After raining non-stop for a whole week, on Saturday, 07/17/04, it finally lightened up with blue sky and white clouds. It was a perfect day. American DBAOnline successfully held its second general meeting in the year 2004 at the Clarion Hotel & Towers in Edison, New Jersey . Over one hundred Oracle professionals from the tri-state area attended the seminar, which was proudly sponsored by VERITAS and Embarcadero.

The seminar was hosted by Mr. John Zhong, who serves on the American DBAOnline committee. The president of American DBAOnline - Mr. David Wang gave the opening remarks. He also briefly introduced the new features of Oracle 10g.

Mr. Qi Wang, who’s a senior principal consultant at Oracle corporation, gave an in-depth presentation on how to build a data warehouse using the tool Oracle Warehouse Builder, which is a separately purchasable component of the Oracle software. Mr. Qi Wang has worked in the IT industry for over 20 years. He is a very experienced, seasoned Oracle DBA and architect. As we all probably know, building and managing a data warehouse is different from and pose more challenges than building and managing a regular OLTP database, simply given the volume of data involved with a data warehouse. For example, it might be a piece of cake to create an index on a table in an OLTP environment, but in a warehouse situation, it may not be as easy as it might seem. Sometimes for a humongous table, it may take hours or even days to finish the task, if you’re lucky not running out of temporary tablespace or encounter some other issues. Today’s market trend seems to be more data volume. From a job security point of view, a vanilla DBA doesn’t seem to well prepare you for a great future. Putting data warehousing skills under your belt will definitely help make you more marketable and hotly sought after. Combined his knowledge accumulated over the years and personal experiences with his projects on hand, Mr. Qi Wang stepped the audience through Oracle Warehouse Builder to build a data warehouse in a short time.

VERITAS is a dominant market player in the O/S management and high availability arena. As a DBA, we know how important it is to have the O/S knowledge in order to achieve the optimal performance for our databases or simply troubleshoot and fix a seemingly database problem stemmed from the O/S level. Mr. Stephan Kwiatkowski is a senior system engineer at VERITAS. He gave a presentation titled Practical Foundation Performance for Oracle, and covered topics of optimal disk layout considerations, file system tunings, direct I/O vs. Async I/O vs. Sync I/O, volume manager tuning and diska array considerations. He also briefly presented on another VERITAS product – Precise. Precise is a non-intrusive performance monitoring & analyzing tool. It has a quite graphical user interface. Basically, it takes snapshots of SGA at a frequent interval instead of logging into a database and then analyzes what’s going on within the database. Mr. Stephan Kwiatkowski is a second-time presenter and sponsor on behalf of VERITAS to American DBAOnline seminars. Coming along with Stephan to show their generous support to DBAOnline is their account executive Mr. Tom McNallen from Philadelphia, PA.

As we know, there’re many Oracle-related third-party tools out there on the market. Which ones are good and more appropriate to your environment? You may want to hear some peer experiences and feedback. American DBAOnline seminars may serve as a third-party tool peer-to-peer evaluation forum. What made this time different is that our member gave the demo on behalf of the vendor based upon personal experiences. Ms. Yan Zhang, who’s a senior Oracle DBA at Brown Borthers, demo’ed DBArtisan on behalf of Embarcadero engineers. Ms. Zhang’s company purchased this product. She uses this tool on a daily basis. Its ease of use and wide spectrum of functionality have made her daily life as an Oracle DBA easier and more productive. She personally likes the tool and volunteered to give a demo on the product. By the way, Embarcadero was a sponsor of this great event. Ms. Zhang’s presentation was a successful story and initiative. American DBAOnline committee would like to encourage our members to follow suit with permission from the vendor if you find a product that you use worthwhile to be introduced to our audiences.

We were also glad to have a renowned speaker – Mr. Indy Johal who gave a presentation on Oracle 9i/10g DataGuard – Implementing Logical Standby Database. Mr. Johal is the Oracle DBA manager at PR Newswire. He has published numerous articles on various magazines including the famous Oracle Magazine. He is also an active speaker at various large-scale technical seminars nationwide. Standby database has been improved and renamed to Data Guard since Oracle 9i. Besides physical standby databases, Oracle can also have logical databases which are open for reading and writing. Mr. Johal differentiated the physical and logical standby databases in depth, and went through the configuration and setup for both types of standby database in detail. His presentation is not only theoretical, but also practical.

The 5-hour seminar was mid-pointed with a technical quiz hosted by the committee member Ms. Carol Sheng. The audience showed an outburst of enthusiasm. Both sponsors – VERITAS and Embarcadero held raffles. Besides T-shirts, one lucky winner took home a Porsche from Embarcadero, a remote controllable toy car this time; four lucky winners took home a sleek portable memory card from VERITAS. And, the rest of us took home some knowledge in our heads and some fun in our memory piggy bank …

The seminar is free to the public with limited seating. Registration required

Direction

2055 Lincoln Highway (Route 27),   Edison, NJ 08817
Phone: 732-287-3500
Click here to see direction

Practical Foundation Performance for Oracle

-Optimal disk layout considerations
-File System tunings
-Direct I/O vs, Async I/O, vs SYNC I/O
-Volume Manager tuning
-Disk Array considerations

By Stefan Kwiatkowski, and Tom McNally, Senior Architect, VERITAS