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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…

Are reverse cloud migrations a thing?

At Pythian, we spend the vast majority of our time helping our customers take full advantage of the public cloud. But there is always that tiny percentage that comes to us asking if we can move them from the cloud…

Datascape Podcast Episode 38 – December Cloud Update

Welcome to the December episode of our cloud update podcast. We are joined today by three industry experts who talk about the latest developments from the leading public cloud vendors: Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Amazon Web Service (AWS), and Microsoft…

Black Friday is in the books. Did your IT systems keep up?

Black Friday weekend is over. If you’re either an online or bricks and mortar retailer, then congratulations – you made it! We at Pythian hope you crushed your online sales targets these last few days with the help of your…

Three Agile Fixed Price Contract Types You Should Consider

We all know that Agile methods provide great flexibility and allow us to manage priorities and constantly changing requirements. The caveat here is that these flexibilities and adaptabilities will eventually create problems when we package it in a fixed-price contract…

2019 Tech Geek Gift Giving Guide

It’s that time of year again!  Each year around the holidays, we offer gift ideas for the tech geek on your list — any data lover, IT pro, or fan of cool technology. And this year is no exception. The…

Pythian Announces Support for AWS Outposts As A Launch Partner

Today at AWS re:Invent, Amazon Web Services (AWS)’s most important tech conference of the year, AWS Outposts was announced. As Amazon says in its release notes, “AWS Outposts is a natural extension of AWS cloud services towards on-premises and bringing…

Datascape Podcast Episode 37 – Recapping Microsoft Ignite 2019 with Warner

If you don’t want to read through a 78-page PDF document but still want to know what went down at Microsoft Ignite 2019, then this episode is for you! Warner Chaves joins us for our third recap episode of the…

Cutting Costs And Building Sales By Migrating To Google Cloud Platform

If you’re running any kind of e-commerce enterprise, you already know that your business lives and dies by the speed of your page loads. Online shoppers are notoriously impatient, and every second of delay for the user increases the likelihood…

Top big data analytics trends hold true as we look toward 2020

The overall importance of data and information within organizations has continued to grow. We’ve also seen the continued rise of megatrends like IoT, big data – even too much data – and of course, machine learning. That’s along with the…

How the England and Wales Cricket Board scored with big data

The England and Wales Cricket Board governs every aspect of the sport in those two countries, and it holds massive amounts of data generated by professional and amateur players alike. Since its founding in 1997, the ECB has collected information…

How to migrate from Teradata to Google BigQuery

Google BigQuery is a serverless, highly scalable, low-cost enterprise data warehouse that helps data analysts become more productive. It enables extremely fast analytics on a petabyte scale. And its pay-as-you-go model makes it attractive for organizations looking to move away…

Join Pythian for Percona Live Europe 2019 Amsterdam

Percona Live is always a great opportunity to learn from the best and brightest in the open-source database community. This time, Percona Live Europe is being held at the Hilton Amsterdam Airport Schiphol, The Netherlands from September 30 to October…

Can you run Hadoop in the cloud?

As a solutions architect at Pythian, I often get questions from clients about the many solutions available to them to address their big data needs. Between Hadoop, cloud-based, and hybrid solutions, finding the best option for their unique needs can…

The top 8 things every database practitioner should know

I’ve been interviewing and mentoring candidates for technical database positions for almost ten years, and a common question from those who either don’t make it or feel they’re not ready yet to apply to the position they’re looking for is:…

Report: Data Warehouses Are Heading To The Cloud

Unisphere Research Report uncovers the trends that are driving analytics workloads to the cloud, including real-time analytics and machine learning.   Data strategies are now commonplace, machine learning adoption has doubled in a year, and data warehouses are still a go-to…

Pythian migrates company’s global assets to GCP without downtime

Many businesses migrate to the cloud to take advantage of cost savings and improved agility. Optiva, a Canada-based company that develops software for communications service providers, recently migrated to Google Cloud Platform (GCP) with help from Pythian’s team of experts. Since…

Making a business case for Machine Learning

The first step to kick off a Machine Learning (ML) project is to have a written proposition for the business problem, and second, to frame the ML problem. Before even discussing an ML method, it is necessary first to understand…

Comparing Data Science at an AI Startup and a Consulting Company

The difference between data science consultants and a data science team at a company depending on machine learning (ML) solutions is significant. In the first instance, the consultants need to have a good understanding of both the business and technology….

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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.

Use RMAN KEEP Backup To Roll Back From an Upgrade

There is a requirement to back up a database before an application upgrade to be able to rollback. Guarantee Restore Point (GRP) was first considered by us; however, it looks like there is insufficient space from Flash Recovery Area (FRA)….

