I was tasked by IOUG to organize the IOUG High Availability Boot Camp at Collaborate 12 conference. Today (March 19, 2012), I had an interview with Andrew Younger in IOUG to talk about the contents/topics on the High Availability boot camp. Here are the QAs of the interview:
Andrew: For whom are your sessions designed? (Who will get the most value out of them?)
Kai: As one of the IOUG educational Boot Camps at Collaborate 12 conference, the High Availability or HA boot camp runs on Monday and Tuesday. Why do we need two days, because High Availability is very critical for today’s IT system, and it has been also very challenge to design a cost effective HA solution and implement it properly to meet the high availability requirement of SLA. When we prepare for this boot camp, we have this goal in mind that we want to provide a good coverage of related technology and tips and tricks for the DBAs and architects or DBA managers who are looking for the advices and best practices for the high availability solutions of their Oracle database environments.
Andrew: What is the main focus of your sessions – do they address a specific problem or introduce an innovation?
Kai : In this two day boot camp, we total have 11 sessions presented by Oracle ACE/ACE directors, as well as other industry well known speakers who are recognized for their expertise on their areas. Through their presentations, the speakers are going to share their tips and tricks and lessons learned on their chosen topics.
These 11 sessions including 9 one hour sessions and 2 x 30 minute sessions, cover several Oracle HA related topics such as Data Guard, backup and recovery, RAC, RAC one Node, Oracle VM and GoldenGate, as well as the case studies of how to use these technology to achieve high availability in real world. Each of session will be presented independently. Attendees can choose any of them based on their interest. They also can go the IOUG website’s collaborate 12 boot camps tab and click the High Availability tab to see the list of the sessions and the schedules, titles and speakers:http://events.ioug.org/p/cm/ld/fid=65#ha
Andrew: What are the main points of learning that attendees will take with them back to their own work?
Kai: As a reviewer, I had a privilege to preview all the presentations contents and found a lot contents were based on real world practical experiences. The attendees can really leverage these course contents for a comprehensive learning experience. Without going too detail of each session, I would like to highlight some of the topics from this Boot Camp.
Session #544 by Syamal Bandyopadhyay will explore an overview of the various High Availability solutions and the considerations to design a cost effect HA solution for business and how they are used in good size IT department.
We will have two Data guard centric sessions #334 and #649: Session #334 by Manoj Machiwal will focus on how to leverage the Active Data Guard feature to utilize the secondary site for reporting purposing. Session #649 by Bonnie Bizzaro will discuss the best practices of configuring data guard for a RAC database using data guard broker.
Session #184 by Dong Wang is about the features and best practices of the latest GoldenGate v11 and some of the common use cases.
We will have two sessions focusing on backup and recovery. Session #711 by Oracle ACE Yury Velikanov will Shared his experience and lessons learned from his RMAN backup scripts auditing and how to eliminate the errors in your the backup process so that you can ensure the recoverability under stress. Session #492 by Oracle ACE Nelson Ariel Calero will talk about the Important Hidden features in RMAN , tips and tricks and sample code in command line interface ,Troubleshooting, and debugging techniques, practical examples, optimization techniques.
We have allocated three sessions to explore the technology to achieve server high availability such as Oracle RAC, RAC one and Oracle VM. Session #548 by Tom Reddy will discuss a 16 node Oracle 11gR2 RAC configuration case study,; session #373 by Leighton Nelson will discuss some of the RAC diagnostic tool and how to use these utilities for RAC trouble shoot and diagnose problem in RAC system. Session #840 by Oracle ACE director Kai Yu will discuss other cost effective options to achieve server HA such as RAC One Node and Oracle VM
Finally we have two case studies sessions to discuss how to reduce the planned downtime due to system upgrade and migration. Session 371 will go through a case study of migrating a system from a single Instance to RAC and also to upgrade from 10.2.0.4 to 11.2.0.2 up with minimal downtime using Data Guard. Session #633 by Oracle ACE director Tariq Farooq will get a 360-degrees deep-dive along with tips & tricks, recommendations, best practices, gotchas & lessons learned, on how to do online migration of a Single-Server Single-Instance Oracle Database to Oracle Real Application Clusters (Oracle RAC) with Oracle Streams and Oracle Data Pump with almost zero downtime.
In summary, this two days high availability boot camp is designed to cover several major areas related to Oracle database high availability. This can be a great opportunity for speakers and colleagues to share their experience and learn each other. That also can be a great network opportunity and I would expect that more extensive knowledge sharing will also continue after the boot camp.
Oracle ACE Director Kai Yu's Oracle Blog 
A fascinating discussion is definitely worth comment.
I think that you need to write more on this subject matter,
it may not be a taboo subject but typically folks don’t talk about these subjects. To the next! Many thanks!!