OOW, Day 2 (Monday)

Turns out, I apparently had more fun than I should have last night at the ACE Dinner. So, I woke up this morning not feeling very well. That combined with the time zone adjustment left me waking up a little groggy this morning. Starting the day today was the announcement regarding Oracle VM as described … Continue reading “OOW, Day 2 (Monday)”

Turns out, I apparently had more fun than I should have last night at the ACE Dinner. So, I woke up this morning not feeling very well. That combined with the time zone adjustment left me waking up a little groggy this morning.

Starting the day today was the announcement regarding Oracle VM as described in the keynote by Charles Phillips. I missed seeing the keynote, but caught the announcement from Justin’s tweets. Popular theories is that this was done similarly to the Oracle Enterprise Linux launch in that Oracle took open source Xen and re-rolled it into binaries. We’ll see when it is released for public consumption on November 14th. Continue reading “OOW, Day 2 (Monday)”

Oracle VM

I knew something big was getting pushed out from Oracle related to virtualization, but I didn’t expect it to be quite like this. Maybe now RAC will be supported in a VM :). I missed it, but apparently that was the big announcement in Charles Phillips’ keynote this morning. Update: I was only half joking … Continue reading “Oracle VM”

I knew something big was getting pushed out from Oracle related to virtualization, but I didn’t expect it to be quite like this. Maybe now RAC will be supported in a VM :). I missed it, but apparently that was the big announcement in Charles Phillips’ keynote this morning.

Update: I was only half joking about the RAC support, but now I’ve had time to read the FAQ and found this: “Oracle Real Application Clusters testing is in progress and it will be supported with Oracle VM in 2008 (calendar year).” …Excellent!

OOW, Day 1 (Sunday)

Sunday was a great day at OOW with lots of IOUG activities for me as well as seeing a lot of old friends that I never manage to see except at these events. My day started at breakfast with reviewing presentation materials for a co-presentation with Matt Topper. More about that in a minute. After … Continue reading “OOW, Day 1 (Sunday)”

Sunday was a great day at OOW with lots of IOUG activities for me as well as seeing a lot of old friends that I never manage to see except at these events.

My day started at breakfast with reviewing presentation materials for a co-presentation with Matt Topper. More about that in a minute.

After breakfast catching up with Matt and quickly reviewing our slides, I headed over to Moscone West where I gave my first presentation of the week titled “High Availability Options for Oracle Database”. The session was surprisingly well-attended and, as usual, I rushed through the first several options (exp/imp, data pump, RMAN, replication) and all the discussion and questions started around data guard, failover clusters, and, of course, RAC. If you attended the session, thanks for coming! Please don’t hesitate to drop me an email with your comments or suggestions (positive or negative)–I’m always looking for ways to improve the sessions!

After that session, I grabbed a quick lunch and headed to the IOUG SIG Council meeting. We had a relatively brief meeting as I think everyone had a lot on their minds and there is a lot to be done. This group is responsible for helping IOUG chart the direction of the SIG program and I can tell you that everyone is very interested in making the SIG successful. I’m excited to be involved in this great group and I know we’ll do some good things in the coming year.

After lunch, it was time for Matt and I to present our session titled “Is that really you? Prove it!” The session was all about Oracle Adaptive Access Manager (OAAM) which is the new name for the product acquired with Bharosa in early October. We had a lot of good discussion among our relatively small audience confirming that there is enough interest to kickstart this product in the community.

After that session, I dashed to the 11g Database beta testing panel session where I was a panelist with John King, Plamen Zyumbyulev, Charles Kim, and George Trujillo. We scrambled a bit to assemble the content and panelists, but I think it was a good session where attendees got to learn about some of the key 11g new features in an interactive way instead of the usual death by powerpoint.

Following the panel, I was back on stage for the RAC SIG Birds of a Feather session at 4pm. We had a short presentation describing the RAC SIG and its history as well as our usual pleas for volunteers. Following the presentation, we had a little more than an hour of Q & A that was all done by audience members. I’m not sure how the format was received by everyone, but I do think we got a lot of questions answered and we also gave good opportunity for everyone to answer questions and be involved. We have the expert panel session later this week, so if you have more questions, stop by then and lob them at the panel (I’ll be moderating that one too).

After the RAC SIG session, I wanted to see the Sunday Night Live event which I anticipated to be entertaining and funny as some Saturday Night Live cast members were on stage. Turns out I was wrong–was not entertained and endured a long monologue by Larry recounting how Oracle got started 30 years ago. There were also two deaths mentioned either by Larry or on screen in one of the videos they showed that really made for a fun mood-killer. I bailed out before the band started and headed to the final resting place for the evening.

