This year’s Oracle technology users groups COLLABORATE conference has been cancelled due to the evolving COVID-19 situation. As a result, the conference has been converted to multiple Digital Virtual Conferences.
- OATUG (Oracle Applications Technology Users Group) will hold OATUG Online Forum on April 20-May 1, 2020 with 200+ sessions online. Refer to OATUG Form Online page here . For this online forum, I will present my topic “Replicating Oracle EBS Database with Snapshot for DEV/Test,” on Tue, Apr 28, 2020 3:30 PM – 4:30 PM EDT.
- Quest Oracle Community will hold several Quest Forum Digital Events: Innovation Week on April 20-April 24, 2020 and Community Education Weeks on May 27-June 18. Check this link for details.
- The Innovation week will consists of keynote speakers, Oracle roadmap updates, strategic insights and customer case studies . This link has more details.
- Community Education Weeks continues a series of comprehensive virtual events for each Quest Community such as Database & Technology week on June 15-18, 2020. I will be giving three presentations on the Database & Technology Week:
- Leveraging Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse for Machine Learning, June 15, 2020, 11:am-12:00pm.
- Database Cloud: Architecture components, Deployment and Migration, June 15, 2020, 3:45:pm-4:45pm.
- Achieving Extreme Scalability & Total Fault Isolation with Oracle Sharding 19c/20c, June 16, 2020, 11:am-12:00pm.
Next week I will be presenting the two following topics at Germany Oracle User Group Conference (DOAG2019):
Cloning Oracle EBS Database With Snapshot for DEV/Test
Abstract: For many complex database applications such as Oracle E-Business suite, it is quite common that a production environment needs 10 or more copies of various development and test purposes. This database clone process to create these many copies of production database can be very challenging and costly especially when the database gets larger than multiple even over 10 terabytes (TBs). This session will discuss two snapshot based methods that can help IT simplify this database cloning process and reduce the time and resource cost: The method is called Oracle gDBClone which is based on Oracle ACFS snapshot. The second method is based on database storage volume snapshot provided by the storage array. With a real example in our IT department, we will discuss the implementation details of these two methods and discuss the pros and cons of these two methods.
Oracle ADW for Advanced Analytic and Machine Learning
Abstract: Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse (ADW) provides a fully automated data warehouse specific features to deliver outstanding query performance. As a fully managed cloud service running on high performance Oracle Infrastructure Cloud (OCI), ADW also comes with a new set of tools such as Zeppelin-based SQL notebooks for advanced analytics and Oracle machine learning. This session will examine the architecture of Oracle ADW and its collaborative environment. Then we will discuss how application developers and data scientists can leverage this environment: how import and export large set of data to/from ADW database instance, and how to build, evaluate, and apply machine learning models with SQL notebooks. With several examples, I will share some troubleshooting experiences and tips of building such advanced analytics and Oracle machine learning applications in Oracle ADW.
The presentation slide deck links have been listed on the presentations section of this blog.
I will be speaking at Oracle OpenWorld 2019. Here are information of my session. Look forward to seeing and discussing this interesting topic with friends and colleagues in Oracle community.
Title: Achieving Massive Scalability and Total Fault Isolation with Oracle Sharding 19c. Session Code: BUS1988
Session time and location: Tuesday, September 17, 04:15 PM – 05:00 PM | Moscone West – Room 3020A
Session abstract:
Oracle Sharding was introduced in Oracle Database 12cR2, and was further improved in Oracle database 18c and 19c for linear scalability and complete fault isolation for OLTP workloads. With Oracle Sharding, data is horizontally partitioned across discrete Oracle Databases (shards) that collectively form a single logical database. Come to this session to learn about the latest sharding improvements in Oracle Database 18c and 19c, sharding on Oracle Database Cloud, and leveraging sharding for your business. Hear about the experience of using Oracle Sharding in Dell IT’s global geo-distribution application, including what apps best fit to sharding, deployment of sharded databases with replication for massive scalability, and complete fault isolation. Lessons learned are also covered.
