Author: Gwen Shapira

When I heard that Intel announced their own Hadoop distribution, my first thought was “Why would they do that?”. This blog post is an attempt to explore why anyone would need their own Hadoop distribution, what Intel can gain by…

Pythian now officially supports MongoDB both as On-Demand and Managed Services offerings. Including monitoring, capacity planning, tuning and troubleshooting

Do DBAs have a role to play with Hadoop clusters? If so, what is that role and what skills they need to get there. I provide the answers to these questions in this post.

Following my “Building Integrated DWH with Oracle and Hadoop” webinar for IOUG Big Data SIG, I got a bunch of excellent follow up questions. The most frequently asked questions are: What is the minimum I need to do to get started with Hadoop? and How do I load data into Hadoop? Since so many people are interested in the same question, it makes more sense to answer on the blog.

Shortly before we all went on break for the holiday, Oracle announced the new BDA X3-2. Now I have time to properly sit down with a glass of fine scotch and dig into the details of what is included in the release. Turns out that there are quite a few changes packed in. We are getting new hardware, new Hadoop, new Connectors and new NoSQL. Tons of awesome features are included. Let’s get into it.

Prepare your database for the apocalypse with these 10 easy tips.

Just a short note documenting a procedure that isn’t done frequently, and I didn’t see described anywhere else. Somewhere last month a customer asked for my help in changing the SIDs on one of his RAC databases to match the new corporate standard. The database name matched the standard so we could leave that alone, but the SID needed to be changed. Here’s what we did to change it

The main difficulty in writing good abstracts is that you are trying to accomplish multiple goals in the same short text: You are trying to convince the abstract reviewer that the topic is interesting, that you are an expert on the subject matter and that you will be educational and entertaining. Here are my tips.

Like many good stories, this one also started with an innocent question from customer: “I often check “SELECT COUNT(*) FROM TABLE;” on our old 10.2.0.4 cluster and the new Exadata. The Exadata is slower than our old cluster by few minutes. Exadata is not good at count(*) ? or other problem?” Here’s how I fixed it.

Ian Redfern published a paper documenting the TNS protocol internals. The paper is titled “Oracle Protocol” and is clearly the result of painstaking research.. the paper became a classic in our field. Fortunately, it was released into the public domain, allowing me to reproduce it here in full, preventing it from disappearing forever.