Official Pythian Blog - three streams, three perspectives

Leading Through Crisis – What Ernest Shackleton Can Teach Us About the COVID Pandemic

In January 1915, polar explorer Ernest Shackleton’s ship became trapped in ice near Antarctica. For the next two years, he kept his crew of 27 men alive on a drifting ice cap, before leading them to safety. In this article…

Datascape Podcast Episode 44: Snowflake with Kent Graziano

Episode 44: Show Notes Snowflake is the only data platform built for the cloud for all your data and all your users. Today we have Kent Graziano, Chief Technology Evangelist at Snowflake, here on the show to discuss how this…

The Top 10 Reasons to Add Pythian to Your Team

Let’s start with the obvious: Technology has changed a lot in the past ten years. And as technology has changed, so too have the reasons for augmenting your IT department with the expertise of a managed services provider (MSP). Ten…

How QAD workers get access to Pixelbooks in minutes, using Grab and Go

This article was originally posted on Google Cloud Blog, click here to read the original. Author’s note: Today’s post is by Scott Lawson, Director of IT Architecture at QAD, provider of cloud-based software and services for global manufacturing companies. QAD…

8 Questions To Ask When Choosing A Database Managed Service Provider

If you’re searching for a database managed service provider, congratulations are in order. You’re one step closer to being able to focus more fully on the strategic priorities of your business. But bear in mind that choosing the wrong provider…

DBAs and the Cloud: Evolving Roles and New Challenges

Do businesses have the right skills and expertise internally to take full advantage of both the tactical and strategic benefits of the cloud? To help you determine what skills are needed on your team, we’ve developed a list of 5 key skills of modern DBAs in the era of cloud. And for a complete picture of what cloud means for your DBA team, Warner Chaves, one of Pythian’s principal consultants, has written a white paper outlining how database management is different in the cloud, and the key skills the modern DBA must have.

Keep Your Teams On-Track During COVID-19 and Beyond

It could be that your organization was working remotely long before the arrival of COVID-19. Even if that’s the case, you’re now dealing with challenges you couldn’t have imagined back in March. But here’s some good news: Agosto, a Pythian…

Hands On Transfer Learning with Keras

Transfer learning is an approach where the model pre-trained for one task is used as a starting point for another task. It’s extremely useful in scenarios where there are limited data available for model training, or when training a large…

OATUG Forum Online (or, the 2020 Version of Collaborate Las Vegas)

Hi everyone! It’s been a very busy year for me, so I haven’t had much time to blog. But, here we go! This isn’t a technical post, but more of an opinion piece. I’ve split this post into two parts….

How Pythian and Google helped reduce pesticide use in high-value crops

Semios is a Vancouver-based data analytics company for growers of high-value crops such as almonds and apples. It uses a combination of machine learning, in-crop wireless networks and half a million IoT sensors across 80,000 acres to offer real-time monitoring…

Datascape Podcast Episode 41 – Choosing a Public Cloud for Oracle Database

You can run Oracle anywhere. It’s very flexible, which means anywhere you can get a VM, you can run it, including a virtual box on your laptop. There’s even have a free edition (XE) if you don’t have large data…

Tips that Help Alleviate Pressures on DataOps

Data is hard. Its always been hard, and it’s not getting easier. We always have more of it, there are more sources to integrate, it changes all the time, the quality is questionable, and the business wants it all right…

How Pythian Is Flattening the IT Disruption Curve

COVID-19 is creating a perfect storm of disruption, chaos, and challenges for organizations in both the private and public sectors. The current pandemic is almost certainly adversely affecting every institution, while a few might be able to draw a few…

Infographic: What is Data Governance?

An explainer on achieving consistency, trustworthiness, and accessibility across your data estate. The Wild West might be entertaining in movies or TV, but it’s the equivalent of a horror show when it comes to your organization’s data. That’s why strong…

Our Commitment to You During COVID-19

In light of the continued spread of Coronavirus (COVID-19) globally, we want to let our clients know how Pythian is prepared to continue providing the high standard of service you’ve come to expect. Our leadership team has developed an action…

The top 5 reasons you need a data governance strategy

The concept of good governance is key to any high functioning society and economy. It helps establish and maintain trust between constituents and their representatives, along with setting the stage for people and organizations to operate within a well-defined framework…

Advice for Remote Work Planning

With many companies investigating or enacting remote work options in response to the COVID-19 outbreak, the Pythian team would like to share their best advice to those companies considering a move to remote work. Here are some of our remote…

Defining “real-time’ or ‘streaming’ analytics and its use cases

This is the first in a series on real-time or streaming data analytics best practices, including terminology, system design and examples of real-world success. In this initial post, we’ll focus on terminology and possible use cases. When launching a multi-part…

Datascape Podcast Episode 39 – February 2020 Cloud updates

In this episode, Warner Chaves, Stephane Frechette, Pierig LeSaux and I distill the most interesting, recent updates from Google, Amazon and Microsoft.

