The only thing that stays the same is change…. As the time flies by and the world turns, I often am jarred back to reality when I discover how the little things we do can have a larger impact on the world around us. Flying back from Interop ITX and StarEast conferences last week, I was reminded of this. While reading the latest copy of Wired , I came across a story on D-Tech High School. This is the school that resides on the Oracle headquarters campus, in its own building(s). The story was interviewing different students to discuss how…
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I’m getting ready to get on a plane between two events today and have been so busy, that there’s been a break in blogging. That’s right folks, Kellyn has let a few things slide…. For those people on top of all the happenings in Kevlar’s life, I’ve been busy removing 15 years of possessions from my home so we can sell it in the next month, along with the purchase, upgrade and consolidation into a 42Ft. travel trailer. It’s quite an undertaking, so a few things have had to be put lower on the priority list to complete the rest.…
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Its been a couple years since I presented at UKOUG. After taking last year off to prioritize some projects with Delphix, I’m back to speaking and the event committee was gracious enough to offer a goth girl a couple spots on the schedule this year. The event is in Birmingham, and although I’ve never been there, I’m told by reports, it’s rather rainy and cold this time of year, so I better prepare, (nothing like people selling you on a location…:)) I have two sessions this year, the first one is on Super Sunday: Sunday, Dec. 3rd at 4pm in the…
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As I continue to dig into the legacy we’re impacted by in technology, I had the opportunity to read Disrupt or Die, the new book from Delphix and Avamar founder, Jedidiah Yueh. I was first concerned that the content wouldn’t be that interesting to someone from the deep technical like myself… To be honest, I ended up quite captivated by the history lessons surrounding some of our most successful technology companies, like Facebook, Google, Salesforce and others. The book discusses, in Jed’s own words, something that I’ve always referred to as “the power in the simple act of doing” and…
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This is the Part III in a four part series on how to: Enable VNC Viewer access on Amazon EC2 hosts. Install DB12c and upgrade a Dsource for Delphix from 11g to 12c, (12.1) Update the Delphix Configuration to point to the newly upgraded 12c database and the new Oracle 12c home. Install DB12c and upgrade target VDBs for Delphix residing on AWS to 12.1 from the newly upgraded source. In Part II, we finished upgrading the Dsource database, but now we need to get it configured on the Delphix side. Log into the Delphix Admin console to make the…
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I’m finally getting back to upgrading the Linux Source for a POC I’m doing with some folks and picking up from where we left off in Part I… Address Display Issue Now that we have our VNC Viewer working on our Amazon host, the first thing we’ll try is to run the Oracle installer, (unzipped location –> database –> runInstaller) but it’s going to fail because we’re missing the xdpinfo file. To verify this, you’ll need to open up a terminal from Application –> System Tools –> Terminal: $ ls -l /usr/bin/xdpyinfo ls: /usr/bin/xdpyinfo: No such file or directory We’ll…
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Doing three or four webinars in a month doesn’t seem like a big deal until you actually try to do it…and present at two or three events and make sure you do everything for your job outside of that, too. Suddenly you find yourself scrambling to keep up, but I’m known for taking on a few too many things at once… 🙂 Tomorrow at I’ll be presenting at 24HOP, also known as the 24 Hours of Pass, which is the webinar preview of The Pass Summit conference. This is a free web event to anyone who registers, so no matter…
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I’ve been at KSCOPE 2017 all week and it’s been a busy scheduled even with only two sessions. Its just one of those conferences that has so much going on all the time that the days just speed by at 140MPH. As with most major conferences, KSCOPE abstract submission was about 9 months ago. This was a time when I was just coming to grips with how much Delphix could solve in the IT environment and may have been one of the first abstracts I submitted as a Delphix employee. I wasn’t too thrilled with my choice and thank KSCOPE for…
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I’m in sunny Phoenix this week at the Data Platforms 2017 Conference and looking forward to a break in the heat when I return to Colorado this evening. As this event is for big data, I expected to present on how big data could benefit from virtualization, but was surprised to find that I didn’t have a lot of luck finding customers utilizing us for this reason, (yet). As I’ve discussed in previous presentations, I was aware of what a “swiss army knife” virtualization is, resolving numerous issues, across a myriad of environments, yet often unidentified. The Use Case To…
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Different combination in the game of tech create a winning roll of the dice and other times create a loss. Better communication between teams can offer a better opportunity to deter from holes in development cycle tools, especially when DevOps is the solution you’re striving for. It doesn’t hurt to have a map to help guide you. This interactive map from XebiaLabs can help offer a little clarity to the solutions, but there’s definitely some holes in multiple places that could be clarified a bit more. The power of this periodic table of DevOps tools, isn’t just that they are broken…
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I did a couple great sessions yesterday for the awesome Dallas Oracle User Group, (DOUG.) It was the first time I did my thought leadership piece on Making Sense of the Cloud and it was a great talk, with some incredible questions from the DOUG attendees! This points me to a great [older] post on things IT can do to help guarantee tech projects are more successful. DevOps is a standard in most modern IT shops and DBAs are expected to find ways to be part of this valuable solution. If you inspect the graph, displaying the value of different projects…
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For over a year I’ve been researching cloud migration best practices. Consistently there was one red flag that trips me that I’m viewing recommended migration paths. No matter what you read, just about all of them include the following high level steps: As we can see from above, the scope of the project is identified, requirements laid out and a project team is allocated. The next step in the project is to choose one or more clouds, choose the first environments to test out in the cloud, along with security concerns and application limitations. DBAs are tested repeatedly as they continue to…
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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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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…