Session link at Oracle OpenWorld conference catalog: https://events.rainfocus.com/widget/oracle/oow19/catalogow19?search=BUS1988
I will be invited as a guest speaker to present at the upcoming Ohio Oracle Users Groups meeting on March 24, 2017.
At the meeting I will be speaking at the following presentation sessions
10:00 – 11:00 A.M: Oracle DBAs, let’s have a taste of Oracle Database Cloud Service
11:00 – 12:00 A.M: Leveraging Oracle Database In-Memory to accelerate Business Analytic Applications
01:00 – 02:00 P.M: Optimize Oracle Database Storage with Storage Tiering
02:00 – 03:00 P.M: Oracle ASM Cluster File System for Private Cloud storage
For the details about the meeting , please refer to the Ohio Oracle Users Group link: http://www.ooug.org/
I will join three other Oracle ACE/ACE Directors Jim Czuprynski, Anuj Mohan, and Rich Niemiec to present IOUG Oracle Database 12cR2 Expert Panel. We will share our experience of attending a week long Oracle 12cR2 beta program on behalf of IOUG in Oracle Lab at Oracle HQ. We will also discuss some of the major Oracle database features introduced in Oracle 12cR2 such as those in Multitenant database, Database In-Memory, Oracle Sharding and many more. To attend this IOUG webinar, please get the registration information from this link:
Just received a great news from IOUG that three of my presentations were accepted for Collaborate 17.
. Session #724: Oracle DBAs, It is time to have a first taste of Oracle Database Cloud Service
Abstract: As an important part of Oracle Cloud offering, Oracle Database Cloud service provides an easy of use enterprise-proven highly available and scalable database service. Oracle database cloud service can be the first “going to Cloud” that you, an Oracle DBA may experience. This session helps you get the first taste of Oracle Database Cloud service. It will examine choices of of database cloud services and help you to determine which one would fit in your business requirement. It will also discuss the technical expects of each of cloud services. Through a few examples, the session will discuss the DBA tasks and how you would perform in the new database environment ranging from creating database cloud service to managing the databases.
. Session #487, Leveraging Oracle Database In-Memory to accelerate Business Analytic Applications
Abstract :By introducing In-Memory column store, Oracle Database In-Memory (DBIM) significantly improves the performance for analytic queries as well as mixed workloads. Come to this session to learn Oracle Database In Memory under the hood: the dual format memory architecture and configuration, how the data is populated into In-Memory column store and it helps query performance. . This presentation also covers further enhancements of DBIM in Oracle Database 12cR2 : Join group, and In-memory expression, In Memory active Data Guard support etc. Through some case studies of business analytics projects, this presentation covers the practices of leveraging DBIM to improve the query performance of business analytic applications and how to use In Memory advisor to determine the objects that need to be loaded into In memory column storage . We also will present some analysis on the performance gains by using IM memory features and when and how these gains can be achieved.
. Session #437: Get ready to upgrade your Oracle databases to 12c: tools, methods and paths
Abstract: In this session we will share some of our experience on upgrading different versions of Oracle databases to the latest Oracle 12c. Attend this session you will learn the upgrade tools and various upgrade paths that help you plan your upcoming database upgrades. This will include upgrade methods for multitenant databases. Another focus area of this session is Oracle RAC database upgrade which includes Oracle Grid Infrastructure upgrade and Oracle RAC database upgrade. You will also learn how to use the rolling upgrade for Oracle Clusterware and ASM and Oracle RAC database to reduce the database downtime.