Cloud Maturity: How cricket, fashion and mining organizations adopted cloud for data success 

Lynda Partner, Pythian VP Marketing and Analytics, is presenting tales of cloud analytics success at the Big Data and Analytics Summit Canada in Toronto. It’s not often said that cricket batsmen, luxury fashion buyers, and mining engineers have much in…

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Overcoming ORA-01722 Error While Doing an Upgrade With Different DST Versions

This will be a short entry, but hopefully, it will help if you face the error “ORA-01722: invalid number” while doing an upgrade. Today I was doing an Oracle RDBMS upgrade from 12.2 with DST 34, to 19.7 with DST…

Setting up MySQL Monitoring With New Relic Infrastructure Pro

If you have a New Relic Infrastructure Pro license, and unmonitored MySQL servers, there’s now an easy solution at your fingertips. With the New Relic MySQL integration you can monitor and graph almost any detailed metric you could possibly want….

Dipping Your Toes Into Building an Analytics Platform on Google Cloud Platform

“We have many disparate data sources and we’re having a hard time getting a global view of all our data across our organization.” “Our data is currently all in <enter data warehouse name here> and we want to migrate it…

Leading Through Crisis – What Ernest Shackleton Can Teach Us About the COVID Pandemic

In January 1915, polar explorer Ernest Shackleton’s ship became trapped in ice near Antarctica. For the next two years, he kept his crew of 27 men alive on a drifting ice cap, before leading them to safety. In this article…

Benefits of Workshop Learning: a Cassandra Workshop Example

At Pythian, we pride ourselves in assisting and empowering our clients. We strive to understand the needs of each customer and to teach customers to make the most of their resources. Experience has shown that the best way to learn…

Exadata’s InfiniBand Switch: Incorrect NTP settings Leading to Evictions, and Patching Recommendations

Overview This post describes a recent outage during a routine Exadata (X7-2) patching to the 19.2.12.0.0.200317 release using “patchmgr.” An incorrect configuration of NTP (Network Time Protocol) on the InfiniBand (IB) switches placed all switches in the “discover” state after…

Using SQLCODE Function

The idea of this post is to show how to handle errors using SQLCODE function. That function shows the code error for the latest exception when running a PL/SQL code. Here is a small example of code that raises an…

ProxySQL Query Rules: Notes From Production

After spending four years working with ProxySQL in production, I’ve learned a few interesting lessons about interpreting and processing query rules. I hope to save you some time (and avoid wrong turns) with this summary of ProxySQL query rules. ProxySQL…

Cassandra Vulnerability – CVE-2020-13946 – Apache Cassandra RMI Rebind Vulnerability

On September 1, 2020, Apache disclosed a security vulnerability for Apache Cassandra. Summary: It’s possible for a local attacker without access to the Apache Cassandra process or configuration files, to manipulate the RMI registry to perform a man-in-the-middle attack and…

Top Five Recommendations to Accelerate Your Snowflake Adoption

After eight years in business, Snowflake filed its prospectus with the USA’s Securities and Exchange Commission to become a publicly traded company this week (August 24, 2020). Details are here. This is the next step in the history of the…

Adding Your RDS Fleet to PMM2 Using the API

PMM (Percona Monitoring and Management) is a great community tool for monitoring your OSDB (MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB) fleet. It’s feature rich, and it’s built and distributed as open-source based on several de-facto industry standard tools such as Grafana and Prometheus….

CreateGoldImage Followup – Is CreateGoldImage Required for Cloning Oracle Home?

On October 31, 2019, I blogged about How To Use CreateGoldImage For Cloning In 19c. CreateGoldImage seems like a nice new feature; however, it’s also very buggy. Here are a few bugs: 2641469.1 27432355.8 27432338.8 I received a suggestion to use tar…

Query Statspack’s “SQL ordered by” Sections Over a Time Period

In this post, I’ll present the statspack_top_sqls.sql script, which returns SQL performance statistics by mining the Statspack repository. In a previous blog post, I presented the statspack_load_trends.sql and the AWR_load_trends.sql scripts, which provide a high-level overview of workload dynamics on…

Postgres partial indexes on email address domains

When I first heard of Postgres partial indexes, I knew immediately that this would have solved a problem I had in MySQL about a decade ago. That problem didn’t go unsolved, but it certainly wasn’t as easy as I’ll demonstrate…

Postgres Security Patches Related to the Search Path

There were some security patches released this month for Postgres, to put further restrictions on pathways that malicious users could use to leverage the search_path to insert malicious code. What is the search path? What is search_path? Postgres has a…

Mining Statspack and AWR Repositories for Historical Trends

There are various ways that we can approach the analysis of a past database performance problem. The initial steps usually differ based on their scope. Is it limited to a certain SQL/process/task, or is it perceived as a database-wide slowdown?…

An Introduction to Chrome Browser Management

Knowledge is power. The more information you can gather as an admin, the easier it is to manage the browsers that power your organization’s work. To simplify browser management and increase security, Google offers its Chrome Browser Cloud Management tool….

