Community

We’re going to change it up a little bit and have a networking / social event. No presentation this time – just a chance to meet up with colleagues in the area for some food, drink, and conversation. The location is TBD, but will be somewhere downtown – we’re working on securing a spot.

Please send this out to anyone you think might be interested; we’d like to get as many of the people signed up on this list to attend as possible!

The Meetup RSVP can be found at:  http://www.meetup.com/seattle-oracle-apps-tech/calendar/12816702/

Come see Blue Gecko at the Oracle Technology Solutions Fair!  Blue Gecko will have a booth at the 2010 Oracle Technology Solutions Fair at the Fairmont Olympic Hotel, 411 University Street, Seattle, WA on March 3, 2010.  Come see Jeremiah, Rick, Chuck, Ken, and a bunch of other Oracle Geckos (heck, it’s a block away from our Seattle office!)

Don’t miss this great opportunity to learn more about Oracle solutions for your business, meet with Oracle experts, and visit with Oracle partners. This event will feature high level and technical sessions, which will equip you to better use, implement, and manage information throughout your enterprise.

Having completed more than 40 transactions since fiscal 2005, Oracle has been one of the most active acquirers in the software industry, adding many new solutions to Oracle’s product line. Hear from these experts about what this means for your business.

Amazon recently allowed Elastic Block Store to boot persistent images. However, there are two concerns I have with the method.

* The EBS boot volumes must be EBS Snapshots, which cost more than regular EBS volumes. (http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/#pricing)
* The EBS boot volumes currently do not work within the Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) infrastructure. (http://aws.amazon.com/vpc/faqs/#45) Read the full article…

If you’re reading this on RSS, please drop everything (immediately) and check out our updated web site!  If you’re reading this post on the web site, well, you probably noticed already.  :)

We’re pleased to announce that Blue Gecko is providing hosting and some technical support for Drizzle!  Drizzle is a community-driven project based on the popular MySQL DBMS that is focused on MySQL’s original goals of ease-of-use, reliability and performance.  For more information go to http://drizzle.org.

I was looking at an old backup script the other day.  We acquired a new client who was stiil using shell scripts to execute hot tablespace backups and it got me thinking about how much I take RMAN for granted these days.

Remember how meticulous we used to be about backup shell scripts?

In the “old days” you had to manage everything in the scripts like finding file locations, compression, labeling tarballs, error logging, etc.  DBAs took one of two paths: Read the full article…

“Expert Oracle Practices: Oracle Database Administration from the Oak Table” was just released and it features our own Jeremiah Wilton’s thoughts on running Oracle on Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2).

As an official Amazon Web Services partner, Blue Gecko has adopted EC2 as a primary database hosting platform, and Jeremiah is leading the charge.  For best practices regarding Oracle on EC2, check out “Expert Oracle Practices: Oracle Database Administration from the Oak Table” today – available at Amazon.com.

If you don’t get alerts regularly from Oracle Support you may have missed this notice:

If you conducted an import or export of an Oracle10g Release 2 or 11g Release 1 database prior to September 11, 2009, you should follow the instructions in My Oracle Support Knowledge Document 1055539.1 to verify the privileges in your database. This is because a missing step in several OracleMetaLink notes published before 11 September 2009 means that target instance schemas created by following the instructions in them may have an additional privilege that was not present in the source instance, and which may therefore need to be removed. See Knowledge Document 985520.1 for full Critical Patch Update Information.

Anyone who has performed an export or an import recently should absolutely read this note.  Below, I have included Oracle’s test to see if you may be affected by the issue.  This is straight off of note 1055539.1 mentioned above: Read the full article…

Are you the kind of person who takes your car to the shop and tells the mechanic exactly what part needs to be replaced or fixed?  Do you go to the doctor’s office and let them know about your condition and probable cures based on what you looked up on WebMD?

How about others’ interaction with you?  In your professional life, have you been asked to do something very specific without context?  Does it make you uncomfortable?  Do you ever think, “Man, I just wish I knew what this was all about?” Read the full article…

Many Oracle Apps DBAs don’t feel pressure to apply E-Business Suite CPU until they are asked to expose an application node to the outside world; now there’s no excuse.  If you’re an established EBS shop and you’ve never applied the EBS CPU patches for your Release 11i environment, there is quite a bit of work to get caught up on should you need to implement a new module like iStore or iSupplier. Read the full article…