Community

The next Seattle Amazon Web Services User Group meeting is Tuesday, April 27.  For more details, go to http://www.sawsug.com/.

Without completely copying everything our Oracle on EC2 Licensing page, I wanted to provide a quick overview of Oracle Processor licensing for EC2.

Oracle can be licensed on Amazon EC2, but we have to translate processor use to core use to determine licensing costs.  Where bare-metal processor licensing uses a CPU socket to define a processor, EC2 instances use cores.  Oracle has provided a metric of 4 cores = 1 socket, rounded up to the nearest 4 cores.  So, a small instance with 1 core would require 1 socket (1 core rounded up to 4), or one processor license.   An extra large instance with 4 cores would also require 1 socket – same as a small instance. Read the full article…

I created the Bluegecko MySQL training AMI as a MySQL sandbox that folks could use to learn things about MySQL. I wanted the AMI to have MySQL 5.0, and a large collection of tools — for both tinkering and visualizing what is happening inside MySQL and on the system in general.

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. Read the full article…

At Collaborate this week, I received a lot of questions regarding support and certification for Oracle on Amazon Web Services.  After unraveling a few of these questions, I realized that the difference between “certification” and “support” has become quite confused.  I thought a quick explanation might help, because the difference is not really that subtle and definitely important. Read the full article…

10.  a swarm of geeks storming a hotel bar is awe inspiring
09.  openly shared information is a beautiful thing
08.  i got to be star struck when meeting and greeting luminaries
07.  only to find out they know about my comany/projects/name
06.  met clients/peers/vendors whom i only knew via email/im/twitter Read the full article…

Blue Gecko would like to invite you to a complimentary lunch seminar on Wednesday, May 5, 2010. Jeremiah Wilton will be covering the topic High Performance Oracle 11g in the Amazon Cloud. There are 15 spaces available so sign up soon to reserve your spot. Click here to submit your registration info. Read the full article…

Sarah Novotny speaking at MySQL Conference 2010

I’ll be giving a talk tonight at the Ignite MySQL! For those of you who don’t know about this format, I suggest that you check out Ignite!.  The basic premise is:

Fast-paced, fun, thought-provoking, social, local, global—Ignite is all of these and more. It’s a high-energy evening of 5-minute talks by people who have an idea—and the guts to get onstage and share it with their hometown crowd.

My talk will be called Backups Don’t Make Me Money Read the full article…

As information technology professionals, we constantly complain about mismanaged projects in which we have the misfortune to be involved.  Frequently, someone with more power than knowledge – usually in management and under the sway of a persuasive vendor sales team – has come up with a systems design most politely described as novel. Because of our experience and understanding of the technology, we can clearly see the plan will fail.  Heedlessly, despite our loud protests, the project plods onward toward oblivion, consuming money, time and our human spirit along the way. Read the full article…

I am scheduled to present “E-Business Suite in the Amazon Cloud” on Monday, April 19 at Collaborate 2010.  I’ll provide an overview of Amazon Web Services and present a few common use cases that E-Business Suite DBAs in particular might find useful.  If you are an E-Business Suite customer and do NOT have a DR site or struggle with sharing test environments, this presentation is for you.  You can download the white paper from our community page; the abstract is as follows:

With Oracle’s announcement of support for Amazon Web Services (AWS), it is now possible to run Oracle databases and Oracle E-Business Suite in the AWS EC2 (Elastic Cloud Compute) cloud. In this session we will create a working release 12 Vision Demo environment on EC2, based entirely on audience specifications. Through the deployment process, we will explain the basics of EC2, and show how anyone can instantly deploy Oracle E-Business Suite for less than $20/day. Demonstrate the basics of working with Amazon EC2 Demonstrate the advantages to running Oracle E-Business Suite on EC2 Explore Oracle/EC2 best practices

Jeremiah Wilton will be presenting High Performance Oracle 11g in the Amazon Cloud at Collaborate 2010 – an updated version of his February RMOUG presentation.  For a preview, you can find both the white paper and presentation slides from RMOUG on our white paper page.  Currently scheduled for Monday, April 19, the session abstract reads: Read the full article…