Postgres Covering Indexes and the Visibility Map

Covering indexes in Postgres came up in our weekly tech call because of a query optimization review one of the teams has in progress. It seemed like some covering indexes weren’t working. I’ve been reading a book called Curious Moon,…

How to Improve Healthcare Security With Google Chrome Security

The healthcare industry has become a huge target for cybercrime due to the overwhelming amount of critical patient information. To protect your patients and staff, the tech you use must have the highest level of security. Chrome Enterprise is widely…

Chrome Enterprise in Healthcare: Positively Impacting the End-User Experience

The goal of technology in a healthcare setting is to simplify a care team’s work, not make it more complex. Plus, it should do its part in securing critical patient data. Google Enterprise and Chrome devices are a simple solution…

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How To Get The Most Out Of Your Next Virtual Learning Event

COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted every aspect of our lives this year. But in July, in spite of all the upheaval, the All India Oracle Users Group (AIOUG) still managed to hold its annual Oracle Groundbreakers Yatra conference. By moving the…

We Need More Women in Tech!

Two years ago, I joined Pythian. This was my introduction to working in “tech.” The only hint of what working in tech might be like came from binge watching TV series such as “Silicon Valley” and movies like “The Social…

What to Expect When Interviewing with Pythian

Welcome to Pythian’s recruitment process! We haven’t met yet, but if you’re considering a role here at Pythian, you’ll likely be speaking with me or one of my colleagues on the Talent Acquisition team.  What We Do Our purpose at…

Ten Tips When Working from Home During These COVID-19 Times

During this COVID-19 time, business is no longer as usual. Recently I have had a few contacts asking me for tips on how to work remotely. Why? Well, I have been working from home for ten years now. Working remotely, …

22 Ways to Make Remote Work, Work!

If I offered you a job that would allow you to live anywhere you wanted, where you could wake up and start work at any time, and never be stuck in traffic… would that check some of the boxes on…

Achieving rock-solid maintenance with template-based action plans

Pythian has always been serious about reducing human mistakes. Our consultants have always been required to log all terminal outputs for the work we execute so that the information is available to our clients, and to make sure the same…

A day in the life of a Red Cross volunteer

In addition to my day job working as a team manager at Pythian, I am fortunate to be part of a specialist Red Cross volunteer team called an Emergency Response Unit (ERU). There are many of these ERUs around the…

First time presenter, what a feeling!

It’s been a couple weeks now, and the dust has settled but not the sentiment. I am talking about my very first public presentation performed at Spain Oracle Users Group (SPOUG) during the Technical SPOUG Day 2018 on September 25th….

Mentorship can be a valuable tool for professional growth

Mentoring has been defined as a professional relationship between a mentor (more experienced) and a mentee (less experienced) to develop certain skills and knowledge that will enhance personal and professional growth. Mentors are usually assigned to junior members of a…

The life of a happy remote DBA

Life is a balancing act between the personal and professional. It is a journey and this journey should be filled with joy and happiness. It should also give you a chance to learn, to grow and to cherish moments, spending…

Technical training – good for business and career

Whether you are just starting out or have been working with technology and want to expand your skill set, training never hurts anyone. In some situations, your own company encourages it and wants to help you excel. You may be…

Pythian BORG: bringing on recruited gurus

When university graduation was rushing up on me and I hadn’t the first idea how I would start my career, my parents gave me the best advice I’ve ever received: Find meaningful work that you’re passionate about and collaborate with…

The life of a Pythian road warrior

I’m sitting here on March 16th, the day before Saint Patties day and I am thinking about what I will need for my trip to Salt Lake City next week. I work for Pythian in the Principal Consulting Group. We are…

The value of lifelong learning

When I was asked to write a blog post about two conferences I attended this year, I had to sit down and think. Think about how learning is such an essential aspect of my life, both personally and a professionally….

A Team Manager’s perspective on success at Pythian

To all managers out there, especially in the IT sector, to be truly successful you don’t need to be the most technical savvy person on your team.

Diversity: pursuing your dreams

Seven months ago, I was fortunate to start a new career journey with Pythian. At first I found working in IT intimidating as I was working with such a wide variety of technical subject matter experts on a daily basis,…

Kickstart your career

Working at Pythian has probably been one of the best decisions I could have made towards developing my technical skills as well as growing my skills as a person. When I first got the interview, I knew nothing of the…

From co-op to full time!

My experience with Pythian was like a co-op fairy tale. As a 4th-year student entering my last co-op term, I was looking for something more than just a regular administrative job. I was seeking a role in which I could…

The Pythian community gives back: movember and the holiday food drive

They say you can’t create an org culture, you can only guide it. As a growing IT services company with 400+ employees spread across 35+ countries, one of our biggest opportunities is not technological but cultural. An inherent challenge we…

My internship experience at Pythian

I remember nervously walking out of one of King’s Cross St Pancras Station’s numerous exits searching for the 7 Stanley Building. I wandered through the morning rush in the heart of London, and I was overwhelmed, out of place and…

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