And it will be my great honor to join my fellow Oracle ACE Directors and Oracle ACEs as a co-speaker for their sessions:
. Session #779: Oracle VM, OEM13c and Cloud Computing – Expert Panel by Tariq Farooq and Charles Kim and Kai Yu
. Session #518: Oracle 12c R2 Expert Panel by Anuj Mohan, Jim Czuprynski, Kai Yu, Seth Miller
And at last , but certainly not least, I am waiting for IOUG Collaborate 17 conference committee to accept one of important sessions in Cloud area: the IOUG Cloud SIG session: Session #711 Cloud Experience-To the Cloud and Back -Hands on Workshop by Steve Lemme, Charles Kim, Try Logon, Erik Benner, Kai Yu, Seth Miller.
See you at Collaborate 17@Vegas , next April!
If you are thinking about building Oracle Linux or Oracle VM based systems for your Oracle databases, for example building a private cloud type of system to consolidate your databases,. have you thought about the hardware infrastructure that your rest of platform will be built upon. One thing that you need to make sure is that the infrastructure stack is certified and validated for the software platform stack such as Oracle Linux/Oracle VM and the Oracle database.
The nice thing about this is that as a customer, you should not spend your resources for this complex and time consuming certification and validation process as various hardware vendors will partner with Oracle to establish the validated configurations. But you need to make sure that you select the proper infrastructure and OS based on the validated configurations. Since starting working on Oracle Linux and Oracle VM in 2009 , it has been my team’s responsibility to work with Oracle Linux and Oracle VM team to certify and validate Infrastructure such as Dell servers, storage and networking components with Oracle VM and Oracle Linux Unbreakable Kernel (UEK). And we posted the validated configurations on Oracle Linux and Oracle VM Validated Configuration (OVC) website : http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/linux/validated-configurations-085828.html .
This website documented pre-tested , validated configurations and best practices of running Oracle Linux and Oracle VM on various infrastructure such as Dell PowerEdge servers, Dell Storage and Network. With each of the validated configuration, customers can run their production Oracle database either with Oracle Linux or Oracle VM as a database platform.
You can get a completed list of the configurations with this link: http://linux.oracle.com/pls/apex/f?p=102:1. On this link, you can type a Hardware vendor name and you can get a list of the validated configuration with various hardware. For example,. if you type Dell to search, it will come back with 55 configurations as today (10/19/2016). The list consists of the latest servers such as Dell PowerEdge R930 and various Dell Storages.

This is what a specific configuration looks like:


Working in Progress, will come up in 2-3 days
The annual Oracle technology event Oracle OpenWorld (OOW) was held on Sept 18-22 in San Francisco. As usual my trip to this conference really consists of two parts: Preconference Oracle ACE Director product briefing (my 7th product briefing ) on Sept 15-16 and OOW conference (my 11th OOW) on Sept 18-22. I am writing these two blogs to share my experience of this 7 days conference.
The preconference Oracle ACE Director Product briefing was held at the Oracle Conference center of Oracle HQ at Redwood shores, California. The event agenda consisted of two full days of presentations by Oracle executives and product managers. The Product briefing started at 9:00am of Spet 18 with the executive presentation by Thomas Kurian , the president of Oracle product development. In his one hour presentation, Thomas Kurian gave a very broad summary of the Oracle’s IaaS/Cloud Vision, Strategy, Roadmap , which covered a good amount of new development that would be announced in the upcoming Oracle OpenWorld 2016 in a next few days. Thomas’ talk was followed by two IaaS presentations that covered Oracle latest IaaS Cloud service: 1) IaaS architecture by Mark Cavage , vice president of Engineering at Oracle ; 2) the engineering overview of IaaS implementation by Deepak Patil, Vice president, Development at Oracle. The new Oracle IaaS service has built in some high performance features such as high bandwidth (Tb/s) and low round-trip-time (< 1ms) between Oracle Cloud data centers . It uses Software Defined networks (SDN) technologies which provides the flexibility of network in the same way as Hypervisor provides flexibility of compute. In the compute cloud service, the IaaS offers the Bare metal based compute service, the Virtual machine based compute service as well as the Container based compute service.

