atrocities have gone unresolved for so long.  Many will remain unresolved forever.  Whether they remain unresolved should be the decision of the victim — not the state, not the employer, and certainly not the perpetrator.
 
The courage required to speak out and live with the consequences is staggering. Those who do so are heroes, nothing less.  These charges are not brought frivolously, but after endless soul-searching.
 
Women simply want to do their jobs just as men are able, without fear or favor, and with recourse other than quitting or moving on when a man targets her.
 
Rape culture, which blames victims as well as perpetrators, forcing women to adapt rather than forcing men to be human, is the reason so many feel outrage at recent developments.
 
Are you an opponent, or an advocate, of rape culture?  Can you prove so by word or deed, and not just by a knee-jerk reaction to the question?
 
What is happening is long overdue, and hopefully will finally achieve a real and lasting balance.
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Automating Stored Procedures When Refreshing Virtual SQL Server Databases

So… you’re using a Delphix virtualization engine to provision SQL Server virtual databases (VDBs), but you’re finding that your SQL account passwords are being reset to those used in production after every refresh?  Likewise, all of the settings in the application supported by the database?

Provisioning a new virtual databases is easy.  Go into the Delphix administrative console, find the dSource you want, find the snapshot for the point-in-time you want on that dSource, click the Provision button, specify the database server where the new database should reside, and hey presto!  In 10 minutes or less, a new virtual database is ready for use.

Except not quite…

That new VDB still has all of the data from the source database, and if that source database is production, then that means that it still has production passwords.  And it still has confidential data.  All of that has to be fixed before the database can be used by developers or testers.

So, even though you can now clone from production in minutes instead of hours or days, you still have to do the same post-clone and post-refresh processing tasks you’ve always had to do prior to Delphix.  Now, you just do them immediately rather than later.

If you’re willing to automate those tasks, whether in T-SQL stored procedures or in Windows Powershell scripts, then Delphix can help by embedding them as part of the operations of provision or refresh.

Delphix offers hooks, which are programmatic callouts which fire before and after certain actions by the Delphix virtualization engine, such as as a refresh action…

Hooks provide the ability to execute Powershell code on the target Windows server as the Windows domain account registered with Delphix, either before or after the successful completion of an action.  Here is what the form for adding hooks within a VDB looks like…

Here are the actions for which hooks can be entered, also seen listed in the screenshot above…

  • Provision
    • Configure Clone hook fires after the action completes
  • Refresh

    • Pre-Refresh hook fires before the action begins
    • Post-Refresh hook fires after the action completes successfully
    • Configure Clone hook fires after the Post-Refresh hook completes successfully
  • Rewind

    • Pre-Rewind hook fires before the action begins
    • Post-Rewind hook fires after the action completes successfully
  • Snapshot
    • Pre-Snapshot hook fires before the action begins
    • Post-Snapshot hook fires after the action completes successfully
  • Start
    • Pre-Start hook fires before the action begins
    • Post-Start hook fires after the action completes successfully
  • Stop

    • Pre-Stop hook fires before the action begins
    • Post-Stop hook fires after the action completes successfully

So back to the problem at hand…

We want some actions to take place automatically each time we refresh our virtual database (VDB).  As it turn out, we have two Transact-SQL stored procedures already coded to do the job…

  1. stored procedure MSDB.DBO.CAPTURE_ACCTS_PASSWDS
    • Saves all of the current accounts and account passwords to a set of tables in the MSDB system database
  2. stored procedure MSDB.DBO.REAPPLY_ACCTS_PASSWDS
    • Re-applies all of the current accounts and account passwords from the information previously stored in the MSDB system database

“@DatabaseName”, which is the name of the VDB, is the only parameter for these stored procedures.

I haven’t posted the T-SQL code for these stored procedures, partly because it is always going to be very customized to its environment, but mostly because I am not proficient with T-SQL myself, and I would just be copying someone else’s code for a time.

So looking at our list of Delphix hooks, it should be clear that we need to call the CAPTURE_ACCTS_PASSWDS stored procedure during the Pre-Refresh hook, and call the REAPPLY_ACCTS_PASSWDS stored procedure during the Post-Refresh hook.  Since hooks only call Powershell code and not T-SQL, here is some Powershell code we can use…