The Oracle ACE dinner at The Fly Trap was the next and final stop on this long day. I enjoyed meeting many of the people I’ve followed through their blogs and reuniting with past acquaintances as well. Some of the ones I remember are: Matt Topper, Mark Rittman, Mogens Norgaard (I can’t type the special keys to spell his name properly), Justin Kestelyn, Jake Kuramoto, Dan Morgan, Arup Nanda, Michael Armstrong-Smith, Eric Marcoux, and I’m sure many others I forgot to mention. Good food, good conversations, and a nice way to kick off the week for sure.

OOW Personal Itinerary

I’ve pretty much taken a hiatus from technical articles while preparing for OOW. I depart tomorrow for SF and I plan to keep at least one entry per day…we’ll see if I can keep up while on-site at the conference. I have a lot of plans to attend some of the good RAC and Identity … Continue reading “OOW Personal Itinerary”

I’ve pretty much taken a hiatus from technical articles while preparing for OOW. I depart tomorrow for SF and I plan to keep at least one entry per day…we’ll see if I can keep up while on-site at the conference.

I have a lot of plans to attend some of the good RAC and Identity Management sessions at OOW. I won’t bore you with my personal pick list, but if you’re looking for me (because you want to hear a good joke or I owe you money or some such thing), you’ll definitely find me at these sessions since I’m involved in them to some extent:

  • Sunday, 11-Nov
    • 10 am: High Availability Options for Oracle Database, Moscone West 2003
    • 1 pm: Is that really you? Prove it!, Moscone West 2005
    • 2:30 pm: 11g Database Beta Testing Panel, Moscone West 2004
    • 4 pm: RAC SIG Birds of a Feather session, Moscone West 2002
  • Monday, 12-Nov
    • 10 am: Piocon Booth, Moscone South
    • 12:30 pm: RAC SIG Customer Panel, Moscone South 310
    • 4:45 pm: RAC For Beginners: The Basics, Hilton Continental Ballroom 6
    • 7:30 pm: OTN Night, Westin St. Francis Hotel
  • Tuesday, 13-Nov
    • 10 am: Piocon Booth, Moscone South
    • 12:15 pm: RAC SIG Expert Panel
    • 3:15 pm: Demystifying Fusion Middleware, Hilton Yosemite Room C
  • Wednesday, 14-Nov
    • 9 am: Piocon Booth, Moscone South
    • 11:15 am: other technical sessions
    • 3 pm: Piocon Booth, Moscone South
    • 8 pm: PARTY @ Cow Palace
  • Thursday, 15-Nov
    • 10 am: Piocon Booth, Moscone South
    • 11:30 am: other technical sessions
    • 5 pm: It’s a wrap reception, Howard Street

Should be a fun week. Please stop by and meet me at one of these places or anywhere else you happen to see me. Now, back to preparing the presentations for my sessions :). See you in SF! Travel safe.

RAC SIG Events at OOW

As the events chairperson for the RAC SIG, I wanted to make everyone aware of the events we have scheduled for next week at Oracle OpenWorld SF. Anyone is welcome to attend our sessions, though you’ll probably need a conference badge of some sort to get in (I recall that the room monitors are usually … Continue reading “RAC SIG Events at OOW”

As the events chairperson for the RAC SIG, I wanted to make everyone aware of the events we have scheduled for next week at Oracle OpenWorld SF. Anyone is welcome to attend our sessions, though you’ll probably need a conference badge of some sort to get in (I recall that the room monitors are usually pretty sticky about letting people in without proper conference badges). Anyway, here are the events we have planned. You’ll also find them on the homepage of our website.

  • Sunday, 4pm, Moscone West 2002-L2: RAC SIG Birds of a Feather Discussion Session, S292952
  • Monday, 12:30pm, Moscone South 310: RAC SIG Customer Panel, S291621
  • Tuesday, 10:45am, Moscone South 310: Panel Discussion: Deploying Siebel, SAP, Oracle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, and Hyperion on a Grid, S291659
  • Tuesday, 12:15pm, Moscone South 310: RAC SIG Expert Panel, S291665

Besides great content at these events, you’ll find many of the RAC SIG board members attending, hosting, moderating, and participating in these events. If you’re interested in becoming more involved with the group, please seek out one of us to discuss how you can help. Also, we’re always looking for potential presenters for our live webcast series, so we may be seeking you out to solicit your participation in that as well!

Either way, attending these sessions or not, I encourage you to sign up for an account on the RAC SIG website. This will enable you to access our recorded past webcasts (on demand playback at any time) and receive email reminders about upcoming events.

See you in SF! Be sure to confirm the room assignments and session times as they sometimes change in last-minute planning by OOW staff.

PortableApps.com

One of my peers introduced me to the website www.portableapps.com a week or two ago. This site takes popular applications, modifies them to avoid requiring a typical installation so that you don’t need to have administrative privileges on the system to run them. This allows those of us (especially consultants) that work on others’ systems … Continue reading “PortableApps.com”

One of my peers introduced me to the website www.portableapps.com a week or two ago. This site takes popular applications, modifies them to avoid requiring a typical installation so that you don’t need to have administrative privileges on the system to run them. This allows those of us (especially consultants) that work on others’ systems to be able to use some of our favorite tools without requesting special privileges.

I’d encourage you to check them out if you’d like to be able to put your favorite utility or web browser on a USB drive, plug it in to a computer you’ve never used before and start using the utility without delay. It can provide a great deal of privacy protection as well since you don’t leave behind your browser cache, bookmarks, or site visit history.

If you’re looking for a tool to access the internet, archive some files, transfer files, read MS Word documents or many others, grab the Portable Apps utility of your choice and avoid the Windows-isms. They’ve got a great inventory of products already and they seem to be actively updating the existing tools as well as adding new ones.

Using mod_rewrite to rewrite OC4J-served URLs – a complete review

We recently ran into an issue in a customer configuration where rewriting URLs using pass-through didn’t function as expected with OC4J-deployed applications. As it turned out, there’s a bug in the OC4J container and a relatively easy workaround for some. The situation was this (names changed to protect the innocent): An existing Java application deployment … Continue reading “Using mod_rewrite to rewrite OC4J-served URLs – a complete review”

We recently ran into an issue in a customer configuration where rewriting URLs using pass-through didn’t function as expected with OC4J-deployed applications. As it turned out, there’s a bug in the OC4J container and a relatively easy workaround for some.

The situation was this (names changed to protect the innocent):

  • An existing Java application deployment existed using JRun on Solaris. In that deployment, an application called “abc” would be called as “http://abcapp.corp.com/servlet/login”
  • Applications were to be migrated to Oracle Application Server 10.1.3.1.0.
  • Deployments on OAS were required to prefix the application with something and they used the application name. So, on the new site, the application would need to be called as “http://abcapp.corp.com/abc/servlet/login”. This was undesirable since bookmarks would have to be updated. While it could easily be handled with redirections, the desired behavior was to have all URLs match what they were on the old deployment.

On the surface, this seems like a relatively simple problem to solve using a RewriteRule with the [PT] option and few RewriteConds in the Apache configuration. That is, until you find the bug in OC4J that makes it impossible. First, let’s review the configuration parameters. Continue reading “Using mod_rewrite to rewrite OC4J-served URLs – a complete review”

Oracle OpenWorld Unconference Session Proposal

A few weeks ago, I posted a proposal to hold a session in the OpenWorld Unconference event. If you’re interested in discussing the complex configuration of Oracle Application Server in various situations like load balancing, virtual hosting, SSL configuration, and other often challenging situations, please head over and put a comment on the posting. I’ll … Continue reading “Oracle OpenWorld Unconference Session Proposal”

A few weeks ago, I posted a proposal to hold a session in the OpenWorld Unconference event. If you’re interested in discussing the complex configuration of Oracle Application Server in various situations like load balancing, virtual hosting, SSL configuration, and other often challenging situations, please head over and put a comment on the posting.

I’ll be joining several other session proposers at the Unconference event on Monday to reserve a time and place to hold this session. Once I have a slot reserved, I’ll update the page on the wiki with time and location as well as posting it here.

Please post something there or contact me directly if you’re interested in reviewing some of the common settings, discussing ways to work around limitations in the application server, applications, and other tips and tricks. I plan for this session to be highly interactive, but I firmly believe that everyone will leave with at least one new idea, technique, or tip in their brain.

OOW Appreciation Event Lineup Updated

I previously posted on Oracle OpenWorld’s Appreciation Event lineup. Unexpectedly, they changed the lineup to remove Prince, but they also added Lenny Kravitz…not a bad trade, though both have good shows I expect. Billy Joel is still on the lineup as well as Stevie Nicks, so there should be something for just about everyone. See … Continue reading “OOW Appreciation Event Lineup Updated”

I previously posted on Oracle OpenWorld’s Appreciation Event lineup. Unexpectedly, they changed the lineup to remove Prince, but they also added Lenny Kravitz…not a bad trade, though both have good shows I expect. Billy Joel is still on the lineup as well as Stevie Nicks, so there should be something for just about everyone.

See you there–only 3 more weeks!

Ora-safe-search

Here’s a useful little utility to add to your browser. It’s purpose is singular and simple, but still quite useful. Check it out at http://ora-safe-search.sourceforge.net/.

Here’s a useful little utility to add to your browser. It’s purpose is singular and simple, but still quite useful. Check it out at http://ora-safe-search.sourceforge.net/.