Group Blog Posts

By now the Denver Convention Center is probably cleaned up from IOUG Collaborate. The signs directing thousands of attendees to top-notch technical presentations have been removed, the twenty rental laptops which composed the classroom for Pythian’s RAC Attack class have been returned and the vendor exhibition floor has been completely cleared out. Flight delays notwithstanding (thanks to some midwest weather), attendees are generally home by now – even those coming from places as far away as Germany and Australia.

Now that the buzz is dying down, I’ve finally found a few minutes to post my personal highlights.

Friends Old and New

First off, my favorite part of Collaborate is the opportunity to meet so many old friends and make new acquaintances who are all using Oracle technology. It’s both fun and informative to hear about the ways others are using Oracle software.

I was recently involved with an upgrade project to go from 11.2.0.2 to 11.2.0.3 on an Exadata V2. We hit some snags during the upgrade specifically related to OEM 12c Cloud Control. We performed an out-of-place upgrade and OEM 12.1.0.1.0 had some difficulty in dealing with this.

12c Cloud Control is supposed to run a daily check which looks for new targets on each server. When it finds something new, it places this in a queue to wait for admin approval. With a single click you can promote the newly discovered target into an OEM managed object.

I recently helped setup an Exadata X2-8 Database Machine with the latest version of OEM Cloud Countrol (12.1.0.2). A few documents do exist for this process – the most useful of which are the Exadata Discovery Cookbook and the Setup Automation Kit. However I found a few inconsistencies and problems; I think the existing documents I found were written on older versions of OEM and older versions of the tools. Also there are some additional steps for older Exadatas which didn’t apply to my case.

Disclaimer: much that follows is pure speculation on my part. It could be completely wrong and I’m putting it out there in the hopes that it’ll eventually be proven one way or the other.

As I’ve become Director of Communities for IOUG recently, I’m intimately involved in many aspects of leading IOUG community. One of the area the user group is pursuing all the time is finding the new speakers and that takes some part of convincing the community members to actually start presenting. There are many of you who have exciting projects and implementations to share but can’t quite convince themselves to actually present.

So… whether you are a total newbie presenter or a presenter with experience that didn’t present at IOUG Collaborate conference yet, you might find this webinar useful — IOUG: Call for Speakers Informational Webinar. Hope to see you selecting one of your projects or a technical area you are excited and knowledgeable about and send your abstract. Feel free to post any question if have them — I’ll make sure they get answered.

Oracle OpenWorld 2012 is just over a month away and yes we are organizing the Annual Oracle Bloggers Meetup — one of your top favorite events of the OpenWorld.

What: Oracle Bloggers Meetup 2012

When: Wed, 3-Oct-2012, 5:30pm

If you are looking to kick start your community contributions or looking to volunteer more than what you already do, I have an awesome suggestion for you — nominate yourself to serve as IOUG Oracle RAC SIG Board Officers volunteer. You don’t need to be an Oracle RAC expert to be successful in that role but you do need to be disciplined, creative, passionate about Oracle technology and community and have a bit of time to contribute regularly. I’d advise to plan to contribute at least an hour per week.