#======================================================================
# File:      callsp.ps1
# Type:      powershell script
# Author:    Delphix Professional Services
# Date:      02-Nov 2015
#
# Copyright and license:
#
#       Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
#       you may not use this file except in compliance with the
#       License.
#
#       You may obtain a copy of the License at
#     
#               http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
#
#       Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing,
#       software distributed under the License is distributed on an
#       "AS IS" basis, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND,
#       either express or implied.
#
#       See the License for the specific language governing permissions
#       and limitations under the License.
#     
#       Copyright (c) 2015 by Delphix.  All rights reserved.
#
# Description:
#
#    Call the appropriate stored procedure within the DBO schema in
#    the MSDB database on behalf of the VDB.  The stored procedure
#    name the name of the database as a parameter called
#    "@DatabaseName"..
#
# Command-line parameters:
#
#    $fqSpName        fully-qualified stored procedure name
#
# Environment inputs expected:
#
#    VDB_DATABASE_NAME    SQL Server database name for the VDB
#    VDB_INSTANCE_NAME    SQL Server instance name for the VDB
#    VDB_INSTANCE_PORT    SQL Server instance port number for the VDB
#    VDB_INSTANCE_HOST    SQL Server instance hostname for the VDB
#
# Note:
#
# Modifications:
#    TGorman    02nov15    first version
#======================================================================
param([string]$fqSpName = "~~~")
#
#----------------------------------------------------------------------
# Verify the "$dirPath" and "$fqSpName" command-line parameter
# values...
#----------------------------------------------------------------------
 if ( $fqSpName -eq "~~~" ) {
     throw "Command-line parameter 'fqSpName' not found"
 } 
#
#----------------------------------------------------------------------
# Clean up a log file to capture future output from this script...
#----------------------------------------------------------------------
 $dirPath = [Environment]::GetFolderPath("Desktop")
 $timeStamp = Get-Date -UFormat "%Y%m%d_%H%M%S"
 $logFile = $dirPath + "\" + $env:VDB_DATABASE_NAME + "_" + $timeStamp + "_SP.LOG"
 "logFile is " + $logFile
#
#----------------------------------------------------------------------
# Output the variable names and values to the log file...
#----------------------------------------------------------------------
 "INFO: dirPath = '" + $dirPath + "'" | Out-File $logFile
 "INFO: fqSpName = '" + $fqSpName + "'" | Out-File $logFile -Append
 "INFO: env:VDB_INSTANCE_HOST = '" + $env:VDB_INSTANCE_HOST + "'" | Out-File $logFile -Append
 "INFO: env:VDB_INSTANCE_NAME = '" + $env:VDB_INSTANCE_NAME + "'" | Out-File $logFile -Append
 "INFO: env:VDB_INSTANCE_PORT = '" + $env:VDB_INSTANCE_PORT + "'" | Out-File $logFile -Append
 "INFO: env:VDB_DATABASE_NAME = '" + $env:VDB_DATABASE_NAME + "'" | Out-File $logFile -Append
#
#----------------------------------------------------------------------
# Housekeeping: remove any existing log files older than 15 days...
#----------------------------------------------------------------------
 "INFO: removing log files older than 15 days..." | Out-File $logFile -Append
 $ageLimit = (Get-Date).AddDays(-15)
 $logFilePattern = $env:VDB_DATABASE_NAME + "_*_SP.LOG"
 "INFO: logFilePattern = '" + $logFilePattern + "'" | Out-File $logFile -Append
 Get-ChildItem -Path $dirPath -recurse -include $logFilePattern |
     Where-Object { !$_.PSIsContainer -and $_.CreationTime -lt $ageLimit } |
     Remove-Item
#
#----------------------------------------------------------------------
# Run the stored procedure...
#----------------------------------------------------------------------
 "INFO: Running stored procedure '" + $fqSpName + "' within database '" +
     $env:VDB_DATABASE_NAME + "'..." | Out-File $logFile -Append
 try {
     "INFO: open SQL Server connection..." | Out-File $logFile -Append
     $sqlServer = $env:VDB_INSTANCE_HOST + "\" + $env:VDB_INSTANCE_NAME + ", " + $env:VDB_INSTANCE_PORT
     "INFO: sqlServer = '" + $sqlServer + "'" | Out-File $logFile -Append
#     [System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("Microsoft.SqlServer.Smo") | Out-Null;
     $conn = New-Object System.Data.SqlClient.SqlConnection
     $conn.ConnectionString = "Server=$sqlServer; Database=MSDB; Integrated Security=SSPI;"
     "INFO: conn.ConnectionString = '" + $conn.ConnectionString + "'" | Out-File $logFile -Append
     $conn.Open()
     $cmd1 = New-Object System.Data.SqlClient.SqlCommand($fqSpName, $conn)
     $cmd1.CommandType = [System.Data.CommandType]::StoredProcedure
     $cmd1.Parameters.Add('@DatabaseName', $env:VDB_DATABASE_NAME) | Out-null
     "INFO: calling " + $fqSpName + ", @DatabaseName = " + $env:VDB_DATABASE_NAME | Out-File $logFile -Append
     $exec1 = $cmd1.ExecuteReader()
     $exec1.Close()
     $conn.Close()
 } catch { Throw $Error[0].Exception.Message | Out-File $logFile -Append }
 #
 "INFO: completed stored procedure '" + $fqSpName + "' within database '" +
     $env:VDB_DATABASE_NAME + "' successfully" | Out-File $logFile -Append
#
#----------------------------------------------------------------------
# Exit with success status...
#----------------------------------------------------------------------
exit 0

The formatting of the code is a little constrained by the narrow viewing area, so if you want the actual code correctly formatted, it can be downloaded from HERE.

Of course, this code does more than just calling the stored procedure with the database name as the sole parameter;  it is also qualifying command-line parameters, creating and updating a log file, and handling possible error conditions.

Once this script is saved on the target Windows host server where the VDB resides, then we can call it from the Pre-Refresh and Post-Refresh hooks.

Here we see the Pre-Refresh hook being called with a call to the CALLSP.PS1 powershell script located within the C:\DELPHIX\SCRIPTS directory on the target Windows server, to call the CAPTURE_ACCTS_PASSWDS stored procedure…

Likewise, we see here how the Post-Refresh hook is constructed to call the REAPPLY_ACCTS_PASSWDS stored procedure…

And finally, with both hooks created, we can see them in the Configuration panel together like this…

So now, whenever the refresh operation is performed on the VDB named VV11, these hooks will execute the Powershell script, which will in turn execute the specified stored procedures, and so when the refresh operation is complete, the account and password settings which were present prior to the refresh operation will still be present.

I hope this is useful?

This post can also be found on the Delphix website HERE…

If you have any questions about this topic, or any questions about data virtualization or data masking using Delphix, please feel free to contact me at “tim.gorman@delphix.com”.

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SQL Saturday 588 – May 20 in NYC

I’m really excited about speaking at SQL Saturday #588 at the Microsoft office in Times Square, I’ll be discussing Accelerating TDM Using Data Virtualization.  This is my favorite topic, because for the 20+ years that I worked as a database administrator (DBA), I ran into the same challenges time and again.

The challenges of data volume.

More than 20 years ago, a friend named Cary Millsap was asked to define the term very large database, because its acronym (VLDB) had become popular.  Knowing that numbers are relative and that they obsolesce rapidly, he refused to cite a number.  Instead, he replied, “A very large database is one that is too large for you to manage comfortably“, which of course states the real problem, as well as the solution.

The problem of data volume has, if anything, become more severe, and there is no sign that it will abate and allow storage and networking technology to catch up.

So it becomes necessary to cease doing things the way we’ve done them for the past several decades, and find a more clever way.

And that is why I work for the solution.  Delphix data virtualization addresses the root of the problem, providing a far faster, less expensive way to provision and refresh huge volumes of data.  The result is revolutionary for the beleaguered software testing industry.

Every mishap or delay in the software development life-cycle means time pressure on the last step:  testing.  Creating full-size and fully-functional copies of the environment to be tested is also time-consuming, putting more time pressure on testing to prevent the slippage of delivery dates.  The end result is untested or poorly tested systems in production, despite heroic efforts by under-appreciated testers.

Constraining the creation of test data is data volume, which is growing beyond the capability of most enterprises.  “Storage is cheap” is not merely a cheap lie to dismiss the problem without solving it, but it is irrelevant and beside the point.

The real issue is time, because it takes a lot of time to push terabytes around from place to place.  It is just physics.  It is time which is most expensive and, by the way, storage really isn’t cheap, especially not in the quality that is demanded, and certainly not in the quantities in which it is being demanded.

Provisioning a full environment for each tester, one for each task, of each project, seems unrealistic when each environment might require terabytes of storage.  As a result, testers are limited to working in shared DEV or TEST environments which are refreshed only every few months, if ever.  Code quality suffers because testing is incomplete, and the pace of delivery fails to live up to business needs.

Server virtualization unleashed a surge of productivity in IT infrastructure over the past ten years.  But each virtual server still requires actual storage, making storage and data the constraint which holds everything back.

Data virtualization is the solution.

Come learn how to accelerate testing and how to accelerate the pace of innovation.

Come learn how to inspire more A-ha! moments by liberating QA and testing, and eliminating the constraint of data under which the software development life-cycle — from waterfall to agile — has labored over the past decades.

Liberate testing now!

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SQL Saturday – 25-March 2017 – Colorado Springs CO

I’m really excited about speaking at SQL Saturday on my favorite topic!

SQLSaturday is a free training event for Microsoft Data Platform professionals and those wanting to learn about SQL Server, Business Intelligence and Analytics.  I’m all for that!

At this event, I’ll be discussing Accelerating DevOps and TDM Using Data Virtualization.  This is my favorite topic, because for the 20 years that I worked as a DBA, I ran into the same roadblock time and again.  The roadblock of data volume.

“DevOps” is a conflation of parts of the words “development” and “operations”, and it represents the grass-roots movement to merge application development, application testing, and IT operations into one continuous stream.  All tasks from coding to testing to operations must be automated so that new features and fixes can be delivered on a continual flow.

“TDM” is Test Data Management, the optimization of software quality testing to ensure that applications are built and maintained to operate according to their specifications.

Constraining both these goals is data volume, which is growing beyond the capability of most enterprises.  “Storage is cheap” is not merely a cheap lie to dismiss the problem without solving it, but it is irrelevant and beside the point.

The real issue is time, because it takes a lot of time to push terabytes around from place to place; it is just physics.  It is time which is most expensive and, by the way, storage really isn’t cheap, especially not in the quality that is demanded, and certainly not in the quantities in which it is being demanded.

Provisioning a full environment for each developer or tester, one for each task, of each project, seems unrealistic when each environment might require terabytes of storage.  As a result, developers and testers are limited to working in shared DEV or TEST environments which are refreshed only every few months, if ever.  Code quality suffers, testing suffers, and the pace of delivery fails to live up to business needs.

Server virtualization unleashed a surge of productivity in IT infrastructure over the past ten years.  But each virtual server still requires actual storage, making storage and data the constraint which holds everything back.

Data virtualization is the solution.

Come learn how to accelerate development, how to accelerate testing, and how to accelerate the pace of innovation.

Come learn how to inspire more “a-ha!” moments by eliminating the constraint of data under which the software development lifecycle has labored over the past decades.

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Singing The NoCOUG Blues

This is a re-post of an interview between myself and Iggy Fernandez, editor of the Journal of the Northern California Oracle Users Group (NoCOUG), Oracle ACE, OakTable member, blogger, and simply an amazing person.  The interview starts on page 4 of the August 2014 issue of the NoCOUG Journal, and demonstrates how a gifted interviewer can make someone being interviewed more interesting and coherent.

Singing The NoCOUG Blues

You are old, father Gorman (as the young man said) and your hair has become very white. You must have lots of stories. Tell us a story!

Well, in the first place, it is not my hair that is white. In point of fact, I’m as bald as a cue ball, and it is my skin that is pale from a youth misspent in data centers and fluorescent-lit office centers.

It is a mistake to think of wisdom as something that simply accumulates over time. Wisdom accumulates due to one’s passages through the world, and no wisdom accumulates if one remains stationary. It has been said that experience is what one receives soon after they need it, and experience includes both success and failure. So wisdom accumulates with experience, but it accumulates fastest as a result of failure.

About four years ago, or 26 years into my IT career, I dropped an index on a 60 TB table with 24,000 hourly partitions; the index was over 15 TB in size. It was the main table in that production application, of course.
Over a quarter-century of industry experience as a developer, production support, systems administrator, and database administrator: if that’s not enough time to have important lessons pounded into one’s head, then how much time is needed?

My supervisor at the time was amazing. After the shock of watching it all happen and still not quite believing it had happened, I called him at about 9:00 p.m. local time and told him what occurred. I finished speaking and waited for the axe to fall—for the entirely justified anger to crash down on my head. He was silent for about 3 seconds, and then said calmly, “Well, I guess we need to fix it.”

And that was it.

No anger, no recriminations, no humiliating micro-management. We launched straight into planning what needed to happen to fix it.

He got to work notifying the organization about what had happened, and I got started on the rebuild, which eventually took almost 2 weeks to complete.

Side note…

I didn’t explain how we rebuilt the index within the NoCOUG article, but I did so recently in a recent post to the ORACLE-L email forum…

Here is a high-level description of what worked to rebuild it…

1) Run “create partitioned index … unusable” to create the partitioned index with all partitions empty.

2) Create a shell-script to run NN SQL*Plus processes simultaneously, where “NN” is a number of your choice, each process doing the following…

alter index <index-name> rebuild partition <partition-name> parallel <degree> nologging compute statistics

We ordered the SQL*Plus calls inside the shell-script so that the partitions for the most-recent partitions (i.e. the table was partitioned by a DATE column) were populated first, and then let the builds progress back in time.  Depending on the application, you can be doing some or all of the normal activities on the table.  Our assumption (which proved correct) was that all DML occurs against the newest partitions, so those were the partitions that needed to be made “usable” first.

This approach won’t eliminate downtime or performance problems, but it will likely minimize them.

It truly happens to all of us. And anyone who pretends otherwise simply hasn’t been doing anything important.

How did I come to drop this index? Well, I wasn’t trying to drop it; it resulted from an accident. I was processing an approved change during an approved production outage. I was trying to disable a unique constraint that was supported by the index. I wanted to do this so that a system-maintenance package I had written could perform partition exchange operations (which were blocked by an enabled constraint) on the table. When I tested the disabling of the constraint in the development environment, I used the command ALTER TABLE … DISABLE CONSTRAINT and it indeed disabled the unique constraint without affecting the unique index. Then I tested the same operation again in the QA/Test environment successfully. But when it came time to do so in production, it dropped the index as well.

Surprise!

I later learned that the unique constraint and the supporting unique index had been created out of line in the development and QA/test environments. That is, first the table was created, then the unique index was created, and finally the table was altered to create the unique constraint on the already-existing unique index.

