Most people know I like to do things the hard way… 🙂 When it comes to learning things, there’s often no better way to get a strong understanding than to have to take something apart and put it back together. I wanted to use swingbench on my AWS deployment and needed the Sales History, (SH) sample schema. I don’t have an interface to perform the installation via the configuration manager, so I was going to install it manually. Surprise, the scripts in the $ORACLE_HOME/demo/schema/sh directory were missing. There are a couple options to solve this dilemma. Mine was to first get the…
-
-
I had the opportunity to attend Delphix‘s Company Kick Off last week in San Francisco. This was my first time at an event of this nature and it was incredibly successful. As Delphix had just promoted Adam Bowen and me to the Office of CTO, along with promoting Eric Schrock to the CTO position, I was in an enviable position, but not just because of the role change. For some reason, my badge stated I was in Product Management, (I wasn’t) and as I was transitioning from my previous role in Technical Product Marketing, (I was the full-on techie on the team.)…
-
There are a lot of people and companies starting to push the same old myth regarding the death of the database administrator role in companies. On the Oracle side, it started with release Oracle 7 and now is proposed with the introduction of cloud. Hopefully my post will help ease the mind of those out there with concerns. There are a number of OBVIOUS reasons this is simply not true, but I’m going to write a few posts over the next year on some of the less obvious ones that will ensure DBAs stay employed for the long haul. The…
-
No, this isn’t a title for a future Star Wars movie, but our own future, foreseen by me, (as well as many others) from experience, research and discussions everyday. No, it’s not this dark and menacing…no sith lords. The Cloud We know who the main players in the current cloud arena are and how much they hold of the cloud market. Many are betting that they can make a dent in that market and as much as it looks like some companies have the cloud all “wrapped up”, it may not be as clean a win as you might think. One to…
-
This was received by one of our Delphix AWS Trial customers and he wasn’t sure how to address it. If any others experience it, this is the why it occurs and how you can correct it. You’re logged into your Delphix Administration Console and you note there is a fault displayed in the upper right hand console. Upon expanding, you see the following warning for the databases from the Linux Target to the Sources they pull updates from: Its only a warning and the reason it’s only a warning is that it doesn’t stop the user from performing a…
-
As a heterogenous company, I get a lot of questions on what database platforms are important, why and if we should invest in them. When looking at some of the lists and some of the marketing, it can be a bit overwhelming. Now I’m not going to promise to take all of the confusion out of the myriad of database platforms out there, but I’m hoping to help with what’s relevant. Ranking So let’s take a look at what is in the list of top databases engines in the industry per db-engines.com. The reason I use this site as my main…
-
We’ve been working hard to create an incredible new trial version of Delphix that uses AWS, which is built with the open source product Terraform. Terraform is a tool that anyone can use to build, version and manage a product effectively and seamlessly in a number of clouds. We are currently using it to implement to AWS, but there is a bright future for these types of open source products and I’m really impressed with how easy its made it to deploy compute instances, the Delphix Engine and supporting architecture on AWS EC2. If you’d like to read up on Terraform,…
-
When tearing down an AWS Delphix Trial, we run the following command with Terraform: >terraform destroy I’ve mentioned before that every time I execute this command, I suddenly feel like I’m in control of the Death Star in Star Wars: As this runs outside of the AWS EC2 web interface, you may see some odd information in your dashboard. In our example, we’ve run “terraform destroy” and the tear down was successful: So you may go to your volumes and after verifying that yes, no volumes exist: The instances may still show the three instances that were created as part of the trial, (delphix…
-
Now, for most of us, we’re living in a mobile world, which means as our laptop travels, our office moves and our IP address changes. This can be a bit troubling for those that are working in the cloud and our configuration to our cloud relies on locating us via our IP Address being the same as it was in our previous location. What happens if you’re IP Address changes from what you have in your configuration file, (in Terraform’s case, your terraform.tfvars file) for the Delphix AWS Trial? I set my IP Address purposefully incorrect in the file to demonstrate what…
-