(Oracle President for product development Thomas Kurian in Oracle ACED product briefing )
One of interesting presentations was given by Navin R. Thadani, Products at Ravello Systems at Oracle. Navin introduced one of new products recently acquired by Oracle: Ravello. This product helps customers by lifting the applications running on VMware from customer on-premise data center to Oracle public Cloud simply without any change. Another presentation was about Oracle Oracle Database 12c Release 2 Cloud First release, which was later officially announced by Larry at Oracle OpenWorld 16.
In the afternoon, I also attended a special session about Oracle Linux and virtualization update (my favor subject), presented by my good friend Honglin Su, Sr. Direct of Product Management for Oracle Linux and Virtualization. A lot of new features about Oracle UEK kernel, and Oracle VM were presented, such as support for Ksplice , OpenStack for Oracle Linux, Docker and Oracle Cloud container Registry, in UEK R4. QU2 . Here is the photo taken after the session:

(With Oracle Linux and Virtualization : Honglin Su (Right) and his colleague (Left) and myself (middle))
On the second day, there were more Oracle cloud related presentations which covered a variety of Oracle public cloud topics: DevOps at Oracle public cloud, Big data in Oracle cloud, Oracle Golden Gate in the cloud, Oracle PaaS cloud. Oracle Management cloud service. Etc.
In summary, from this Oracle product briefing, we can see that Oracle has put so much focus on Oracle Cloud in the past year. I was expecting to give more details about Oracle Cloud from the rest of Oracle OpenWorld conference.
Oracle ACE director product briefing not only provides us a chance to get the exposure on the Oracle latest technology development, it was also a great network opportunities for us. This is the annual event where more 70 Oracle ACE Directors got together to discuss many their favor technologies and establish the professional network and the friendship among us. The following photo is the picture of all Oracle ACED directors who attend this preconference product briefing event at Oracle Conference center before Oracle OpenWorld 2016.

(Oracle ACE directors at Oracle conference center)
The networking opportunity event extended to Oracle ACE and Oracle associate ACE (for more details about Oracle ACE directors, Oracle ACE and Oracle ACE associate , refer to Oracle ACE program link : http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/community/oracle-ace/index.html ).
The following is the photo of Oracle ACE directors, Oracle ACE and Oracle ACE associate taken at San Francisco Pier 39 where Oracle ACE program hosted the annual Oracle ACE dinner for all the Oracle ACED/ACE/ACE associates who attended Oracle OpenWorld 2016.


At the upcoming Oracle OpenWorld 2016, I will be co-presenting two sessions:
- Discovering Oracle Cloud [UGF5475], Tariq, Farooq, Kai Yu, Sunday, Sep 18, 3:30 p.m. – 4:15 p.m. | Moscone West – 2009
This vibrant session explores how your company could make the best use of all Oracle Cloud options available, including backup in the cloud, and what benefits it can bring to your organization. Discover how Oracle Cloud works, looks, and feels in only 45 minutes , the link to download the presentation of this session: https://static.rainfocus.com/oracle/oow16/sess/146284681395700181qM/ppt/DiscoveringTheOracleCloud_UGF5475.pdf2.
2. Leveraging Oracle Database 12c Release 2 Multitenant Features [CON3075], Thursday, Sep 22, 12:00 p.m. – 12:45 p.m. | Park Central – Metropolitan I
Oracle Database 12c Release 2 offers so many new multitenancy features that only a panel of Oracle ACEs can do them justice. In this session Oracle ACEs Jim Czuprynski, Andy Colvin, Kai Yu, Anuj Mohan, and Deiby Gomez provide their experiences with the latest multitenancy features in Oracle Database 12c Release 2. Hear about client implementations as well as extensive beta testing and see how any Oracle DBA can take immediate advantage of these new capabilities. All source code and practical examples will be available immediately after the presentation.
The link to download the presentation of this session: