Pythian Goes to RMOUG Training Days 2010, Denver

Update 9-Feb-10: Want to schedule a meeting with Pythian folks? See Pythian Events page.

I’m so much looking forward to the next conference in my schedule — RMOUG Training Days 2010. It would be only my second time I’m presenting at the RMOUG but it was enough to go there once to understand that it’s one of the top rated Oracle User Group conferences in the world. Some of the great speakers are presenting and registration fees are very low compare to other events of comparable quality. If your conference budget is low this year — that’s the conference you don’t want to miss!

Two of us from Pythian are going to speak at RMOUG Training Days 2010 that starts in just 4 week. I present the following session:

Alex Gorbachev: Oracle ASM 11g — The Evolution.
Oracle Automatic Storage Management has proven to be one of the most widely adopted new features in Oracle Database 10g and it has been dramatically improved in the later 11g releases. This presentation will explain what changes are solved by ASM, how these challenges are solved, what barriers there are to ASM adoptions, and how 11g Release 2 addresses these barriers.

My colleague, Christo Kutrovsky is presenting the following:

Christo Kutrovsky: RAC+ASM — Three Years in Production. Stories to Share.
This presentation will cover Migration via LUN re-assignment; migrating online migration from EMC to 3par; removing ASMLIB and using EMC multipathing; gotchas when building ASMLIB devices with multipathing; corrupting your production database beyond repair with duplicate database on ASM; overwriting your data with ASM due to incorrect naming convention; corrupting your production database with NETAPP/NFS due to Oracle bug; two nodes RAC is not HA; performing network maintenance; and RAC + SAME = LAME.

Coincidentally, out topics are very close. However, they don’t overlap but rather complement each other when it comes to ASM. While my session covers more the history of ASM, why it arrived in Oracle stack and, of course, why ASM 11g versions is so much better in many respects compare to ASM 10g, Christo delivers a more practical speech with some interesting real world scenarios.

Update 9-Feb-10: Unfortunately, Jay Caviness session is canceled so there will be only 3 ASM presentations.

Actually, there are four 3 sessions around ASM at the conference and all of them are back to back starting at 11:45 on the second day of the conference. Christo’s session is the first followed by Marshall Presser from Oracle presenting on ASM Cluster Filesystem (ACFS). I’ve had a pleasure to meet Marshall literally couple weeks ago here in Ottawa during a joint workshop on Oracle RAC (well, Marchall was actually running the show and I contributed some examples of real-world experience with Pythian customers). Marshall has long history with Oracle and definitely knows what he is talking about. He is also a very entertaining speaker so I recommend you attend his session if you are interested in the topic.

My session is on next and I’ll make sure not to cover much of ACFS — I have way more to go through during my slot. In addition, there is a dedicated presentation on Oracle ASM 11gR2 new features from Jay Caviness so my job will be to cover enough to warm up the audience for the Jay’s session that is up next according to the schedule. I haven’t met Jay yet but I’ll try to get in touch and coordinate to avoid significant overlaps in our presentations. Jay’s session has been canceled.

See you in Denver soon and, if you are a skier, make sure to catch the ski lift somewhere around Loveland Pass — great slopes there! The photo below was taken couple years ago after the conference (courtesy of Tim Gorman) — there is interesting story behind so ask me or Tim at the conference.

That’s all for now. Time to feed my new dog:

She is a 10 weeks old puppy (mix of Bull Mastiff, Doberman and Rottweiler). She is usually a good girl but, sometimes, throws surprises like this when she is left on her own for too long:

It’s not the worst that happened so far and I’m sure more to come!