A Fun Look at the DBA

A bunch of us got together and put our heads together for what DBA really stand for. Regardless of if its, an Oracle DBA, SQL Server DBA, DB2 DBA, MySQL DBA. If you have one that is not on the list please share with us.

• DBA Stands For......
• Data Base Administrator
• Don't be assertive
• Doing business after-hours
• Don't bother asking
• Don't be afraid
• Don't beg anymore
• Dumb But Adorable
• Driven By Aggression
• Deaf But Astute
• Drinking Beer Allday
• Drugs Beer and Alcohol
• Deep Brain Activity
• Deaf But Astute
• Dubious Business Acronyms
• Default Blame Acceptor
• Does Bugger All
• Do Be Accurate
• Determined Best Always

If you have one that you feel should be added please let me know.

Michael Corey

Founder & CEO, Ntirety

www.ntirety.com 

My Personal Twitter Account: Michael_Corey

Ntirety Corporate Twitter Account: Ntirety

Database Administration As A Service® is a registered trademark of Ntirety, Inc

VMWORLD or Bust

My excitement is building, in just 12 days I will be at VMworld in Las Vegas. As I tell the many DBA's at Ntirety, it does not matter if you work with Oracle, MySQL or SQL Server virtualization is a DBA game changer. Its wide adoption already should make that obvious to the world. The many advantages from improved business continuity to plain saving a lot of money make it a no brainer. There are so many advantages to placing your mission critical applications and databases in a Virtualized infrastructure. So my excitement build, Lost Vegas or Bust.

As I look at the conference, there is just so much happening. So many things to choose from. Its why we are sending quite a few people to the conference. 

Here is a copy of the VMworld tracks at the writing of this blog...

VMWORLD 2011 Tracks

Cloud Application Platform

This track focuses on the VMware vFabric cloud application platform, an integrated platform to build, run and scale modern applications for organizations looking for a platform that enables rapid delivery of modern, data-intensive applications both on-premise or in the public cloud, and provides unparalled efficiencies across the application lifecycle. This track covers solutions for Cloud Foundry, vFabric, GemFire, SQLFire, tc Server, RabbitMQ, Hyperic; Spring Insight, and Elastic Memory for Java (EM4J). (Sessions in the Cloud Application Platform Track will be held at The Venetian)

Cloud Infrastructure: Business Continuity

This track focuses on virtualization products and solutions for improving application service levels and overall availability of virtual infrastructure. Topics in this track include: Local Availability Solutions such as Fault Tolerance and High Availability, Disaster Recovery Solutions including Replication, Site Recovery
Manager, Metro Clustering and DR to the Cloud, as well as Data Protection Solutions. (Sessions in the Cloud Infrastructure: Business Continuity Track will be held at The Venetian)

Cloud Infrastructure: Management and Operation

This track focuses on infrastructure and operations of highly virtualized and enterprise cloud
environments for private, public and hybrid scenarios. Attendees will learn about building infrastructure as a service (IAAS) architectures, service catalog design considerations, metering and billing for IT services, ensuring performance SLAs, optimizing capacity, and automated workload management. Topics include best practices, technology deep-dives and customer success stories, spanning from hitech, healthcare and financial services to education and government entities around vCloud Director, vCenter Operations, and IT service management solutions. (Sessions in the Cloud Infrastructure: Management and Operations Track will be held at The Venetian)

Cloud Infrastructure: Security and Compliance

This track focuses on all things related to Virtualization and Security in the datacenter. Topics include hardening and protecting your virtual infrastructure, application and endpoint protection,
perimeter/edge protection & services, how to achieve compliance with virtualized deployments, and why virtualized datacenters can be seen as having ‘better than physical’ security. (Sessions in the Cloud Infrastructure: Security and Compliance Track will be held at The Venetian)

Cloud Infrastructure: Virtualizing Business Critical Application

This track focuses on performance and best practices for virtualizing Business Critical or Tier1
Applications. Topics include virtualizing Databases such as SQL and Oracle, Email & Collaboration suites such as Exchange and SharePoint, Java Middleware and Enterprise Applications such as SAP. (Sessions in the Cloud Infrastructure: Virtualizing Business Critical Applications Track will be held at The Venetian)

