A DBA's Journey in the Sun: George Trujillo Blog

Virtualization Bootcamp for Oracle Technology Professionals

Collaborate 10 - Oracle User Conference  April 18, 2010

Mandalay Bay Convention Center, Las Vegas, NV

Presenters: George Trujillo (Sun Microsystems) and Steve Lemme (Computer Associates)

Environment

Attendees can bring their own laptop and use a Sun Virtual Box solution on their own machine to configure and manage a Solaris virtualized environment.  A laptop is not required if an attendee would like to watch the workshop demonstrations instead of doing the hands on labs.

Presentation Abstract

In supporting and managing new technology,  administrators and DBAs are increasing virtualized environment deployments with production applications, web servers and databases being moved into them.  Virtualization is one of the  hottest areas in database environments for reducing the total cost of ownership and optimizing operations.   Virtualization offers, speed, flexibility and agility in managing systems, databases, application servers. and applications.  Beyond the driving factors, what do you need to know to be successful in supporting and managing virtualized environments?   Join your peers in this bootcamp designed to help you increase your skills,  learn virtualization fundamentals as well as management essentials.  Virtualization is increasing its role  and is a stepping stone for cloud computing and automation in the data center.

Outline

• Virtualization opportunities and challenges
• Benefits of virtualization
• Industry terminology
• Virtualization role in Cloud Computing
• Types of virtualization technology available
• Server consolidation
• Working with virtualization technology such as Sun Solaris Containers, Logical Domains,  Zones, VMware and Oracle VM
• Virtualization architectures
• Set up and migration to a VM
• Configuring a Solaris Zone
• Zone administration and management
• Creating backups in zone environments
• Migrating a zone
• Installing packages in zones
  
• Configuring zone resources
  
• Database considerations in a VM environment
• Database manaagement through virtualization
• Cloning databases
• Database backups in a VM
• High availability in a VM environment
  
• Testing and deployment
• Essential roles and skills for virtualized envionments
• Virtualization management
• Virtualization best practices

Learning Objective 1

Industry trends, terminology, features, challenges and benefits of virtualization

Learning Objective 2

Key fundamental skills in virtualization through Solaris containers and logical domains.

Learning Objective 3

The opportunity virtualization and cloud computing provides and how you can take advantage in your own project work

Prerequisites

A background in database and/or Unix operating systems.

Note

Some of the technical topics may be modified as we get closer to the bootcamp start date to make sure the latest information is covered.

I recently received the Socrates award from the MySQL education team.   As a "maven"  I took special pride in the award.

• Solaris administration.
• ZFS.
• Containers and Zones.
  
• Dtrace.
  
• Application Servers - knowledge of Oracle, Apache, JBoss, LightHTTP, connection pooling, etc.
• Monitoring skills - OEM, Enterprise Monitor, Nagios, Cacti, etc.
• Ability to support developers - PHP, Java, .NET.
• Networking skills.
• Storage.

Here are some outstanding blog sites that I would highly recommend for DBAs to visit.  Thanks Rick, Yousuf, Satyajit and everybody for sharing.

• http://blogs.sun.com/isve/
• http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/collections/database.jsp
• http://planets.sun.com/ISVe/
  

Most of my blog entries this week are going to be at http://web.mac.com/george.trujillo  since I'm at the Collaborate 09 Users conference.

Second Life Presentation on Sun Solaris Campus 

This virtual world presentation will be delivered at the Sun Microsystems Islands on the Solaris Campus.  Here I'm chilling at the Solaris Campus on one of the Sun virtual islands.

Second Life Presentation on Sun Solaris Campus

George Trujillo at Collaborate 09 Week of May 3, 2009

Demystifying MySQL for Oracle DBAs and Developers Tues @ 9:45am - 10:45am, 224A

George Trujillo at Collaborate 09 Week of May 3, 2009

I will be presenting two presentations at the IOUG Collaborate 09 Conference in Orlando FL,  the week of May 3rd 2009.   Here is one I have been asked to present.   This presentation is a non-technical presentation talking about MySQL positioning, strengths and strategic directions.

What every Oracle Professional needs to know about MySQL Mon @ 3:45pm - 4:45pm, 240CD

The MySQL open source database continues to increase in popularity with usage estimated at 11 million database servers worldwide. This presentation will help Oracle professionals who are considering the addition of MySQL or just getting started with MySQL:  how the MySQL database can be utilized, MySQL strategy and architecture, and key functionalities.  Similarities and differences between database vendors and best practices will be included. The focus of this presentation is on  helping attendees understand the philosophy, features, benefits and popularity of MySQL.

The Continuing Disruption in the Database Industry:

Everyone recognizes the tremendous growth and adoption of the MySQL Database Server in the marketplace.   On the second day of the MySQL Users Conference 2009 in Santa Clara, CA , the power of combining Sun expertise with MySQL innovation has been shown to the IT industry.  Today Sun Microsystems introduces the MySQL 5.4 performance release.   Sun and MySQL teams have addressed all the doomsayers and analysts spreading FUD with an exciting new version of MySQL.  This release includes some excellent patches from the user community showing the continuing importance of the MySQL user community.

