Official Pythian Blog - three streams, three perspectives

Datascape Podcast Ep 34 – Recapping Microsoft Build 2019 with Warner Chaves

Today on the Datascape Podcast we are joined by Warner Chaves to discuss the most exciting announcements from the recent Microsoft Build 2019 Conference! We run through a host of different products and services with Warner, hand-picking the most most…

Australian Red Cross gains speed, stability, and savings by optimizing cloud platforms

When the Australian Red Cross, a leading humanitarian aid and community services charity and an auxiliary to the Australian government, realized that their data platform was no longer performing optimally for their critical applications, they turned to Pythian for help….

Hadoop to the cloud: Is it time to make the move?

When Hadoop was introduced, it promised a faster time to insight because of simpler modeling using cheaper hardware. But over time, organizations have been finding that Hadoop’s complexity and need for specialized skills are adding cost and headaches. Now instead…

Gaming company benefits from increased responsiveness with help from Pythian’s Google BigQuery experts

When Skillz, a leading mobile eSports platform connecting 2.6 billion gamers across the globe, sought Pythian’s help with reducing storage costs, they learned they could not only reduce costs but also gain a more responsive application while providing an improved…

Pythian will be at Percona Live 2019 – Join us in Austin, Texas!

Percona Live provides the open source database community with an opportunity to discover and discuss the latest open source trends, technologies, and innovations. The conference includes the best and brightest innovators and influencers in the open source database industry. This…

Big mining gets a boost from big data

What do you do when the breakdown of a single vehicle could cost you a million dollars? Easy: you avoid breakdowns at all costs. That’s exactly what Canada’s largest mining company is doing through a Google Cloud Platform artificial intelligence…

Personal finance company develops secure data sharing with assistance from Pythian’s experts

A large personal finance company benefitted from Pythian’s expertise to help them share data securely and keep customer information safe. Pythian provided Google BigQuery expertise and developed innovative solutions to ensure secure multi-tenancy access to their data. The finance company…

Unleash the power of your data with Pythian at DBTA Data Summit 2019

Pythian is the Diamond Research and Keynote Sponsor at Data Summit 2019 in Boston on May 21 to 22. See you there! The theme of this year’s DBTA Data Summit is “unleashing the power of your data” – exactly what…

Online retailer gains business efficiencies with help from pythian’s cloud experts

A major online retailer joined forces with Pythian to help improve their efficiency delivering new service features. With the help of Pythian’s Cloud Consulting Services, the retailer determined that they needed to migrate their two large on-premises data centers to…

3 key data analytics announcements from Google NEXT 2019

Google NEXT 2019 was a momentous event for the Pythian team. We celebrated winning the Google Cloud Global Data Analytics Partner of the Year award, had a chance to meet with customers and Googlers, and had many conversations about the…

Is application refactoring right for your organization?

The following is the first in a series of blog posts covering Pythian’s Application Migration webinar series, where host Chris Presley discusses several application migration-related topics. Recently, he spoke with Alex Zadoroshnyi and Pierig Le Saux about the topic of…

Reduce costs by adding a data lake to your cloud data warehouse

By Lynda Partner, VP Analytics as a Service and Danil Zburivsky, Director of Engineering When it comes to data warehouse modernization, we’re big fans of moving to the cloud.  The cloud brings unprecedented flexibility that allows you to easily accommodate…

Top big data analytics trends hold true well into 2019

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…

Anthos Is the future of cloud transformation

This blog post is co -authored by Alex Zadorozhniy – DevOps Technical Director and Bill Fraser – Principal Consultant in Customer Service Delivery at Pythian. On Tuesday, Google announced the general availability of Anthos, a re-branding of its Cloud Services Platform,…

Pythian Wins 2018 Google Cloud Data analytics partner of the year award

Google Cloud Recognizes Pythian’s Technical Proficiency and Proven Success In Data Analytics Pythian announced that it has received the 2018 Google Cloud Global Data Analytics Partner of the Year award. This award was presented at the Partner Summit at Google…

How AEG Presents uses data to boost client engagement for Coachella and other events

AEG Presents is a seasoned veteran when it comes to staging high-profile concerts with first-class artists and venues like Coachella and the New Orleans Jazz Festival. But the organization recently realized it had a problem getting the most out of…

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…

Pythian is at COLLABORATE 19 – Join us in San Antonio!

COLLABORATE is the largest independently run Oracle conference in the world and as always, Pythian will be there in full force with several of our Oracle experts speaking on topics ranging from Oracle to open-source to cloud and more. This…

How Pythian helped a company migrate 1,100 websites to GCP in just 30 days

When VerticalScope, a Canadian digital media and entertainment firm, wanted to automate the cloud migration of their digital assets and inventory, they came to Pythian for help with accelerating the process. VerticalScope operates a large number of high-traffic websites and…

Pythian is loud and proud at Google Cloud Next ’19

I’ve just celebrated my 9th anniversary at Pythian. Wow, have we ever grown from the 65-person Oracle database-focused company we were in 2010.  Today, we have significantly elevated conversations with clients to be much more transformative and strategic, over and…

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How To Delete MGMTDB and MGMTLSNR Using emcli

Problem: MGMTDB and MGMTLSNR are running on only one host at a time and when relocated, will be paged unnecessarily. One team member`s suggestion is to relocate MGMTDB and MGMTLSNR back to its original host. It does not make sense having…

How to fix error when MySQL client fails to load SQL file with Blob data

In one of my latest database restore jobs, I was helping a MySQL client with issues related to mysqlbinlog and I wanted to share it here. In case you didn’t know, MySQL is a simple SQL shell with input line…