Cloud Infrastructure: vSphere

This track focuses on core components of the vSphere platform, such as networking, storage,
availability, etc. These sessions will typically focus on a single feature/technology/component and are not directly related to any of the broader solutions discussed in any of the other tracks. (Sessions in the Cloud Infrastructure: vSphere Track will be held at The Venetian)

End-User Computing

This track is designed to focus on solutions to go from PC centric to user centric computing. These sessions focus on business cases, technology deep dives, real world examples and best practices for both IT and business. Products covered in these sessions include View, ThinApp, Zimbra, Horizon, Fusion, Workstation and many others. (Sessions in the End-User Computing Track will be held at The Venetian)

Partner Track

This track, designed especially for VMware Partners with customized content is tailored to help partners grow their business, build expertise, and accelerate sales of VMware solutions. Sessions will focus on enabling partners to effectively identify requirements across their customer’s journey to IT-as-a-Service (ITaaS), and to successfully sell and deploy VMware solutions. VMware experts will deliver best practices to help partners acquire new customers, expand business by cross-selling VMware solutions and services, and walk-away with proven go-to-market selling strategies. (Sessions in the Partner Track will be held at The Wynn)

Technology Exchange for Alliance Partner

Technology Exchange for Alliance Partners track focuses on the needs of ALL developers building and delivering solutions on VMware platforms. This track will provide valuable information on the APIs, tools and resources available to develop and delivery on VMware platforms in public or private clouds; cloud or hybrid environment; best practices for application development and delivery on VMware products delivered in the enterprise; VMware updated APIs and tools to build and integrate with VMware products; VMware product roadmaps for vSphere, vFabric, vCloud, End User Computing products and solutions; and new program benefits for Technology Alliance Partners. (Sessions in the Technology Exchange for Alliance Partners will be held at The Wynn)

Technology Partner/Sponsor

This track will showcase the latest technology and solutions from VMware’s technology partners. (Sessions in the Technology Partner/Sponsor Track will be held at The Venetian)

With so much happening, I feel like a kid in the candy store.

 The more I look at what is here, the better it keeps getting. Did I mention the hand-on-labs. 

Well 12 days, I plan to be there. 

 Vegas or BUST

Michael Corey

Founder & CEO, Ntirety

www.ntirety.com 

My Personal Twitter Account: Michael_Corey

Ntirety Corporate Twitter Account: Ntirety

Database Administration As A Service@ is a registered trademark of Ntirety, Inc.

The IOUG is gettng real on Virtualization. They are running a series of online Educattional events. Get Real with MySQL, Database, Virtualization, Security, and BI IOUG 2011 Online Education Series

Get Real with MySQL, Database, Virtualization, Security, and BI IOUG 2011 Online Education Series

IOUG's inaugral Online Education Series was such a success in 2010 that we're bringing it back in 2011!

Since we're committed to equipping community users with the tools and mindshare to increase proficiencies in their everyday job roles, we're presenting a year-round Online Education Series to provide members remote access to 'unfiltered' education from real customers.
 
The best part? All of this training comes straight to you. No travel. No time out of the office. Minimal conflicts with your schedule.

Save the date for the 2011 Webinars, each quarter being focused on a different topic:

 

July 27: 360 Degrees: Everything to know about Virtualization for Oracle DBAs
12:00 p.m. - 1:00 p.m. CT
Mike Ault
Tariq Farooq, BrainSurface

Register here!

The speakers will present, detail and elaborate Comprehensive Concepts Overview, Insight, Recommendations, Best Practices, Current Strategies, Pros & Cons, Relevance/Role in Cloud Computing, Prevalent/Dominant Paradigms & Technologies and, a whole lot more about Virtualization as, it relates to Oracle DBAs.

August 24: Virtualizing Oracle Database Servers on VMware
12:00 p.m. - 1:00 p.m. CT
Bert Scalzo, PhD
George Trujillo, VMware

Register here!