Key Features of the MySQL 5.4 Release 

Performance benchmarks have shown  MySQL 5.4 to run up to 60% faster than 5.1. Some of the key new features of this performance and scalability release include:

• Architecture enhancements to support significant increase in scalability supporting up to 16-way x86 servers and 64-way CMT servers.
• Improved default configuration out of the box.  Default parameters are much better initial values.
• Significantly improved locking concurrency capability with InnoDB.
• Improved metadata with enhancements to INFORMATION_SCHEMA.
• Key performance additions to subqueries and joins improving performance up to 90% for some queries.
• Enhanced diagnostics with Dtrace runtime monitoring.
• Expanded SHOW ENGINE INNODB STATUS output.
• Performance optimizations to leverage MySQL on Solaris.
  
• New performance status variables.
  
• Configurable read (INNODB_READ_IO_THREADS) and write threads (INNODB_WRITE_IO_THREADS) allow MySQL to leverage hardware capability.
• Significantly enhanced I/O with InnoDB.
  
• Improvement of stored procedures with SIGNAL and RESIGNAL additions.

The Oracle announcement to purchase Sun Microsystems makes the  IOUG Collaborate 09 Conference (May 3-7 2009, Orlando FL) a very hot ticket.    The IOUG conference will bring together the top Oracle technology leaders in the user community.    You can expect a lot of great discussions and interactions discussing the potential of the Oracle acquisition with Sun within the Oracle user community.

Oracle and Sun employees cannot discuss the potential of this acquisition, however the top industry leaders in the Oracle user community and Oracle 3rd party vendors and partners will definitely be discussing this interesting news.

The IOUG is the largest Oracle user technology user group in the world.  Whenever you bring the top Oracle technology leaders in the user community you can expect a lot of discussion and interaction between these leaders.   I don't think I've ever gotten more voice mails and emails in one day.   So the buzz is definitely at the highest level.

 This will definitely make the Collaborate 09 conference in Orlando a very dynamic week among the Oracle user community.  The Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG) can be a very strong  resource to the Sun Microsystems community.  The IOUG focuses on the technology side of Oracle. 

So when you look at some of these areas of the IOUG you can see why the IOUG Collaborate 09 conference just got a lot more exciting:

• Operating systems, security, storage and all technology components surrounding the Oracle Database Server
• Oracle Database Server - RAC, Data Guard, Streams, High Availability, Performance Tuning and Backup/Recovery
  
• Oracle Fusion Middleware - Java, BPEL, SOA, Web Services, XML, application servers.
• Identity Management

Oracle's announcement of its intention to purchase Sun Microsystetms definitely started the MySQL Users conference with a bang.    The MySQL conference is always one of the best conferences to attend for the year, so people attending will definitely be having a lot of discussions and interactions. 

It will make it very interesting to have a number of the open source leaders all together for the conference to exchange a lot of ideas.  Some of the most exciting conversations are definitely going to be occurring this week.

Today's announcement that Oracle has agreed to buy Sun does not come as a surprise to anyone. 

• Oracle announcement:  http://www.oracle.com/sun/index.html
• Sun announcement: http://www.sun.com/third-party/global/oracle/index.jsp
  

I really can't speculate or offer an opinion at this time.   However, there are a lot of insights offered by the industry analysts that are an interesting read.

For me personally this acquisition is great news if this moves forward.   It brings together the two company's technologies where I have spent most of my career working with.

My presentation on MySQL in Second Life went really well.  I presented in one of the Sun auditoriums that was really cool.  It was all glass, very futuristic look.  This presentation was really popular at the Sun CEC in Las Vegas, so I customized it for Second Life and got a lot of great feedback and emails.   I'm now going to be delivering some customized MySQL and Oracle presentations for Sun employees.

I've been getting a lot of emails of people volunteering to help with the MySQL second life project and also requests for different types of sessions.   I will keep people in the loop as new presentations get scheduled.

MySQL Sessions at Sun CEC 2008

I was asked to put together a MySQL training track at the Sun CEC 2008 conference in Las Vegas.  I've never had so much fun delivering at a conference.   During the Sun Customer Engineer Conference  we delivered 11 sessions preparing attendees for eventually the MySQL DBA certification. We started off with attendees from multiple tracks sitting in the first session which gave us a body count of 84.  Over the entire week, these sessions  regularly had 70+ plus seats filled.  Highlights of the sessions include:

• Marc Sodano - discussing strategic directions in MySQL education.
• George Trujillo - delivering 9 sessions on MySQL DBA topics.
• Martin Mickos - positioning MySQL and defining directions and strategies for MySQL.
• David Stokes - discussing MySQL certification and directions.
  
• Anders Karlsson - delivering real life stories of MySQL  being used at very large web companies.
• Domas Mituzas - discussing how MySQL is being used at Wikipedia one of largest web sites in the world.
  
• Cliff Conklin - delivering sessions on Storage Engines and Transactions.
  

Attendees took MySQL Associate Exam

David Stokes the MySQL Certification Manager was there to discuss certification, define directions in MySQL certification and show attendees the path to MySQL certifications.  David also provided a lot of the energy and ideas surrounding the conference.

On the last day we offered the Associate exam  with fifty people passing and two failing.

50 exams taken
48 CMA Certifications  (94 or 96% success rate)

Attendees will now be working towards MySQL DBA certifications.

Tons of success stories: Here are a few.

Attendee after attendee from other tracks after hearing about the awesome MySQL sessions came in trying to join.  "The MySQL sessions were fun, entertaining and I never learned so much in one week".  "Some of the best presenters I've ever heard at a conference."  "The week was excellent."   The best I ever had at a CEC".  "Best organized sessions of the conference."  "MySQL rocks!"

Guest speakers a big success!

• Marc Sodano
• David Stokes
• Anders Karlsson
• Domas Mituzas
• Cliff Conklin

Marten Mickos at Sun CEC