But in production, the unique constraint and the supporting unique index had been created in-line. When the table was created, the CREATE TABLE statement had the unique constraint within, along with the USING INDEX clause to create the unique index.

So when I altered the table in production, disabling the constraint also caused the index to be dropped.

After the mishap, I found the additional syntax for KEEP INDEX, which could have been added to the end of the ALTER TABLE … DISABLE CONSTRAINT command because Oracle recognized the difference in default behaviors.

But that was a discovery I experienced after I needed it.

As to why my supervisor was so calm and matter-of-fact throughout this disaster, I was not surprised; he was always that way, it seemed. What I learned over beers long after this incident is that, in his early life, he learned the true meaning of the words “emergency” and “catastrophe.”

He was born in Afghanistan, and he was a young child during the 1980s after the Soviets invaded. His family decided to take refuge in Pakistan, so they sought the help of professional smugglers, similar to what we call “coyotes” on the Mexican-American border. These smugglers moved through the mountains bordering Afghanistan and Pakistan at night on foot, using camels to carry baggage and the very old, the sick and injured, and the very young.

My supervisor was about 9 years old at the time, so the smugglers put him on a camel so he would not slow them down. During the night, as they were crossing a ridge, they were spotted by the Soviets, who opened fire on them using machine guns with tracer bullets. Everyone in the caravan dove to the ground to take cover. Unfortunately, they all forgot about the 9-year-old boy on top of the 8-foot-high camel. My supervisor said he saw the bright tracer bullets arching up toward him from down below in the valley, passing over his head so close that he felt he could just reach up and grab them. He wanted to jump down, but he was so high off the ground he was terrified. Finally, someone realized that he was exposed and they pulled him down off the camel.

As he told this story, he laughed and commented that practically nothing he encountered in IT rose to the level of what he defined as an emergency. The worst that could happen was no more catastrophic than changing a tire on a car.

I’ve not yet been able to reach this level of serenity, but it is still something to which I aspire.

We love stories! Tell us another story!

A little over 10 years ago, I was working in downtown L.A. and arrived in the office early (5:00 a.m.) to start a batch job. I had a key card that got me into the building and into the office during the day, but I was unaware that at night they were locking doors in the elevator lobby. I banged on the doors and tried calling people, to no avail. Finally, after a half-hour, out of frustration, I grabbed one of the door handles and just yanked hard.

It popped open.

I looked at it in surprise, thought “sweet!”, walked in to the cubicle farm, sat down, and started my batch job. All was good.

Around 7:00 a.m., the LAPD showed up. There were about a dozen people in the office now, so the two officers began questioning folks nearest the door. From the opposite side of the room, I stood up, called out “Over here,” and ’fessed up.

They told me that if I hadn’t called them over immediately, they would have arrested me by the time they got to me.

Have a nice day, sir.

The NoCOUG Blues

NoCOUG membership and conference attendance have been declining for years. Are user groups still relevant in the age of Google? Do you see the same trends in other user groups? What are we doing wrong? What can we do to reverse the dismal trend? Give away free stuff like T-shirts and baseball caps? Bigger raffles? Better food?

Yes, the same trends are occurring in other users groups. IT organizations are lean and can’t spare people to go to training. The IT industry is trending older as more and more entry-level functions are sent offshore.
Users groups are about education. Education in general has changed over the past 20 years as online searches, blogs, and webinars have become readily available.

The key to users groups is the quality of educational content that is offered during live events as opposed to online events or written articles.

Although online events are convenient, we all know that we, as attendees, get less from them than we do from face-to-face live events. They’re better than nothing, but communities like NoCOUG have the ability to provide the face-to-face live events that are so effective.

One of the difficulties users groups face is fatigue. It is difficult to organize events month after month, quarter after quarter, year after year. There is a great deal of satisfaction in running such an organization, especially one with the long and rich history enjoyed by NoCOUG. But it is exhausting. Current volunteers have overriding work and life conflicts.

New volunteers are slow to come forward.

One thing to consider is reaching out to the larger national and international Oracle users groups, such as ODTUG, IOUG, OAUG, Quest, and OHUG. These groups have similar missions and most have outreach programs. ODTUG and IOUG in particular organize live onsite events in some cities, and have webinar programs as well. They have content, and NoCOUG has the membership and audience. NoCOUG members should encourage the board to contact these larger Oracle users groups for opportunities to partner locally.

Another growing trend is meet-ups, specifically through Meetup.com. This is a resource that has been embraced by all manner of tech-savvy people, from all points on the spectrum of the IT industry. I strongly urge all NoCOUG members to join Meetup.com, indicate your interests, and watch the flow of announcements visit your inbox. The meet-ups run the gamut from Hadoop to Android to Oracle Exadata to In-Memory to Big Data to Raspberry Pi to vintage Commodore. I think the future of local technical education lies in the intersection of online organization of local face-to-face interaction facilitated by Meetup.com.

Four conferences per year puts a huge burden on volunteers. There have been suggestions from multiple quarters that we organize just one big conference a year like some other user groups. That would involve changing our model from an annual membership fee of less than $100 for four single-day conferences (quarterly) to more than $300 for a single multiple-day conference (annual), but change is scary and success is not guaranteed. What are your thoughts on the quarterly vs. annual models?

I disagree with the idea that changing the conference format requires increasing annual dues. For example, RMOUG in Colorado (http://rmoug.org/) has one large annual conference with three smaller quarterly meetings, and annual dues are $75 and have been so for years. RMOUG uses the annual dues to pay for the three smaller quarterly education workshops (a.k.a. quarterly meetings) and the quarterly newsletter; the single large annual “Training Days” conference pays for itself with its own separate registration fees, which of course are discounted for members.

Think of a large annual event as a self-sufficient, self-sustaining organization within the organization, open to the public with a discount for dues-paying members.

Other Oracle users groups, such as UTOUG in Utah (http://utoug.org/), hold two large conferences annually (in March and November), and this is another way to distribute scarce volunteer resources. This offers a chance for experimentation as well, by hiring one conference-coordinator company to handle one event and another to handle the other, so that not all eggs are in one basket.

The primary goal of larger conferences is ongoing technical education of course, but a secondary goal is to raise funds for the continued existence of the users group and to help subsidize and augment the website, the smaller events, and the newsletter, if necessary.

It costs a fortune to produce and print the NoCOUG Journal, but we take a lot of pride in our unbroken 28-year history, in our tradition of original content, and in being one of the last printed publications by Oracle user groups. Needless to say it also takes a lot of effort. But is there enough value to show for the effort and the cost? We’ve been called a dinosaur. Should we follow the other dinosaurs into oblivion?