The default platform for Oracle database servers is rapidly moving towards virtual machines. This is why virtualizing Oracle Databases on VMware is one of the largest growth areas in the IT industry. This presentation will show attendees the various virtualization alternative technologies and how virtualization works under the covers. The quality of service of database management improves significantly by running Database Servers in a VM.  Features such as vMotion, Storage vMotion, DRS /HA clusters and SRM  will completely change how DBAs manage their database environments.  Best practices of virtualizing single instance and RAC instances will be covered.

September 21: Virtualized Oracle 11g/R2 RAC Database on Oracle VM: Methods/Tips
12:00 p.m. - 1:00 p.m. CT
Kai Yu, Oracle Solutions Engineering Lab, Dell Inc.

Register here!

Virtualization technology provides the solution to enable the server partition and consolidation for improving the resource utilization and archiving the great flexibility and high availability. By combining with RAC technology, it provides the grid ready architecture to consolidate the data center infrastructure. This presenter covers the configuration of such an infrastructure based on Oracle VM and Oracle 11g R2 RAC. You will learn the  basic Oracle VM architecture and the tips and tricks of network and shared storage configuration on the multiple layers of virtual infrastructure to support 11g R2 RAC database deployment. The presentation will also discuss the various methods to provision 11g R2 RAC database on Oracle VM.

Get Real with MySQL, Database, Virtualization, Security, and BI IOUG 2011 Online Education Series

Michael Corey

Founder & CEO, Ntirety

www.ntirety.com

My Personal Twitter Account: Michael_Corey

Ntirety Corporate Twitter Account: Ntirety

Best Kept Secret At VMware -- N.E. VMWare Users Group Summer SLAM

It was a very hot July New England Day in Maine. In fact it was the second Hottest July 21st on record. Yet I was on a Mission to find Brunswick Maine and attend the event. All my friends in the know told me this was the greatest secret in VMware there is.

This event is very well attended, and anyone who is anyone at VMware tries to attend. I can tell you first hand I was not disappointed.

To learn more about the New England VMware Users Group click on the link.

Technical Sessions At New England VMware Users Group

The Technical sessions were awesome. My favorite was "What DBAs need to know about Virtualization" by George Trujillo, Jr., Senior Systems Engineer - Tier 1 DB Specialist, VMware. It was standing room only. At Ntirety 6 of our DBAs attended this presentation and everyone walked away learning something. When the session was over, you could tell no one was ready to leave.

George brought real world experience to his presentation. If you ever have a chance to see George present, I would highly recommend it. Other Sessions included..

• VMware Fundamentals; Back to the Basics
• Find, fix and prevent application performance problems with VFabric Hyperic
• Create your cloud
• vStorage: Best Practices
• Increasing Performance, Capacity, Reliability and Automation - An in-depth look at VMware's System Management Tools

This sample of presentations is just the tip of the iceberg. You were even able to use Dell computers on site to build your own VMware environment.

Vendors/Sponsors

There was an excellent Vendor Floor. A Sample of the Sponsors included....

Focus Technology Solutions, Actitio, Brocade, Trend Micro, CBE Technologies, Falconstor, Morse Technologies, AVERE, 10ZIG technology, CORAID, DELL, Echo Star, RSA, Nimblestorage, commvault, GreenPages Technology Solutions, MITEL, Pano logic, VKERNEL, Whip Tail Tech, Blue Socket, PRESIDO, VEEAM, NASUNI, Nexenta, TwinStratta, Stratus Technologies.

That is not a complete list. It does give youy a sense of just how many vendors were there.

 I have no idea what the official count of the event was. There had to be over a 1000 attendees.

Gritty's McDuff's - Old Fashion Lobster Bake

Just when I thought the event could get no better. There was an old fashion Lobster Bake held at Gritty McDuff's Brewpub of Freeport, Maine. Grittys is a favorite spot of mine to have lunch when I visit my daughter who goes to school at the University of Souther Maine. Little known trivia about Gritty McDuff's. Its holds the unusual distinction of being the first brewpub to open in the state of Maine since prohibition ended.

This was an awesome event. Not only did we work hard, but we played hard at the end.

Michael Corey

Founder & CEO, Ntirety

www.ntirety.com

My Personal Twitter Account: Michael_Corey

Ntirety Corporate Twitter Account: Ntirety

This is a great article on Oracle purchase of Sun. Its come all the way from Express Computer. A weekly publication in India. it was written by Akhtar Pasha.

