And, feel better Mike!

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My OOW2010 Codpiece

Oracle made a number of important announcements this year at OpenWorld, including a the Exalogic machine, and support for Amazon EC2, which I blogged about here.

For me, the highlight of the week was meeting a number of top Oracle technical minds at Oracle Closed World, the brainchild of Mogens Nørgaard from Denmark. Members of the Oak Table and other luminaries of our field stood up and spoke candidly about technology, drilling down to the most minute detail.  Computerworld Denmark covered the event well here.

I’ll be speaking to a hung over dwindling crowd at noon today, the last day of OOW, and the day after the blowout party on Treasure Island. By telling people about running Oracle on EC2, I hope to make life easier for DBA-kind.  Amazon’s IaaS cloud gives us all a cheap way to provision host resources on demand, and get things done in hours that would otherwise take weeks (or be impossible) via normal corporate hardware procurement processes.

This will be the last big conference for me for a while – I am going to focus on Blue Gecko customers, research and sharing my insights here.

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2. Ignite MySQL at the MySQL Conference and Expo
3. The strangest Oracle problem I ever encountered – can you guess the cause?

http://www.pce.uw.edu/prog.aspx?id=4092

The UW Oracle Certificate is a six-month program taught by Jeremiah Wilton of Blue Gecko and Venki Krishnababu of Nordstrom. Blue Gecko President Chuck Edwards serves on the advisory board for the program. These experienced professionals want to help you cultivate developers, non-Oracle DBAs and other interested IT staff into knowledgeable Oracle professionals.

Through a combination of weekly lectures and hands-on lab work, students learn the basics of Oracle’s internal architecture, PL/SQL programming skills, and basic and advanced administration. Throughout the course, students manage their own private 64-bit Oracle database on Linux, using Amazon.com’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

The UW offers this class simultaneously in person in downtown Seattle, and online via Adobe Connect. The distance education option allows students from all over the world to attend lectures, participate in class and complete lab work.

Recently, Jeremiah Wilton blogged on Blue Gecko’s site about the pros and cons of programs like the UW’s versus vendor certification from Oracle. You can read his post here:

http://www.bluegecko.net/education/good-ocp-bad-ocp/

Blue Gecko does not have a financial relationship with the UW Oracle certificate program; we are proud of our staff contribution to a premier University of Washington academic program.

Kinds Regards,
Your partners at Blue Gecko
Follow us on Facebook - “Blue Gecko – We’ve got your back”

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• Oracle education and certification (OCP)
• Third-party educational programs (University and private training)
• Self-directed study and experimentation

Most entering into the field assume that to be employable, they must become an Oracle Certified Professional (OCP).  They might be surprised to know that most working Oracle professionals do not have this certification.

Although having an OCP is a nice way to show a prospective employer that you are serious about your profession, this certification has never gained the kind of universal traction that Microsoft’s MCSE has.  There are a few reasons for this:

• Oracle education has not matched curriculum with business needs
• The Oracle certifications are very expensive
• Generally, companies hire Oracle DBAs based on technical merit, not paper certifications

Oracle’s classes and exams emphasize memorization of syntax and specific values and settings, instead of broader concepts.  The kind of minutia that must be retained to pass an OCP exam is easily referenced day to day in the Oracle manuals.  Senior professionals in our field frequently do not know specific syntax and parameters.  What makes them senior is their broader, holistic understanding of Oracle systems, and the ability to solve problems.

The OCP certification costs over $2000 and exposes candidates to a minimum amount of practical hands-on experience.  Candidates must attend just one 5-day class in person or on-line and pass two exams to complete the program.  Needless to say this does not prepare anyone to face the real-life challenges of managing enterprise production systems.  It simply graduates people skilled at memorization and test taking.

More and more, the meritocratic culture of the Internet has pervaded hiring strategies for Oracle professionals.  That means that a person who has a broad and holistic knowledge of systems, and can ace a phone screen, is more valued in hiring decisions than someone who simply boasts an OCP credential. Interviewers are much more likely to ask, “How would you deal with the following scenario…?” rather than “What is the exact syntax for …?”