I don’t think so. There are all kinds of formats for publication, from tweets to LinkedIn posts to blogs to magazines to books. Magazines like the NoCOUG Journal are an important piece of the educational ecosystem. I don’t think that any of the Oracle users groups who no longer produce newsletters planned to end up this way. They ceased publishing because the organization could no longer sustain them.

I think today the hurdle is that newsletters can no longer be confined within the users group. Both NoCOUG and RMOUG have independently come to the realization that the newsletter must be searchable and findable online by the world, which provides the incentive for authors to submit content. Today, if it cannot be verified online, it isn’t real. If it isn’t real, then there is little incentive for authors to publish.

So making the NoCOUG Journal available online has been key to its own viability, and NoCOUG membership entitles one to a real hard-copy issue, which is a rare and precious bonus in this day and age.

Oracle Database 12c

Mogens Norgaard (the co-founder of the Oak Table Network) claims that “since Oracle 7.3, that fantastic database has had pretty much everything normal customers need,” but the rest of us are not confirmed Luddites. What are the must-have features of Oracle 12c that give customers the incentive to upgrade from 11g to 12c? We’ve heard about pluggable databases and the in-memory option, but they are extra-cost options aren’t they?

I know for a fact that the Automatic Data Optimization (ADO) feature obsolesces about 3,000 lines of complex PL/SQL code that I had written for Oracle 8i, 9i, 10g, and 11g databases. The killer feature within ADO is the ability to move partitions online, without interrupting query operations. Prior to Oracle 12c, accomplishing that alone consumed hundreds of hours of code development, testing, debugging, and release management.

Combining ADO with existing features like OLTP compression and HCC compression truly makes transparent “tiers” of storage within an Oracle database feasible and practical. The ADO feature alone is worth the effort of upgrading to Oracle 12c for an organization with longer data retention requirements for historical analytics or regulatory compliance.

What’s not to love about pluggable databases? How different is the pluggable database architecture from the architecture of SQL Server, DB2, and MySQL?

I think that first, in trying to explain Oracle pluggable databases, most people make it seem more confusing than it should be.

Stop thinking of an Oracle database as consisting of software, a set of processes, and a set of database files.

Instead, think of a database server as consisting of an operating system (OS) and an Oracle 12c container database software; a set of Oracle processes; and the basic control files, log files, and a minimal set of data files. When “gold images” of Oracle database servers are created, whether for jumpstart servers or for virtual machines, the Oracle 12c CDB should be considered part of that base operating system image.

Pluggable databases (PDBs) then are the data files installed along with the application software they support. PDBs are just tablespaces that plug into the working processes and infrastructure of the CDBs.

When PDBs are plugged in, all operational activities involving data protection—such as backups or redundancy like Data Guard replication—are performed at the higher CDB level.

Thus, all operational concerns are handled at the CDBs and the operational infrastructure from the PDBs and the applications.

Once the discussion is shifted at that high level, then the similarities are more visible between the Oracle 12c database and other multitenant databases, such as SQL Server and MySQL. Of course there will always be syntactic and formatting differences, but functionally Oracle 12c has been heavily influenced by its predecessors, such as SQL Server and MySQL.

Bonus Question
Do you have any career advice for the younger people reading this interview so that they can be like you some day? Other than actively participating in user groups!

This sounds corny and trite, but there is no such thing as a useless experience, and while it may be frustrating, it presents the opportunity to build. Understand that everyone starts at the bottom, and enjoy the climb.
Understand that learning causes stress. Stress is stress and too much can be unhealthy, but if it is a result of learning something new, then recognize it for what it is, know it is temporary and transitory, tough it out, and enjoy knowing the outcome when it arrives.

Also, don’t voice a complaint unless you are prepared to present at least one viable solution, if not several. Understand what makes each solution truly viable and what makes it infeasible. If you can’t present a solution to go with the complaint, then more introspection is needed. The term “introspection” is used deliberately, as it implies looking within rather than around.

Help people. Make an impact. Can we go wrong in pursuing either of those as goals? Sometimes I wish I had done more along these lines. Never do I wish I had done less.

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Presenting “How Data Recovery Mechanisms Complicate Security, and What To Do About It” at #c16lv

Personally-identifiable information (PII) and classified information stored within an Oracle database is quite secure, as the capabilities of Oracle database ensure that it is accessible only by authenticated and authorized users.

But the definition of authentication and authorization can change, in a sense.authentication

In a production application, authentication means verifying that one is a valid application user and authorization means giving that application user the proper privileges to access and manipulate data.

But now let’s clone the data from that production application to non-production systems (i.e. development, QA, testing, training, etc), so that we can develop new application functionality, fix existing functionality, test it, and deliver user training.

By doing so, in effect the community of valid users has changed, and now instead of being production application users, the community of valid users is developers and testers.  Or it is newly-hired employees being trained using “live” information from production.

And the developers and testers and trainees are indeed authenticated properly, and are thus authorized to access and manipulate this same data in their non-production systems.temptation  The same information which can be used to defraud, steal identities, and cause all manner of mayhem, if one so chose.  This honor system is the way things have been secured in the information technology (IT) industry for decades.

Now of course, I can hear security officers from every point of the compass screaming and wildly gesticulating, “NO! That’s NOT true! The definition of authentication and authorization does NOT change, just because systems and data are copied from production to non-production!”  OK, then you explain what has been happening for the past 30 years?

In the case of classified data, these developers and testers go through a security clearance process to ensure that they can indeed be trusted with this information and that they will never misuse it.  Violating one’s security clearance in any respect is grounds for criminal prosecution, and for most people that is a scary enough prospect to wipe out any possible temptation.

Outside of government, organizations have simply relied on professionalism and trust to prevent this information from being used and abused.Medal of Honor  And for the most part, for all these many decades, that has been effective.  I know that I have never even been tempted to share PII or classified data in which I’ve come in contact.  I’m not bragging, it is just part of the job.

Now, that doesn’t mean that I haven’t been tempted to look up my own information.  This is essentially the same as googling oneself, except here it is using non-public information.

I recall a discussion with the CFO of an energy company, who was upset that the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 held she and her CEO criminally liable for any information breaches within her company.  She snarled, “I’ll be damned if I’m going to jail because some programmer gets greedy.”  I felt this is an accurate analysis of the situation, though I had scant sympathy (“That’s why you’re paid the big bucks“).  Since that time we have all seen efforts to rely less on honor and trust, and more on securing data in non-production.  Because I think everyone realizes that the bucks just aren’t big enough for that kind of liability.