Here is the opening  of the Article. With a link back to the entire article at the end. 

Can Oracle successfully assimilate Sun?

Oracle finds itself on a sticky wicket after gobbling up Sun Microsystems. While the rationale of the deal is quite clear, Oracle bought Sun for Java and Solaris, questions remain vis-à-vis MySQL and Sun’s hardware business. Akhtar Pasha writes that this mammoth acquisition could prove to be Oracle’s toughest deal yet

Oracle’s announcement that it would acquire Sun took many industry observers by surprise. The database giant has offered little detail on how it intends to achieve the $1.5 billion in first-year operating profit that it has promised investors. While Oracle’s interest in Java and Solaris has been widely discussed and publicized, the company declined to participate in this story citing the fact that the deal is still pending approval. Even otherwise, Oracle has not been forthcoming on critical aspects of the deal, namely, the future of MySQL and what it intends to do about Sun’s hardware business. Customers, analysts and the financial community all have their own doubts at this point of time.

To Read the  entire article.....

Can Oracle successfully assimilate Sun?

Founder & CEO, Ntirety

www.ntirety.com

My Personal Twitter Account: Michael_Corey

Ntirety Corporate Twitter Account: Ntirety

I found a great article on The Register website from the UK. It had some great quotes from Steve Ballmer concerning the Oracle Sun deal.   Here is a small portion of the article.

Microsoft's DNA won't permit Oracle-Sun deal

Ballmer knows his knitting

By Gavin Clarke in San Francisco

Posted in Software, 22nd April 2009 21:53 GMT

Comment When Steve Ballmer tackled the inevitable question on a Microsoft hardware acquisition, in the wake or Oracle's planned purchase of Sun Microsystems, he was "sticking to the knitting."

"I have no idea why a software company would buy a hardware company," Microsoft's chief executive is reported to have said.

That's not to say Microsoft is impervious to one big trend working its way through the market for storing, serving, and understanding information that Oracle occupies: the trend for getting fast access to huge quantities of data on massive networks and making sense of it. Far from it.

Increasingly, a hardware and software stack tuned to the needs of a combined database, storage system, and processing unit - an appliance - is seen as the way to tackle this.

Oracle last year announced the HP Oracle Exadata Storage Server and HP Oracle Database Machine, a box from Hewlett-Packard featuring a stack of pre-configured Exadata Storage Servers all running Oracle's database and its Enterprise Linux.

It's possible that Oracle's purchase of Sun could help it turn out more such boxes. The only question is why Oracle would want to bother taking on the burden of running a global, hardware design and manufacturing operation when its core competence is software.

To read the entire article...

Microsoft's DNA won't permit Oracle-Sun deal 

I think this has a lot to do with Larry Ellison. He has tried on a number of occasions to get into the Hardware Business. I wonder what will happen with the HP relationship now that Oracle does not need them ?

I think Oracle getting access to MySql was a very smart move. They will very quicky develope a migration path from MySql to Oracle if they are smart. There is good reason Microsoft SQL Server is the fastest growing database in the Market. When you look at the total suite of develppment tools all built by one vendor, the Buisness Intelligence Capabilities, the tight integration, the price points. There is good reason people are choosing SQL Server now. 

Also getting there hands on JAVA was very good for Oracle. I think Microsoft is smart to stick to there knitting. 

Founder & CEO, Ntirety

www.ntirety.com

My Personal Twitter Account: Michael_Corey

Ntirety Corporate Twitter Account: Ntirety

I just saw this on Computerworld....

Oracle buying Sun in $7.4B deal

The move follows efforts by IBM to buy the company last month

 The June meeting of the Boston MySQL User group featured Keith Murphy, Editor of the MySQL Magazine (www.mysqlzine.net). Talking about Mysql backups.