How to Upgrade Grid Infrastructure to 18c

Now that Oracle Grid Infrastructure (GI) 19c has been released, it is time to upgrade your GI to 18c! I am presenting here a well-tested procedure to upgrade your Grid Infrastructure to 18c. It has been designed and applied on…

How to install 18c Grid Infrastructure in Silent Mode on Linux 7

This blog post will show you how to install 18c Grid and upgrade to 18.6.0.0. 1. Download the 18c binairy and Apr, 2019 PSU: 18c Grid: https://download.oracle.com/otn/linux/oracle18c/180000/LINUX.X64_180000_grid_home.zip Apr 2019 PSU: https://updates.oracle.com/Orion/Services/download/p29251992_180000_Linux-x86-64.zip?aru=22869122&patch_file=p29251992_180000_Linux-x86-64.zip OPatch 12.2.0.1.17: https://updates.oracle.com/Orion/Services/download/p6880880_180000_Linux-x86-64.zip?aru=22870225&patch_file=p6880880_180000_Linux-x86-64.zip 2. Prepare OS for Oracle installation,…

A look at new features Azure SQL Database Serverless and Hyperscale

Last May, the Microsoft Build 2019 conference took place in Seattle. A number of new features and capabilities were announced and demonstrated. This week, communities in the Asia Pacific held their own version of Build, bringing the best and the…

How to mine an RMAN Log

I wanted to compare Oracle Recovery Manager (RMAN) backup to an existing NFS versus a NEW backup appliance. I performed a Proof Of Concept (POC) to compare and contrast NFS and NEW, backed up both, then mined the logs to…

Datascape Podcast Ep 34 – Recapping Microsoft Build 2019 with Warner Chaves

Today on the Datascape Podcast we are joined by Warner Chaves to discuss the most exciting announcements from the recent Microsoft Build 2019 Conference! We run through a host of different products and services with Warner, hand-picking the most most…

Three Easy Steps For Consolidating Oracle Databases into Cloud Virtual Machines

Problem Having decided to move our Oracle databases to the cloud, we now want to build equivalent VMs as database servers.  This is simple enough when we have only one or a very small number of databases. But this can…

Examining the Lifecycle of Tombstones in Apache Cassandra

This post is the first part of a series of blog posts regarding the lifecycle and management of tombstones. Deleting and expiring data in Cassandra is something that you should carefully plan. Especially if you’re about to delete a massive…

Explaining Azure Data Factory Mapping Data Flows – SQL On The Edge Episode 20

With the current focus on data science, data engineering and the game-changing advantages of doing data lakes or warehouses in the cloud, all the major cloud providers continue to strengthen their data-related services and tools. On this front, Microsoft has…

How to Autoscale ProxySQL in the cloud

ProxySQL is a great tool. It’s one of the most recommended technologies in our Open Source Database practice. Many of our clients are running it or are migrating towards it, but we’ve seen that it is pretty CPU-intensive. We’ve also…

How to deploy highly available SQL Server 2017 on Linux on GKE

Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration system for automating deployment, scaling and management of containerized applications. Running a SQL Server database on Kubernetes is a topic of discussion nowadays as Kubernetes provides ways to provision stateful containers using persistent volumes,…

How to a recreate disk group used by CRS

I will go through detailed steps here on how to recreate a disk group used by CRS. Some things to bear in mind: – I created this cluster based on another existing cluster, so I just followed the same patterns…

A script for Relocating and Restoring Database Services

Due to complex requirements for service relocate and restore as part of patching, I decided to script the process. Requirements: Existing configuration: Save existing services affinity: Note: /tmp/service_hawk*.conf is read-only to prevent accidental overwrite. Patching starts from instance1 and relocate…

Exadata: How to manage OS dependencies when upgrading to 19c

Exadata 19c comes with Linux 7 and Exadata 12c and 18c come with Linux 6. There will then be an upgrade to Linux 7 when upgrading from 12c or 18c to Exadata 19c or above. In this specific case, you…

How to create an Oracle Database Cloud service (OCI) using the command line

The Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, also known as the second generation cloud, offers an integrated command line utility called OCI Command Line Interface (CLI) which can be used to perform almost all the activities we can do using the web console….

Examining distributed training of Keras Models

Creating deep learning models using Keras is pretty straightforward, which is why Keras is often used for prototyping and creating proof-of-concept products. But when it comes to using it for training bigger models or using very big datasets, we need…

Exposing MyRocks Internals Via System Variables: Part 7, Use Case Considerations

(In the previous post, Part 6, we covered Replication.) In this final blog post, we conclude our series of exploring MyRocks by taking a look at use case considerations. After all, having knowledge of how an engine works is really…

Fix: SQL Server to PostgreSQL Linked Server Error – “Requested conversion is not supported.”

Problem: You created a linked server on SQL Server to a PostgreSQL database. You can open and navigate the linked server on SSMS up to listing the tables, but can not perform select to certain tables, returning the below errors:…

Troubleshooting an enterprise user security database login and sudden ORA-12154

I encountered a new problem last week while trying to log in into LDAP-enabled Oracle Database (Enterprise User Security). I entered my SQL*Plus credentials that usually work fine, but received an error ending with ORA-12154. $ sqlplus aprokopjevs@EBSPROD SQL*Plus: Release…

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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…

Join CEO Paul Vallée and top data experts at Pythian’s love your data conference in NYC

Every year, leaders from every industry are presented with a buffet of conference opportunities to choose from. The pull to attend the biggest and shiniest is strong as event organizers lure potential attendees with swag bags, explosive branding and the…

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