This has given rise to products and features which use encryption for data at rest and data in flight.  But as pointed out earlier, encryption is no defense against a change in the definition of authentication and authorization.  I mean, if you authenticate correctly and are authorized, then encryption is reversible obfuscation, right?

To deal with this reality, it is necessary to irreversibly obfuscate PII and classified data, which is also known as data masking. GuyFawkes mask There are many vendors of data masking software, leading to a robust and growing industry.  If you irreversibly obfuscate PII and classified information within production data as it is cloned to non-production, then you have completely eliminated the risk.

After all, from a practical standpoint, it is extremely difficult as well as conceptually questionable to completely artificially generate life-like data from scratch.  It’s a whole lot easier to start with real, live production data, then just mask the PII and classified data out of it.

Problem solved!

Or is it?

Unfortunately, there is one more problem, and it has nothing to do with the concept of masking and irreversible obfuscation.  Instead, it has to do with the capabilities of the databases in which data is stored.

Most (if not all) of this PII and classified data is stored within databases, which have mechanisms built in for the purpose of data recovery in the event of a mishap or mistake.  In Oracle database, such mechanisms include Log Miner and Flashback Database.

Since data masking mechanisms use SQL within Oracle databases, then data recovery mechanisms might be used to recover the PII and classified data that existed before the masking jobs were executed.  It is not a flaw in the masking mechanism, but rather it is the perversion of a database feature for an unintended purpose.

Ouch.

This topic became a 10-minute “lightning talk” presentation on “How Oracle Data Recovery Mechanisms Complicate Data Security, and What To Do About It” on Wednesday 13-April 2016 at the Collaborate 2016 conference in Las Vegas.  Please read the slidedeck for my notes on how to deal with the situation presented here.

You can download the slidedeck here

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Presentation "How Oracle Data Recovery Mechanisms Complicate Data Security, And What To Do About It" 1.37 MB
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Accelerating Oracle E-Business Suites upgrades

Taking backups during development, testing, or upgrades

The process of upgrading an Oracle E-Business Suites (EBS) system is one requiring dozens or hundreds of steps. Think of it like rock climbing. Each handhold or foothold is analogous to one of the steps in the upgrade.

What happens if you miss a handhold or foothold?

If you are close to the ground, then the fall isn’t dangerous. You dust yourself off, take a deep breath, and then you just start climbing again.

But what happens if you’re 25 or 35 feet off the ground? Or higher?

A fall from that height can result in serious injury, perhaps death, unless you are strapped to a climbing rope to catch your fall.  And hopefully that climbing rope is attached to piton or chock not too far from your current position.  The higher you climbed from your most recent anchor, the further you fall, and more painful.  If you set the last chock 10 feet below, that means you’re going to fall 20 feet, which is going to HURT.  It makes more sense to set chocks every 5 feet, so your longest drop will only be 10 feet at worst.

And that is the role that backups play in any lengthy process with many discrete steps, such as an EBS upgrade. Performing a backup of the systems you’re upgrading every half-dozen or dozen steps allows you to restore to the most recent backup and resume work while having only lost a relatively small amount of work.

But think of the costs of taking a full backup of the systems you’re upgrading?

Let’s assume that the EBS database is 1 TB in size, the dbTier is 4 GB, and the appsTier is another 4 GB. All told each backup takes up over a TB of backup media and takes 2 hours to perform, start to finish. So, for an upgrade process of 100 steps, and performing a backup every dozen steps, means performing 8-9 backups, at 2 hours apiece, totaling 16-18 hours alone! So not only do the backups represent a significant portion of the total number of steps to perform, but those steps also consume a significant portion of the total elapsed time of the entire upgrade process.

So, in the event of a mistake or mishap, it will probably take about 2 hours to restore to the previous backup, and then the intervening steps have to be replayed, which might take another couple of painstaking hours. Assuming there’s nothing wrong with the backup. Assuming that tapes haven’t been sent offsite to Iron Mountain. Assuming… yeah, assuming…

So just as with climbing, taking periodic backups of your work protects you against a fall.  But if each backup takes 2 hours, are you going to do that after every 15 mins?  Or after every hour?  After every 2 hours?  After every 4 hours?  Doing those time-consuming backups allows more productive work, but think of how far you’re going to fall if you slip?

Because of this high cost of failure, believe it that each step will be double-checked and triple-checked, perhaps by a second or third person, before it is committed or the ENTER key is pressed.

No wonder upgrading EBS is so exhausting and expensive!

The fastest operation is the one you never perform

What if you never had to perform all those backups, but you could still recover your entire EBS systems stack to any point-in-time as if you had?

This is what it is like to use data virtualization technology from Delphix. You start by linking a set of “source” EBS components into Delphix, and these sources are stored in compressed format within the Delphix appliance. Following that, these sources can produce virtual copies taking up very little storage in a matter of minutes. A Delphix administrator can provision virtual copies of the entire EBS systems stack into a single Delphix JetStream container for use by an individual or a team. The components of the container, which include the EBS database, the EBS dbTier, and the EBS appsTier, become the environment upon which the upgrade team is working.

Delphix captures all of the changes made to the EBS database, the EBS dbTier, and the EBS appsTier, which is called a timeflow. Additionally, Delphix JetStream containers allow users to create bookmarks, or named points-in-time, within the timeflow to speed up the location of a significant point-in-time, and easily restore to it.

So each developer or team can have their own private copy of the entire EBS systems stack. As the developer is stepping through each step of the upgrade, they can create a bookmark, which takes only seconds, after every couple steps. If they make a mistake or a mishap occurs, then they can rewind the entire JetStream container, consisting of the entire EBS systems stack, back to the desired bookmark in minutes, and then resume from there.

Let’s step through this, using the following example EBS system stack already linked and ready to use within a Delphix appliance…

Understanding concepts: timeflows, snapshots, and bookmarks

A dSource is the data loaded into Delphix from a source database or filesystem. Initially a dSource is loaded (or linked) into Delphix using a full backup, but after linking, all changes to the source database or filesystem are captured and stored in the Delphix dSource.

A timeflow is an incarnation of a dSource. The full lifecycle of a dSource may include several incarnations, roughly corresponding to a RESETLOGS event in an Oracle database. Delphix retains not just the current point-in-time of a dSource (as like replication packages like Golden Gate or Data Guard), but every action ever performed from all incarnations, from the time the dSource was initially linked into Delphix, up to the current point-in-time.