Here are some of the links mentioned in the Video

To play the Keith Murphy Video on MySQL backups click here

Click here to download the Keith Murphy Backup Video located at http://technocation.org (351 MB)

Mylvmbackup by Lenz Grimmer

http://lenz.homelinux.org/mylvmbackup/ http://lenz.homelinux.org/mylvmbackup/.


mylvmbackup is a tool for quickly creating backups of a MySQL server's data files. To perform a backup, mylvmbackup obtains a read lock on all tables and flushes all server caches to disk, creates a snapshot of the volume containing the MySQL data directory, and unlocks the tables again. The snapshot process takes only a small amount of time. When it is done, the server can continue normal operations, while the actual file backup proceeds.

The LVM snapshot is mounted to a temporary directory and all data is backed up using the tar program. By default, the archive file is created using a name of the form backup-YYYYMMDD_hhmmss_mysql.tar.gz, where YYYY, MM, DD, hh, mm, and ss represent the year, month, day, hour, minute, and second of the time at which the backup occurred. The prefix backup and the date format can be modified. The use of timestamped archive names allows you to run mylvmbackup many times without danger of overwriting old archives.

Alternatively, instead of tar, you may use rsync. This process is nearly identical, with the exception that the file suffix is not used.

INNOBASE – INNODB Hot Backup
 http://www.innodb.com/hot-backup/order/


InnoDB Hot Backup is the ideal solution for online backups of InnoDB tables in MySQL—and for setting up replication. It allows you to back up a running InnoDB database under MySQL without setting any locks or disturbing normal database processing. You get a consistent copy of your database, as if the copy were taken at a precise point in time. InnoDB Hot Backup is also the ideal method of setting up new slaves if you use the MySQL replication on InnoDB tables.

Prices are at:

Pricing
Price (excluding VAT)
EUR         USD
1-Year License         € 390     $ 605
Perpetual License     € 990     $ 1540
1-Year Email Support     € 590     $ 915

Zmanda Open Source Backup
 http://network.zmanda.com/shop/home.php?cat=1,3

Zmanda Recovery Manager (ZRM) for MySQL simplifies the life of a Database Administrator who needs an easy-to-use yet flexible and robust backup and recovery solution for MySQL server. With ZRM for MySQL you can:

    * Schedule full and incremental backups of your MySQL database.
    * Start immediate backup or postpone scheduled backups based on thresholds defined by you.
    * Choose to do more flexible logical or faster raw backups of your database.
    * Perform backup that is the best match for your storage engine and your MySQL configuration.
    * Backup your remote MySQL database through a firewall.
    * Configure on-the-fly compression and/or encryption of your MySQL backups to meet your storage and security needs.
    * Get e-mail notification about the status of your backups and receive MySQL backup reports via RSS feed.
    * Monitor and browse your backups.
    * Define retention policies and delete backups that have expired.
    * Recover a database easily to any point in time or to any particular transaction, e.g. just before a user made an error.
    * Parse binary logs to search and filter MySQL logs for operational and security reasons.

Posted by Michael Corey

www.ntirety.com

I have meant for a while to comment on Sun Microsystems buying MYSQL. People can't believe Sun Actually spent a billion dollars for MySQL.

When I talk to a lot of people they just don’t get it. I think its brilliant. Let me say it again, Great move Sun. If anything can save Sun and put them back into a strong market position this can.

I have always liked Sun’s computer equipment. Early in my career I worked for a major New England bank who shall remain nameless. They were big blue from head to toe. I was able to bring Sun Microsystems into the Bank. It was the first time in this bank they had anything but Big Blue running a mission critical database. I was able to use the database and application I was running as justification for bringing in a SUN box in a shop that was big blue head to toe

It was this banks first exposure to Unix operating system. I even had to build my own data center to put it into. I think they were afraid of the Big Blue boxes catching a bad Virus from the Sun Box. In this case I used it to run a Sybase database on. A Sun Box that is fine tuned to running MYSQL is a great reason to buy the Sun box.

Sun in my opinion has all the right pieces and now they have to execute well. I wish them a lot of luck. For those nay sayers. MySQL is here to stay, get use to it!

There was great article that I think did a great job of explaining why this makes a lot of sense. It was titled “Sun’s Best Buy Ever: MySQL” by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols. I found it in EWEEK.com. Here is a link if your interest learning more….

Sun's Best Buy Ever: MySQL

Posted Michael Corey, Ntirety

www.ntirety.com

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