PART 4: Implementing Oracle Database Single Sign-on Using Kerberos, Active Directory, and Oracle CMU

This is the fourth and final article in a four-part series related to testing Oracle Database 18c Centrally Managed Users (CMU) by leveraging the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) for Oracle DBAs to create a lab or testbed. The third article…

Improve your security posture by upgrading to Azure SQL Database

Every now and then I have a conversation with a client who is still reluctant to consider a cloud migration due to what they perceive as a decrease in their security posture. Once we start analyzing this position in detail…

PART 3: Implementing Oracle Database Active Directory Password Synchronization using Oracle CMU

This is the third in a four-part article series related to testing Oracle Database 18c Centrally Managed Users (CMU) by leveraging the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) for Oracle DBAs to create a lab or testbed. The second article covered Configuring…

Let DataGuard Broker Do ALL The Work

What’s the reason for implementing DataGuard Broker? It does all the work. eg. Test system has been shutdown and upon startup, encountered error as shown. Shutdown database and startup mount. Check DataGuard status using dgmgrl. Note: standby recovery was automatically…

How to Run DBSAT 2.2.0 on Oracle Cloud PDB using Wallet

The Oracle Database Security Assessment Tool (DBSAT) is a command-line tool focused on identifying how securely the database is configured and where sensitive data resides with the goal of promoting successful approaches to mitigating potential security risks. DBSAT requires no…

Automatic Graceful Shutdown and Consistent Startup Method for Oracle DB on Linux

Having questions about automatic startup and shutdown is quite common when dealing with new environments or configurations. There is more than one way to implement this depending on the environment configuration, licensing and version. So, here is a summary: 1….

Tracking data flow mechanics of IoT, or a piece of “Pi-oT”

A piece of pi(e): “In contrast to a piece of cake, means a task that looks easy but once you get into it is actually very difficult or time-consuming.”  – Urban dictionary In the early days of my career, I…

How to Stop All Database Instances Running From ORACLE_HOME

At times, there may be a requirement to stop database instances, for example, to perform patching. When there is only one database instance running on the server, it is sufficient to stop the instance using srvctl stop instance -d db_unique_name…

PART 2: Configuring Windows and Linux Servers for CMU Testing

This is the second in a four-part article series related to testing Oracle Database 18c Centrally Managed Users (CMU) by leveraging the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) for Oracle DBAs to create a lab or testbed. The first article covered how…

How to Set up Automatic Startup and Shutdown of an Oracle Database on Linux without Using Oracle-Restart

We have all set up automatic startup and shutdown of an Oracle Database on Linux at some point. I, myself, have made some scripts to do it in the past. However, did you know there is an official way/script for…

OEM 13c Monitoring Features – Part 5, Best Practices and Automatic Incident Creation

This is the fifth in a series of blog posts covering the most important topics you should know to completely monitor your IT infrastructure with Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 13c. The previous posts covered basic monitoring, extended metrics, metric…

PART 1: Creating an Oracle 18c Centrally Managed Users Testbed using Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

Oracle Database 18c introduced a new feature called Centrally Managed Users (CMU) to allow simplified database user management through integration with Microsoft Active Directory (AD). This is an exciting and much-needed enhancement. Previously, complex additional tiers such as Oracle Unified…

Services [not] Starting Automatically with CRS after Reboot?

Hello all! So, a client asked me to check why his database was not starting with CRS after a reboot. I started investigating and noticed this: On Oracle 11.2, the database auto-start policy in the Clusterware is “restore”, which means…

Anthos: How Google changed the perception of hybrid cloud solutions

More than half a year ago, Google announced a truly hybrid cloud solution – Anthos. It’s time to recap and see how exactly Anthos has changed the perception of the hybrid cloud, what types of customers are benefiting from it…

Solving an unusual Oracle upgrade issue

I recently came across a very unusual situation. During an upgraded review, I noticed the dba_registry_sqlpatch was empty when it shouldn’t be: SQL> select patch_id, patch_uid, version, action, action_time, status, description from dba_registry_sqlpatch; no rows selected SQL> The expected output…

How to fix dbupgrade script issue when upgrading Oracle Database Standard Edition

Objective: Upgrade Oracle database from 11.2.0.4 to 12.2.0.1 During the Oracle database upgrade process from 11.2.0.4 to 12.2.0.1 (Standard Edition), running on Windows Server 2012 R2 64bit, the following error was found while executing the dbupgrade script. C:>dbupgrade LOG FILES:…

How to Test Data Guard Fast-Start Failover by Shutting Down Standby Server

This post will demonstrate the procedure for testing Oracle Data Guard Fast-Start Failover by shutting down the server where the standby database is running from. The environment is a single instance database without any grid infrastructure components. Review primary host…

OEM 13c Monitoring Features – Part 4, Corrective Actions

This is the fourth in a series of blog posts covering the most important topics you should know to completely monitor your IT infrastructure with Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 13c. The previous posts covered how to set up basic…

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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…

Pythian at All Things Open 2017

All Things Open 2017 is coming up fast, and Pythian is proud to be supporting one of the largest open source-focused conferences in the US! All Things Open is a conference in Raleigh, North Carolina on October 23-24, 2017. ATO…

Has “Google-ing it” gotten better over time?

Just Thinking… Have you noticed the subtle shift in how we search for information on the Internet…? In the past when I wanted to find something, I would start a web browser (before Tabs came along) and go to www.google.co.nz….

How to hold a great team meeting with remote employees

I want to talk about something that I initially did very poorly when I first became a remote manager in hopes you can learn from my mistakes – Team Meetings. When I started having my first team meetings as a…

My co-op experience at Pythian

I returned to Pythian for my co-op term this past winter (it’s worth mentioning that previous to this, I had already completed two four month terms as a Software Development Intern at the company). The fact that I came back…

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