Azure is the second most popular cloud platform to date, so it’s where Delphix naturally is going to support second on our road to the cloud. As I start to work with the options for us deploying Delphix, there are complexities I need to educate myself on in Azure. As we’re just starting out, there’s a lot to learn and a lot of automation we can take advantage of. It’s an excellent time for me to get up to speed with this cloud platform, so hopefully everyone will learn right along with me! We’ll be using Terraform to deploy to…
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“Enough already with the DHCP complaints!” It’s Friday, so it means soon, we can stop worrying about such stuff and can get onto better things… Until then, I’m sure other folks will be working with an AWS instance, go to log in after setting it up the initial time and want to know why the ssh connection that worked fine the day before is now hanging. In fact, if anything has been done to renew their DHCP release and change their IP Address, this could occur. There’s always more than one way to skin a cat and along with setting…
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I ended up speaking at two events this last week. Now if timezones and flights weren’t enough to confuse someone, I was speaking at both an Oracle AND a SQL Server event- yeah, that’s how I roll these days. Utah Oracle User Group, (UTOUG) I arrived last Sunday in Salt Lake, which is just a slightly milder weather and more conservative version of Colorado, to speak at UTOUG’s Spring Training Days Conference. I love this location and the weather was remarkable, but even with the warm temps, skiing was still only a 1/2 hour drive from the city. Many of…
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Now that I’ve loaded a ton of transactions and did a bunch of work load on my source database with the SH sample schema and Swingbench, I’ve noted how little impact to the databases using different cloud tools, (which will come in a few later posts) now I’m going to show you how easy it is to create a new VDB from all of this, WITH the new SH data included. During all of this time, the primary users of my Delphix VDB, (virtualized databases) would have been working in the previous iage, but someone wants that new SH schema…
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I love valuable metric data and I wanted to see what’s offered from different cloud providers. Metrics are data and data ensures that when performance is impacted, we have the information we need to answer questions and resolve issues. For my first adventure, we’ll start with a high level review of Amazon. Cloudwatch is one of the main tools to inspect the workload on instances in EC2, using the AWS Trial while Swingbench runs the Sales History workload. There is additional charges for this feature, but it’s pretty minimal per instance vs. other tools, so I’ll talk about the basics…
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Swingbench is a one of the best choices for easy loads on a database. I wanted to use it against the SH sample schema I loaded into my Oracle Source database and I haven’t used Swingbench outside of the command line quite a while back, (my databases seem to always come with a load on them!) so it was time to update my Swingbench skills and catch up with the user interface. Thanks to Dominic Giles for keeping the download, features and documentation so well maintained. After adding the application rights to run on my Macbook Pro, I was impressed by…
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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…
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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.)…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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,…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…