Whitepapers

Recently I presented my new live demo pitting Oracle against SQL server under full load enduring a series of catastrophic ordeals. These are my slides. I will present it again at the Michigan Oak Table Symposium and Oracle Closed World in September. -Jeremiah

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.

The Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud is rapidly gaining acceptance as an enterprise-class Oracle platform. In this virgin territory, Oracle professionals need a complete understanding of cloud computing concepts and architectures. This session addresses the basics, and goes further, providing guidance on how best to optimize and configure Oracle for performance, stability and manageability in the cloud. Gain a complete understanding of Cloud Computing Learn the details of Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud Develop the knowledge needed to deploy and effectively manage high-performance Oracle services on Amazon EC2.

Blue Gecko designed and implemented a disaster recovery and test environment solution for Sage Manufacturing using Amazon Web Services' EC2 computing resources.

The consequence of large numbers of Oracle professionals taking advice without understanding it has been a great profusion of theories and ideas with no basis in either fact or experience. These theories have a way of spreading like wildfire, in the form of “common wisdom” and “best practices.” Unsound ideas abound only because not enough people challenge them. This document is a collection of short articles, come accompanied by proofs, that attempt to point out, then debunk, a number of common misconceptions and misunderstandings, as well as just plain bad advice, that few people have stepped forward to challenge.

In this entertaining presentation, Jeremiah Wilton demonstrates creative ways to induce Oracle failures with the objective of learning how to detect, assess and diagnose problems. Some of the self-induced failures are quite amusing, and will allow the reader to have some fun with their DBA friends.

Most organizations running Oracle today are thinking about availability to some degree. For many, it is to their great dismay that they find that average availability is no higher after implementing a high-availability architecture such as RAC or dataguard. Paradoxically, many organizations find that their availability numbers actually get worse. How can this be, and why did they spend all that money if the result is a negative impact on availability?

Mostly resulting from optimizer changes, version upgrade instability has resulted in widespread reluctance by Oracle customers to adopt new versions in a timely manner. Real Application Testing provides the greatest benefit to customers of all the new features in 11g. The importance of Real Application Testing to customers is so great primarily because it helps assure success through major changes, such as version and patchset upgrades.

Oracle’s RAC-centric marketing sells Oracle short by ignoring a broad spectrum of huge advances in 9i and 10g. These features, including logical standby (part of DataGuard), streams, improved multimaster replication, flashback query, Cross-platform transportable tablespaces, improved RMAN (including the pipe interface), constitute the great adaptability for any size organization that is Oracle’s greatest strength.

It’s inevitable that at some time failures will occur in a database, particularly when the database has issues with self-reporting of faults. DBAs often lack the necessary time, knowledge, and/or skills to resolve an outage. For this reason, Oracle has introduced the Automatic Diagnostic Repository (ADR) in Oracle Database 11g. Jeremiah Wilton provides an introduction to this exciting new feature.

This paper outlines a proactive strategy for maintaining Oracle E-Business Suite. By developing a core technology maintenance plan, future patching and upgrade efforts will be easier, and E-Business Suite will be more stable.

Jeremiah Wilton’s presentation shows how to use Oracle 11g Real Application Testing to quantify effect of system and database configuration changes. As an example, he uses Real Application Testing to validate the Automatic Advisor recommendations, and uncovers some interesting results.

The Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud is rapidly gaining acceptance as an enterprise-class Oracle platform. In this virgin territory, Oracle professionals need a complete understanding of cloud computing concepts and architectures. This session addresses the basics, and goes further, providing guidance on how best to optimize and configure Oracle for performance, stability and manageability in the cloud. Gain a complete understanding of Cloud Computing Learn the details of Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud Develop the knowledge needed to deploy and effectively manage high-performance Oracle services on Amazon EC2.

SELECT’s Executive Editor Paul Dorsey asked Amazon.com’s lead DBA, Jeremiah Wilton about helping administer one of the largest e-Commerce databases in the world.