I know, I know- there’s a number of you out there thinking- I’m being brought in on more and more of these projects due to a recent change for some Exadata backup components many companies kept onsite, (parts that wear out more often, like PDUs and cell disks) which are no longer an option and that moving to Azure is a viable option for these workloads if you know what to identify and address before the move to the cloud. Engineered, Not Iron An Exadata is an engineered system- database nodes, secondary cell nodes, (also referred to as storage nodes/cell…
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We’ll start with a disclaimer here- this is my experience and my opinion. NO ONE ELSE’S, just as any link to any blog in this post is. Take it or leave it, I really don’t care, never have, never will- never been one to follow any drummer but my own anyway. 😊 Although the basis for calculating database management systems percentage of business is highly contested, there isn’t anyone contesting Oracle as having the largest percentage of the current database management system business. Don’t confuse this with cloud business or other technology platform- those are two different things. One such…
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I’ve been studying for over a week for my certs. It really is a challenge for my ADHD brain, as I learn by interacting and using a product, not be reading about it and guess what? Most of what the certs are on are not in my technical area. Yeah, this is not fun for me. I find that my brain hits a limit on what it can absorb before the activity levels in the temporal lobes diminish and I need to take a break, which is what I’m doing right now after a full day of Azure Synapse Analytics,…
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I haven’t been very good at sharing my analytics work as often I feel others are more skilled in this area than I am, just starting out, but today I’d like to start to fix that by sharing an interactive diagram. I know, some of you may be saying, “infographic”, but as it’s has links vs. a paginated design, I’ll call it as I see it. Not the Kitchen Sink This diagram I built for a customer who was interested in how data was secured at different stages of the Power BI environment and was built with their specific Power…
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I enjoyed the opportunity to test out my PASS Summit shell scripting session at SQL Saturday Denver. It was the first run on it and Glenn Berry sat in my session. Afterwards, this wise and long-standing member of the community had a very valuable piece of constructive criticism- change the background on my bash terminal for Azure Cloud Shell, as the black background and colors could be troublesome for some attendees. I agree with him- you never know what the projector quality will be, the lighting in the room, color-blind attendees or other factors that could impact the readability of …
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I’ve been very busy allocating 60% of my time towards Oracle on Azure migrations. The biggest challenge right now isn’t getting Oracle on Azure, but keeping my percentage of time allocated to only 60%. I love Oracle technology- yes, a Microsoft employee who LOVES Microsoft and Azure cloud, also LOVES. Oracle. I won’t apologize and I know I’m not the only one. Every company I’ve worked for, even when I worked at Oracle, required my multi-platform skill set. I’ve never worked anywhere that had ONLY Oracle, only Linux, only Microsoft, only SQL Server, etc. I saw it only as…
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Microsoft has done a great job of documenting how to create a VM with the appropriate VM image and Oracle version, then how to log in, startup the listener and create the database. I just have some enhancements I’d like to make to it, hoping to help it move up one level. I Bequeath to You All instructions provided by the Microsoft documentation show how to connect to the database using a bequeath, (BEQ) connection. This is done by the following command, using SQL Plus, (or similar): sqlplus / as sysdba It bypasses the need for a connection string, only…
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We’ve learned a lot about commands, utilities and how to create a script, but we need to discuss the importance of scripting for longevity. What is Scripting for Longevity? We have a tendency to focus on scripting to automate something WE might not want to perform manually, but avoid what we think might void our value. We may try to ensure there is necessity for our role or our knowledge as we create scripts. This can be built into the execution process, scheduling, arguments, pre-run or post-run steps. This doesn’t make us an asset, but a liability and against what…
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If there’s one thing I’ve been able to prove this week, it’s that even with the sweet 4G LTE, Wi-Fi setup in my RV, Montana still has the worst Wi-Fi coverage in the US. Lucky for me, I work in the cloud and automate everything, because if there’s one thing I love about automating with scripts, is that I can build out a deployment faster and less resource intensive than anyone can from the portal. Oracle Virtual Machines in Azure When you build out an Azure VM, with Oracle, you’ll also need to have the supporting structure and a sufficiently…
