(editor’s note: the author is talking about UKOUG, the UK’s major Oracle conference, happening this week in Birmingham)
And so it should be :). The flight over was uneventful, save for my excitement about having 3 seats to myself. Then the big challenge surfaced … a 5’8″ human trying to recline in a 4’10” horizontal surface. I woke about a bit later with a stiff neck but the shut-eye was worth it.
We hit the hotel about 11am after an uneventful 2-hour ride to Birmingham on the M-40. Our early arrival conjured up visions of early checkin, not a chance. All of a sudden at 2pm ALL the rooms became available at once as nothing was ready until then. I guess someone convenes a meeting between all registered guests and they commit to all checking out at 1:58pm so the incoming throngs can be settled by the by the appointed checkout time. There is probably a chance that an incoming guest may slip through the web of security and get a room early.
The chit-chat at the late afternoon Oak Table panel centred around, surprise surprise Exadata. I was intrigued by someone’s suggestion that testing applications against the Exadata box was part of the adoption process. It does not surprise me that, after unpacking a pre-configured appliance, adopters would not take for granted that applications are going to behave “as expected”. That pre-determined configuration could easily satisfy the processing requirements of most applications but probably not 100% of the time.
We touched briefly on the logical standby as a reporting solution, mentioning its 11g counterpart … active data guard. In many circles the logical standby is reported to be a viable solution for sites craving a separate reporting server. I have never been a fan of log miner-based solutions, especially in a high-transaction environment where accurate and current reporting is a 24×7 requirement. The bottlenecks introduced by mining and subsequent sending of change information to the logical standby can be prohibitive. I am not necessarily speaking from hard-code experience, but my experience with Streams trumps the logical standby-based solution.
Off to general session then a fun-filled day of presentations. It wraps up later this afternoon with my rman best practices event at 5:45pm.
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