Summary of the DBA Online seminar on April 26, 2003

The dismal rainy weather and the fear of SARS didn’t seem to affect the DBAOnline gathering -- around 200 members and guests attended DBAOnline’s 2003 April technical seminar that was held in Clarion Hotel, Edison NJ.

The five-hour seminar started when our hostess Ms. Yan Zhang introduced the president of DBAOnline and Youngtech, Mr. David Wang, to the audience and welcomed him to give us opening remarks.

David briefly went over the history of DBAOnline and its current position. Then he introduced current IT industry trends and shared his vision on future development. He emphasized that Linux technology has become more and more popular due to various reasons. When he finished the speech referencing Larry Ellison’s statement: “We’ll be running our whole business on Linux”, everybody could feel that the Linux wave is looming.

Although configuring SQL*Net connection is DBA’s 101 task, few people had experience with LDAP technology. Mr. John Zhong, Senior Oracle DBA from Goldman Sachs, analyzed the pros and cons of different SQL*Net connection methodologies, including tnsnames and naming server. In detail he introduced LDAP, another way to set up sqlnet administrations. His presentation covered details on how to add TNS Service Names to an OID, how to configure and create an OracleContext. Although it is still a quite new technology to most of the audience, LDAP started to be widely used due to following reasons: easy administration and implementation, flexibility, scalability and cost savings to the companies.  It should be one of the skills that add value to our jobs.

Mr. Dave Anderson, founder and senior instructor of Skillbuilders, gave us a presentation on oracle 9I new features for DBA/developers. Even though many people were already quite familiar with the topic, Dave’s instruction was so thorough and organized that it certainly brought our 9i knowledge to a new height.  Plus, he provided many ready-to-use scripts to help us familiarize with the new features ourselves. Dave had over 20 years of database experience and is a nationally recognized oracle expert and speaker. We are very honored to have him as our speaker!  The great news is: he also liked our audience and agreed to present at our seminar again in the future.