The value of private education and self-directed study

Many universities and private companies have crafted programs to provide education services that seek to fill the void left by Oracle University’s lack of practical orientation.  These programs emphasize hands-on lab exercises, concepts and best practices.

Blue Gecko has taken a keen interest in one program at the University of Washington: UW Professional and Continuing education’s Certificate in Oracle Database Administration. This weekly, online three-hour night class runs from October 2012 through June 2013. Blue Gecko’s president, Chuck Edwards serves on the academic board for this program, and it is largely taught by… me!

Two things make the University of Washington program unique:

• Each student maintains their own 64-bit Linux Oracle server on Amazon EC2 for the duration of the program, compliments of Amazon Web Services
• I deliver the course over the Internet via Adobe Connect.  This means that students from anywhere in the world can take the course by attending virtually.

Even with the benefit of a class like the UW certificate program, anyone serious about becoming an Oracle DBA must be self-directed, and engage in plenty of independent experimentation and study.  Oracle’s development license allows anyone to download their software and run it for purposes of independent experimentation. My course at the UW is designed to orient students so that they are prepared to build independently on the knowledge they gained in the course.  During the course, I assign independent projects and reading. The goal of the course is to prepare students to think critically and formulate intelligent solutions both on the job and in job interviews.

Being an Oracle DBA can be a lucrative and interesting career.  But trying to break in using the Oracle certifications may prove more challenging than some might expect.  Consider the third-party education route, combined with independent study for your best chance at professional success.

Related posts:

1. Blue Gecko recommends the University of Washington Oracle Certificate program
2. Oracle Education – Our First DBA Class!!
3. Oracle Support and Certification on AWS

Amazon Web Services (AWS) allows you to add and remove computing services on demand.  You pay for only what you use.  There are no contracts and no fees other than usage charges.  It works exactly like an electricity bill.  When you need more servers, you add them.  When you need more storage, you add it.  When you don’t need these things anymore, you simply remove them.

Why all the fuss?

Because of the cost and flexibility.  Small servers as as little as $0.03 per hour.  Consider the need for a few extra servers during a big project, like implementing an ERP system.  Servers may be added quickly and cheaply, then removed when they’re not needed.  The process of budgeting tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars for server capacity changes dramatically with AWS.

Does anyone important use AWS?

Besides Amazon.com themselves?  The biggest e-commerce site in the world?  Yes, there are literally thousands of companies using AWS today, and more every day.  Savvy start-ups are using AWS as their default computing platform.  Not just garage-based, bootstrapped organizations, but well-funded organizations that intend to go public.

Why would my business use AWS?

Dynamic scaling is one reason.  AWS computing capacity can be added dynamically, so when your product launch is featured on CNN and web traffic goes through the ceiling, your web site will not go down.  Outside of soemthing like AWS, you’d need to purchase and manage enough physical hardware to handle peak traffic that may be impossible to predict.

Another reason might simply be projects.  Part of every IT budget includes some provision for test and development gear.  AWS is a fantastic substitute for expensive capital hardware because your IT department can simply use what they need for a project, then stop paying for them when they’re done.

How can savings be realized?

• AWS may dramatically reduce capital expenditures and therefore depreciation hits to the bottom line.
• Because AWS computing resources are managed by Amazon and not by an internal staff, there are no management or overhead costs to budget for.  The people, data centers, service contracts, 7×24 help desks, etc are all rolled into the hourly rates.
• If your web site experiences downtime due to unpredictable load spikes, AWS may eliminate those problems, which both reduces maintenance overhead and keeps new customers on your site.

What about security?

With AWS, you are renting computing capacity, just like a dedicated hosting or managed hosting model, and security should always be a concern when you don’t have complete control.  AWS security risks are exactly the same as any third-part hosting provider.  That is to say, the risk itself is the same; how each provider addresses those risks should always be what separates one provider from another.  Amazon, produces a SAS70 audit so customers and customer auditors have a clear understanding of internal controls.  Amazon also has detailed technical security documentation that explains Amazon’s security practices far beyond ITIL processes.  As with any hosting provider, customers can mitigate risk by ensuring their security requirements match the provider’s documented controls and security practices.

I’m not technical and my CIO is anti-AWS.  How can I talk to them about AWS?

There are many legitimate reasons AWS is not a good fit for some IT shops, but such reasons should be based on fact and should be easy to communicate and document.  Hearsay or anecdotal “facts,” should never drive decisions.  AWS potentially represents substantial savings and increased IT agility for any organization, and should not be rejected out of hand.  If your CIO has no concrete, documented reason for rejecting AWS (i.e. they have neither explored nor tested the possibility) then you should ask them to.  IT is not a black box; every decision should and can have a concrete reason.  Make them prove it to you.

EAVB_GXGAVWHKBU

Related posts:

1. Amazon Web Services FAQ
2. Database Hosting Services
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I chose to host the AMI on a small instance since they’re cheap to operate, which means you can fire up 3-4 of them to try out a replication scheme without feeling guilty. It runs CentOS 5.4 and MySQL 5.0.77 from the CentOS repository.

One of the goals I had for the training AMI was for it to be easy to visually inspect what is going on inside of MySQL and the system at large. To that end I’ve installed Cacti, a graphing and visualization tool, and equipped it with templates that allow you to visualize i/o statistics and detailed MySQL statistics. I’ve also installed a recent version of Innotop — a very handy top-like tool that lets you see a list of queries happening in real-time. It’s also good for visualizing locking behavior.

Another goal I had for the AMI was that it’d be useful for learning how to backup/clone MySQL databases. On startup I made certain that the ephemeral data store was converted into a physical volume, and then manged with the logical volume manager. A 64GB logical volume is reserved for MySQL and is mounted in /var/lib/mysql. I also installed xtrabackup 1.0 so one could experiment both with backups using LVM snapshots as well as ‘hot’ backups with xtrabackup.

Naturally the AMI includes the Maatkit tool suite, which I didn’t install from the CentOS repository because Maatkit changes so frequently — I wanted the most up-to-date and bug free version possible. The mk-table-checksum and mk-table-sync tools alone make it a valuable addition to any MySQL DBA’s toolkit. In later blog posts we’ll examine using these tools to verify the consistency of replication slaves.

I also wanted to use the AMI for benchmarking various MySQL configurations as well as being able to simulate concurrent read/write load. I built and installed sysbench 0.5 from SVN. The various LUA scripts that drive sysbench’s MySQL testing behavior can be found in /root/sysbench.

Lastly, I wanted the AMI to be useful for learning about SQL, so I made sure some interesting sample datbases were available. In the /root/datasets directory you’ll find SQL for the ‘world‘, ‘sakila‘, and ‘employee‘ test databases.

The password for just about everything (system root, mysql root, cacti admin, etc) is ‘mysqltrain’. If you want to see the Cacti graphs from your web browser you’ll want to open up port 80 on your EC2 Security Group to your home machine’s IP, the same goes for port 3306 if you want to use a local MySQL client such as SQLyog.

The AMI is named “Bluegecko/mysql-training.manifest.xml”. Enjoy!

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CURRICULUM

Starting with basic concepts and product architecture, this course delivers hands-on training in skills crucial to being a DBA:

• DBA roles and responsibilities
• Oracle products, services and features
• How to interact with Oracle (command line, GUI)
• Oracle database architecture
• Fundamental Oracle concepts
• Installation, deployment, security and patching
• Performance tuning
• Backup, recovery and flashback
• High availability, business continuation
• Data Guard
• Replication, Streams, Queuing, Change Data Capture
• Real Application Clusters (RAC)
• Advanced troubleshooting, diagnostics and tracing

SCHEDULE:

May 11 – 15, 2009 daily, 10AM – 5PM
Lunch, coffee and snacks provided
All examples and hands-on tasks are on Linux

REQUIREMENTS/PREREQUISITES:

Your own laptop with wireless LAN
PuTTY or equivalent terminal software
Basic Linux/Unix skills (ls, cd, rm, etc.)
Basic understanding of computing (processes, networks, memory, storage)
Basic understanding of SQL and PL/SQL

HOW TO SIGN UP:

call: 1 866 397 2583 or 1 206 508 4778
cost: $1500.00
payment option: paypal, money order, cashiers check

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