Virtathon - A virtual conference for Oracle community

BrainSurface is organizing an online, virtual conference for the Oracle community called “VirtaThon” which includes Java and MySQL communities as well. I like the idea of online and virtual conference since personally I have not attended many conferences like Oracle Open World or IOUG etc. being in a part of the world where such conferences happen very less. I have always rued that I haven’t been able to attend such conferences organized for my community but now I’m very excited and looking forward to participate in VirtaThon.

I feel this is definitely a great way to learn about the latest and listen to experts in your domain. And the best part is that it’s FREE. So just go and register yourself for VirtaThon.

Dates – 16^th to 21^st July 

Venue – Online

Cost – Registration is Free

Where to Register – http://www.brainsurface.com/virtathon/sign-up

Speakers (names listed in alphabetical order) – Arup Nanda, Brian Huff, Colin Charles, Dan Hotka, Dario Laverde, David Koelle, Dr. Bert Scalzo, Guy Harrison, Lewis Cunningham, Matt Warman, Mike Ault, Riyaj Shamsudeen, Syed Jaffar Hussain, Tariq Farooq, Vinod Haval

Topics being covered – I’m listing only the topics that would be of interest for a DBA.

• Oracle (Database, Cloud Computing, Virtualization, Oracle Linux, Data Modeling and Exadata etc.)
• MySQL (Replication and Scale out, High availability and Clustering, Enterprise database administration and Security, Database Performance Tuning, Storage Engine Development and Optimization, Partition Strategies, Cloud computing etc.)
• Java (details can be found on the VirtaThon site)

Being a virtual conference, you don't have to travel anywhere to attend the sessions; you can simply attend from the comfort of your home or office. This is not a webcasts rather much like normal conferences you can participate by asking questions, interact via chat and have follow ups after talks. All you need is a computer with an internet connection.

Request all to participate, contribute and learn from this conference. As far as I know, this is one of the first Oracle-centric virtual conference. Look forward to more such online oriented conferences. Great effort and move by BrainSurface; Hats off to entire group and Tariq Farooq - the main man behind Brainsurface and this conference.

Pre-packaged Oracle VM Images for Oracle Database and RAC

Oracle has made available pre-configured virtual machines containing pre-installed Oracle enterprise software stacks. These Oracle VM templates can be downloaded from Oracle's E-Delivery site.

Pre-packaged VM’s would greatly useful if you need to quickly test out or do a POC etc. You would anyways download the software so why not download a pre-installed VM image and get started immediately as opposed to going through painstaking process of installing it unless your POC is about installation and configuration.

All you would need is Oracle VM already installed on your server/desktop. Then you can simply download the VM images, import and deploy the template VM’s. However you do need to provide some basic information such IP (DHCP or static), passwords etc. and you will have a fully installed / configured Oracle environment ready without having to install products from scratch.

Currently, I could find the following templates for Oracle Database and RAC on both 32-bit and 64-bit (x86 platforms). All of these are based on Oracle Enterprise Linux version 5.2 onward. No pre-packaged VM’s are available for Windows or other UNIX flavors.

Database VM Templates for x86 (32-bit)

URL - https://edelivery.oracle.com/EPD/Download/get_form?egroup_aru_number=10551276

 

RAC VM templates for x86 (32-bit)

 

URL - https://edelivery.oracle.com/EPD/Download/get_form?egroup_aru_number=12356456

 

RAC 11gR2 Templates for x86 (32 bit)

 

URL - https://edelivery.oracle.com/EPD/Download/get_form?egroup_aru_number=12918773

 

Database VM Templates for x86 (64-bit)

 

URL - https://edelivery.oracle.com/EPD/Download/get_form?egroup_aru_number=10551278

RAC VM templates for x86 (64-bit)

URL - https://edelivery.oracle.com/EPD/Download/get_form?egroup_aru_number=12356458

 

RAC 11gR2 Templates for x86 (64 bit)

 

URL - https://edelivery.oracle.com/EPD/Download/get_form?egroup_aru_number=12918775

There are pre-installed/configured VM’s for other products as well e.g. Grid control, Fusion middle-ware, E-business suite etc. Get them @ Oracle E Delivery - https://edelivery.oracle.com/EPD/GetUserInfo/get_form?caller=LinuxWelcome

RAC One Node changes in 11.2.0.2

I have covered Oracle RAC One Node in one of my previous post. RAC One Node is a single instance of an Oracle RAC database running on node in a cluster. There have been significant changes in the way a RAC One database is administered in version 11.2.0.2 compared to earlier versions. I have briefly summarized the changes herein –

• OUI has a new option to select RAC One Installation (look at the screenshot below)

• You can now create and configure RAC One database using DBCA
• Configure and administer RAC One database using SRVCTL instead of using  "Omotion", "raconestatus", "raconeinit", "racone2rac" etc.
• So move/relocate and convert your database using  SRVCTL
• Dataguard Broker is RAC One aware

I thought to quickly cover the changes since I had previously posted about RAC One. You can also refer to Metalink note 1232802.1 for details.