Even though Delphix compresses, de-duplicates, and performs other clever things to make the data loaded much smaller (i.e. usually about 30% of the original size), you still cannot retain everything forever. It’s just impossible. To deal with this, data is purged from timeflows that are older than the retention policy configured by the Delphix administrator.

Another useful concept to know is a snapshot, which is a small data structure that represents a usable full virtual image of a timeflow at a specific point-in-time.   Snapshots in Delphix can portray a full Oracle database as a virtual image of a point-in-time, and snapshots are subject to purge during the retention policy configured with the timeflow.

A bookmark is a named snapshot that is not subject to the configured retention policy on the timeflow, but instead can be configured with its own private retention policy, which defaults to “forever”.  Bookmarks are intended to represent points-in-time that have meaning to the end user.

An example EBS system stack in Delphix

So here we see a full E-Business Suites R12.1 system stack linked into Delphix. In the screenshot below, you can see three dSource objects in the left-hand navigation bar, under the Sources database group or folder. These three dSource objects are named…

  1. EBS R12.1 appsTier
  2. EBS R12.1 dbTechStack
  3. EBSDB

The first two items are vFiles, containing the file system sub-directories representing the E-Business Suites R12.1 applications tier and database tier, respectively. The last item is a virtual database or VDB, containing the Oracle database for the E-Business Suites R12.1 system. Each are indicated as dSources by the circular black dSource icon with the letters “dS” within (indicated below by the red arrows)…

pointing out dSource icons
dSource icons indicated by red arrows in the main Delphix administration console

Registering EBS dSources as JetStream templates

The three dSources have been encapsulated within the Delphix JetStream user-interface within a templates, as shown by the JetStream icons showing a tiny hand holding out a tiny cylinder representing a datasource (indicated below by the red arrows) just to the right of the dSource icons…

pointing out JetStream template icons
JetStream template icons indicated by red arrows in the main Delphix administration console

Within the JetStream user-interface itself, we see that all three dSources are encapsulated within one JetStream template, with the three dSources comprising the three datasources for the template…

indicating JetStream template datasources
red arrows pointing to the names of the E-Business Suite system components comprising datasources

Encapsulating EBS VDBs as JetStream containers

Once dSources are encapsulated as a JetStream template, then we can encapsulate VDBs and vFiles created from those dSources as JetStream containers. Here, we see the database group or folder called Targets circled in the left-hand navigation bar, and the blue icons for VDBs and vFiles with the letter “V” within are indicated by red arrow, while the darker icons for JetStream Containers are indicated by the green arrow…

pointing to icons for VDBs and JetStream containers
Red arrow pointing to the icon for a VDB, and the green arrow pointing to the icon for a JetStream container

Working with JetStream containers for EBS

With an entire EBS system stack under the control of Delphix JetStream, we can begin the lengthy process of upgrading EBS. Before we begin, we should create a JetStream bookmark called Upgrade Step 0 to indicate the starting point of the upgrade…

starting with a timeflow within a JetStream container
starting with a timeflow within a JetStream container

Then, after performing the first five steps of the upgrade in the EBS system stack, come back to the JetStream user-interface and create a JetStream bookmark named Upgrade Step 5, as shown below…

creating JetStream bookmark
Choosing a point-in-time on a JetStream timeflow within a JetStream container, and creating a bookmark

After every couple steps of the upgrade, or prior to any lengthy step, come back to the Delphix JetStream user-interface and create a bookmark named appropriate for the step in the upgrade process, as shown below…

Naming a bookmark
Naming a JetStream bookmark

Performing a rewind in a JetStream container for EBS

So we’re cruising along, performing productive steps in the EBS upgrade process, and not worrying about making backups.

WHOOPS! At upgrade step 59, we made a serious mistake!

If we had been making backups every 12 steps or so, then the most recent backup may have been Upgrade Step 48, which was 11 steps ago. Besides the multiple hours it may take to restore the backup in the database, the dbTier, and the appsTier, we are going to have to perform 11 steps over again.

In contrast, using Delphix JetStream, we have better choices. From the Delphix JetStream user-interface, we can restore to any point-in-time on the timeflow, whether it is one of the bookmarks we previously created at a known step in the upgrade process, or to any point-in-time location on the timeflow line, which may or may be located in the middle of one the upgrade steps, and thus not a viable point from which to restart.

So, because we want to restart the upgrade from a known and viable step in the process, we’re going to restore the entire EBS systems stack consistently back to the JetStream bookmark Upgrade Step 55…

Selecting a bookmark
Selecting a JetStream bookmark in preparation for performing a restore operation

So, first let’s click on the JetStream bookmark named Upgrade Step 55 and then click on the icon for the Restore operation to start the rewind…

Starting a restore
Starting a restore operation to a JetStream bookmark

After being prompted Are You Sure and then confirming Yes I Am, then the Restore process starts to create a brand new timeflow for all three datasources in the container…

Restore in progress
Seeing the restore operation in progress, and the creation of a new timeflow within the container

Please notice that the old timeflow is still visible and accessible to the left in the JetStream user-interface, even with the new timeflow being restored to the right.

Finally, the restore operation completes, and now all three parts of the EBS systems stack (i.e. appsTier, dbTier, and database) have been restored to Upgrade Step 55 in about 15 minutes elapsed time, a fraction of the 2 hours it would have taken to restore from backups.

New timeflow
Completion of the restore operation, showing the old timeflow still available, and the new timeflow following the restore operation

Now we can resume the EBS upgrade process with barely any time lost!

Summary of benefits

So a few things to bear in mind from this example when using Delphix JetStream…

  1. Once a JetStream container has been provisioned by the Delphix administrators (usually a role occupied by database administrators or DBAs), all the operations shown above are performed by JetStream data users, who are usually the developers performing the upgrade themselves
    • No need to coordinate backups or restores between teams == less time wasted
  2. Using Delphix removed the need to perform backups, because all changes across the timeflow of all three components of the EBS systems stack (i.e. appsTier, dbTechStack, and database) are recorded automatically within Delphix
    • No backups == less storage consumed == less time wasted
  3. Using Delphix removed the need to restore from backups, because the timeflow can be restored to any previous point-in-time in a fraction of the time it takes to perform a restore from backup
    • No restores == less time wasted

It is difficult to imagine not performing EBS upgrades using the methods we’ve used for decades, but the that time is here. Data virtualization, like server virtualization, is fast becoming the new norm, and it is changing everything for the better.