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I keep saying I’m going to start sharing what I’m doing in the Analytics space soon, but heck, there’s too much I need to keep adding to on the Oracle in Azure arena! So, as most people know, I’m not a big fan of Oracle RAC, (Real Application Cluster). My opinion was that it was often sold for use cases that it doesn’t serve, (such as HA) and the resource demands between the nodes, as well as what happens when a node is evicted to those that are left are not in the best interest for most use cases. On…
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A couple weeks back, Oracle and Microsoft announced their cross-cloud partnership. This was wonderful news to me, as I’ve been working on numerous Oracle projects at Microsoft with Azure. The Gist To know that there is now a partnership between the two clouds and that there’s also a large amount of documentation about working between the two clouds is very helpful vs. the amount I’ve been working on based off just my knowledge. Just as anyone appreciates a second set of eyes, I now have two company’s worth! If you missed the announcement and curious what it’s about, Oracle has…
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In the previous blog posts, we learned how to set up the first part of a standard shell script- how to interactively set variables, including how to pass them as part of the script execution. In this next step, we’ll use those to build out Azure resources. If you’re working on-premises, you can use this type of scripting with SQL Server 2019 Linux but will need to use CLI commands and SQLCMD. I will cover this in later posts, but honestly, the cloud makes deployment quicker for any business to get what they need deployed and with the amount of…
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In Part I, we started with some scripting basics, as in, how to write a script. This included the concepts of breaking a script into sections, (introduction, body and conclusion) For Part II, we’ll start with the BASH script “introduction”. The introduction in a BASH script should begin the same in all scripts. Set the shell to be used for the script Set the response to failure on any steps, (exit or ignore) Add in a step for testing, but comment out or remove when in production For our scripts, we’ll keep to the BASH format that is used by…
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I do a LOT of scripting. Given the choice to click in a GUI vs. typing at the command line, I’ll choose the command line. Given the choice to type commands in repeatedly vs. scripting out a task I perform more than twice, I’ll script. Scripting effectively is an art as much as it’s a science. Where a GUI can change, both in content, as well as layout, a script is less impacted by this when it is designed to dynamically work with the catalog. You have the choice to either work with the values in an array or to…
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Yep, still doing a lot of database migrations. Just too many people wanting to migrate their other database platforms over to Azure… I have two customers that have DB2 databases and I know how overwhelming it can be to take on a project like this, so I thought I would go over the high level steps to this project to demonstrate it’s a lot easier than many first may believe. The SQL Server Migration Assistant is your friend and can take a lot of the hardship out of migration projects. The overall steps to the migration are as follows: Questions…
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Cloud is a still a huge buzz word because people are still moving to embrace it. As many companies that are in the cloud, there are still a large percentage of real estate that’s on-premises. As much as I’m now Analytics and AI with Azure, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that I’ve been adopted by a number of those inside Microsoft to assist in the migration of Oracle databases to Azure. There are three primary goals: Move to the cloud and Azure is their cloud choice, so they plan on staying with the Oracle database platform. Migrate current Oracle databases to…
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Its almost standard fare to be using Azure Analysis Services with our customer deployments these days. As our customers evolve the value of their data. SSIS integration runtimes were pivotal to this and now that there is Azure Analysis Services, it’s even easier to get started with just a few clicks in the portal interface, (or for me, a simple step in a script… :)) and migrate runtimes to the cloud. One of the biggest challenges for any cloud migration project is performance issues, not due to cloud, but due to technologists attempting to perform tasks as they have on-premises…
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I’ve been hesitant to post too much on my blog until since the hack, as there were some residual issues after the restoration of the site that took a bit to correct. I’m finally feeling confident enough to start posting on everything I’m doing currently working with Azure and the education customers for Microsoft. One of the powerful tools I’ve been taking advantage of is the Azure Cloud Shell. This cloud tool has the offering option of setting to PowerShell or Bash and I think you know which I chose. Although everything I do will require a PowerShell version in…