I ran across an article from 2013 from Straight Talk on Agile Development by Alex Kuznetsov and it reminded me how long we’ve been battling for easier ways of doing agile in a RDBMS environments. Getting comfortable with a virtualized environment can be an odd experience for most DBAs, but as soon as you recognize how similar it is to a standard environment, we stop over-thinking it and it makes it quite simple to then implement agile with even petabytes of data in an relational environment without using slow and archaic processes. The second effect of this is to realize that we…
-
So you thought you were finished configuring your AWS target, eh? I already posted a previous time on how to address a fault with the RMEM, but now we’re onto the WMEM. Wait, WM-what? No, I fear a DBAs work is never over and when it comes to the cloud, our skill set has just expanded from what it was when we worked on-premise! Our trusty Delphix Admin Console keeps track of settings on all our sources and targets, informing us when the settings aren’t set to what is recommended, so that we’ll be aware of any less than optimal…
-
There are more configurations for AWS than there are fish in the sea, but as the rush of folks arrive to test out the incredibly cool AWS Trial for Delphix, I’ll add my rendition of what to look for to know you’re AWS setup is prepped to successfully deploy. The EC2 Dashboard View After you’ve selected your location, set up your security user/group and key pairs, there’s a quick way to see, (at least high level) if you’re ready to deploy the AWS Trial to the zone in question. Go to your EC2 Dashboard and to the location, (Zone) that…
-
Ah, yes, it’s that RMOUG Training Days time of the year again! As a techie, I didn’t put a lot of time into my slides when I first started presenting, thinking I’d simply dazzle them with my amazing knowledge. What I found is that slide deck skills don’t just help your presentation, they help you tell the story better, which should be the goal of every presenter. No matter how technical we are, we most likely haven’t had any formal Powerpoint training and as I’ve been upping my “PPT skills” this last year, I thought I’d share with the rest of the…
-
Delphix focuses on virtualizing non-production environments, easing the pressure on DBAs, resources and budget, but there is a second use case for product that we don’t discuss nearly enough. Protection from data loss. Jamie Pope, one of the great guys that works in our pre-sales engineering group, sent Adam and I an article on one of those situations that makes any DBA, (or an entire business, for that matters) cringe. GitLab.com was performing some simple maintenance and someone deleted the wrong directory, removing over 300G of production data from their system. It appears they were first going to use PostgreSQL…
-
I’ve been at Delphix for just over six months now. In that time, I was working with a number of great people on a number of initiatives surrounding competitive, the company roadmap and some new initiatives. With the introduction of our CEO, Chris Cook, new CMO, Michelle Kerr and other pivotal positions within this growing company, it became apparent that we’d be redirecting our focus on Delphix’s message and connections within the community. I was still quite involved in the community, even though my speaking had been trimmed down considerably with the other demands at Delphix. Even though I wasn’t submitting abstracts to…
-
I don’t want to alarm you, but there’s a new Delphix trial on AWS! It uses your own AWS account and with a simple set up, allows you to deploy a trial Delphix environment. Yes, you hear me right- just with a couple steps, you could have your own setup to work with Delphix! There’s documentation to make it simple to deploy, simple to understand and then use cases for individuals determined by their focus, (IT Architect, Developer, Database Administrator, etc.) This was a huge undertaking and I’m incredibly proud of Delphix to be offering this to the community! So…
-
So you’ve deployed targets with Delphix on AWS and you receive the following error: It’s only a warning, but it states that you’re default of 87380 is below the recommended second value for the ipv4.tcp.rmem property. Is this really an issue and do you need to resolve it? As usual, the answer is “it depends” and its all about on how important performance is to you. What is net.ipv4.tcp.rmem? To answer this question, we need to understand network performance. I’m no network admin, so I am far from an expert on this topic, but as I’ve worked more often in…
-
So Brent Ozar’s group of geeks did something that I highly support- a survey of data professional’s salaries. Anyone who knows me, knows I live by data and I’m all about transparency. The data from the survey is available for download from the site and they’re promoting app developers to download the Excel spreadsheet of the raw data and work with it. Now I’m a bit busy with work as the Technical Intelligence Manager at Delphix and a little conference that I’m the director for, called RMOUG Training Days, which is less than a month from now, but I couldn’t resist…