Free webinar

Please view the joint webinar on these topics, featuring Mike Swing of TruTek and Kyle Hailey of Delphix and myself, on the topic of “Avoiding The Pitfalls Of An Oracle E-Business Suites Upgrade Project” about how data virtualization can reduce the risk and accelerate the completion of EBS upgrades, recorded on 07-Apr 2016.

You can also download the slidedeck from the webinar here. 

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Presentation "Avoiding The Pitfalls Of An Oracle E-Business Suites Upgrade" 2.39 MB

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Presenting “Accelerating DevOps Using Data Virtualization” at #C16LV

Borrowing from Wikipedia, the term DevOps is defined as…

DevOps (a clipped compound of "development" and "operations") is a culture, movement or practice that emphasizes the collaboration and communication of both software developers and other information-technology (IT) professionals while automating the process of software delivery and infrastructure changes. It aims at establishing a culture and environment where building, testing, and releasing software, can happen rapidly, frequently, and more reliably.

Now, I hate buzzwords as much as the next BTOM (a.k.a. bitter twisted old man)…eastwood

…but the idea behind DevOps, of building, testing, and releasing software more rapidly and reliably is simply amazing and utterly necessary.

As system complexity has increased, as application functionality has ballooned, and as the cost of production downtime has skyrocketed, writing and testing code leaves one a long way from the promised land of published and deployed production code.

As explained by DevOps visionaries like Gene Kim, the biggest barrier to that promised land is data, in the form of databases cloned from production for development and testing, in the form of application stacks cloned from production systems for development and testing.

The amount of time wasted waiting for data on which to develop or test dwarfs the amount of time spent developing or testing.  Consequently, IT has learned to be satisfied with only occasional refreshes of dev/test systems from production, resulting in humorously inadequate dev/test systems, and that has been the norm.

There is a new norm in town.

Data virtualization, like server virtualization, breaks through the constraint.  Over the past 10 years, IT has learned to wallow in the freedom of server virtualization, using tools like VMware and OpenStack to provision virtual machines for any purpose.

Unfortunately, data and storage did not benefit from virtuaMatrix1lization as well.  This has resulted in a white-hot nova in the storage industry, and while that is good news for the storage industry, it still means that IT has cloned from production to non-production the same way it has done the past 40 years, in other words slowly, expensively, and painfully.

Matrix2And we have continued to do it the old way, slowly, expensively, and painfully, because we didn’t know any better.

The IT industry couldn’t see any better way to do clone from production to non-production.  Slow and painful was the norm.

But once one realizes the nature of making copies, and how modern file-system technology can share at the block-level, compress, anMatrix3d de-duplicate, suddenly making copies of databases and file-system directories becomes easier and inexpensive.

Here is a thought-provoking question:  why doesn’t every individual developer and tester have their own private full systems stack?  Why can’t they have several of them, one or more for each task on which they’re working?

I can literally hear all of the other BTOM’s scoffing at that question:  “Nobody has that much infrastructure, you idiot!”

And that is the point.  You certainly do.

You just don’t have the right infrastructure.

This was presented at the Collaborate 2016 conference in Las Vegas on Monday 11-April 2016.

You can download the slidedeck here.

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Presentation "Accelerating DevOps Using Data Virtualization" 16.66 MB

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Presenting “UNIX/Linux Tools For The Oracle DBA” at #C16LV

Going back to the invention of the graphical user interface (GUI) in the 1970s, there has been tension between the advocates of the magical pointy-clickety GUI and the clickety-clackety command-line interface (CLI).

Part of it is stylistic… GUI’s are easier, faster, more productive.

Part of it is ego… CLI’s require more expertise and are endlessly customizable.

Given the evolutionary pressures on technology, the CLI should have gone extinct decades ago, as more and more expertise is packed into better and better GUI’s.  And in fact, that has largely happened, but the persistence of the CLI can be explained by four persistent justifications…

  1. not yet supported in the GUI
  2. need to reproduce in the native OS
  3. automation and scripting
  4. I still drive stick-shift in my car, too

This is the prime motivation for the presentation entitled “UNIX/Linux Tools For The Oracle DBA” which I gave at the Collaborate 2016 conference in Las Vegas (#c16lv) on Monday 11-April 2016.

When your monitoring tool gets to the end of the information it can provide, it can be life-saving to be able to go to the UNIX/Linux command-line and get more information.  Knowing how to interpret the output from CLI tools like “top”, “vmtstat”, and “netstat” can be the difference between waiting helplessly for deus ex machina or a flat-out miracle, and obtaining more information to connect the dots to a resolution.

Oftentimes, you have a ticket open with vendor support, and they can’t use screenshots from the GUI tool or report you’re using.  Instead, they need information straight from the horse’s mouth, recognizable, trustworthy, and uninterpreted.  In that case, knowing how to obtain OS information from tools like “ps”, “pmap”, and “ifconfig” can keep a support case moving smoothly toward resolution.

Likewise, the continued survival of CLI’s has a lot to do with custom scripting and automation.  Sure, there are all kinds of formal APIs, but a significant portion of the IT world runs on impromptu and quickly-developed scripts based on shell scripts and other CLI’s.

Last, my car still has a manual transmission, and both my kids drive stick as well.  There is no rational reason for this.  We don’t believe we go faster or do anything better than automatic transmission.  After almost 40 years behind the wheel, it can be argued that I’m too old to change, but that’s certainly not true of my kids.  We just like being a part of the car.

Hopefully all of those reasons help explain why it is useful for Oracle DBAs to learn more about the UNIX/Linux command-line.  You’re not always going to need it, but when you do, you’ll be glad you did.

You can download the slidedeck here.

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Presentation "Linux/UNIX Tools For The Oracle DBA" 4.49 MB

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RMOUG calendar page

RMOUG calendar pageFor those who are always seeking FREE technical learning opportunities, the calendar webpage of the Rocky Mountain Oracle Users Group (RMOUG) is a great resource to bookmark and check back on weekly.

RMOUG volunteers compile notifications of webinars, meetings, and meetups from the internet and post them here for everyone to use.

The information technology (IT) industry is always evolving and therefore always changing.

Free webinars, even if they seem too commercial at times, always have at least one solid nugget of solid information that can make the difference in a professional’s life and career.

You never know when the need for new information that nobody else knows is going to come in handy.

Stay a step ahead…