Video Podcasting

Over the past few weeks, the team here at Oracle has been working on leveraging video to assist with our messaging. The exercise has been interesting to say the least, people have different ways of presenting and the method of capturing this on video lends itself to a number of challenges. Anyway, after a couple of concepts we have come up with a format that with a little extra tweaking should prove to be informative.

The short version of the video is below, have a look and please feel free to pass back comments through this blog. We look forward to any feedback as always.

Paul

WEB 2.0 for the Enterprise Technology Day

Web 2.0 for the Enterprise
Join Us at the Oracle Web 2.0 Technology Day

Learn how Oracle and its implementation partners can help companies utilise existing organisational knowledge more effectively while also harnessing the creativity of customers, partners, and employees through Web 2.0 approaches.

During the course of this seminar we’ll uncover how to deploy Web 2.0 applications securely across a modern organisation and how to create Enterprise 2.0–enabled processes that leverage your IT systems and create a richer experience for your users.

If you want to attend please click here

10g Protected Enterprise Workshop RIP – Long live the 11g Protected Enterprise Workshop

The 10g Protected Enterprise Workshop has come to an end. From the 7th to 9th April we ran the last iteration of the 10g RAC OEM Workshop. The team, Barry Matthews, Martin Lambert from Oracle and Stuart Zorbas, Scott McNamara from HP, would like to thank all the attendees who gave up their time to attend. From the feedback we have received these workshops have be a very well received.

Unfortunately a person could not make it due to “production problems”, maybe they need protection for their enterprise.

So stay tuned.

We will be announcing the 11g workshop soon. Also due to the popularity of these workshops we will be extending the range to cover new 11g features like Real Application Testing, Active Data Guard and Snapshop Standby and Advanced Compression.

A New Acquisition in the ECM Space

As predicted in one of my earlier posts..

...I think that we will see more acquisitions and/or mergers happening during 2008-2009. There are a number of tier-2 players in the ECM space that are ripe for acquisition and there are a number of hardware vendors that might look to expand their footprint within their own customer base through new initiatives around ECM and the intelligence these products bring to the storage or server environments. Vignette, Interwoven et al. fit firmly into this arena - potential suitors may include HP, Dell or Sun.

..today saw the announcement that HP has made a move to acquire Tower Software, a Canberra based supplier of ECM (records predominately) software - TRIM.

I still predict that we will see 1 or 2 more acquisitions in the ECM space during the course of 2008, HDS have yet to make a move for example. I wish Martin and the guys at Tower all the best and good luck with the future under the HP umbrella.

Paul

Real Application Testing Capture Backported to 9i

HOT NEWS!!!!!

Real Application Testing Capture backported to 9i.

Oracle Real Application Testing includes two solutions to test the effect of system changes on real-world applications, Database Replay and SQL Performance Analyzer. Database Replay enables you to effectively test system changes in test environments by replaying a full production workload on the test system to help determine the overall impact of the change.

To assist the customers in upgrading to 11g the ‘Capture’ portion of Database Replay will be backported to 9.2 (and 10.2). The patch will be made available for 9.2.0.8. For 10g patches will be made available for 10.2.0.2 and 3 and is already included in the 10.2.0.4 and subsequent patchsets.

Again!!!!!! For 9i/10g it is the CAPTURE component only, but can help 9i customers upgrade to 10g by capturing your SQL trace. The trace files are then imported into 11g and from there you can send the SQL to 10g (10.2) to execute and collect the stats. You then reload those stats into 11g and compare with the SQL Performance Analyser.

If you want more information call me Barry Matthews 02 9476 4478

Enterprise Information Management

On the 3^rd March 2008, Oracle announced enhancements to the Enterprise Content Management platform at the AIIM conference and expo in Boston. Amongst the new feature and integration capability information was the announcement that the UCM platform integrates with the Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher. This is a core part of an organisations Enterprise Information Management (EIM) strategy and it is exciting that Oracle has brought together two acquired technologies with its own to provide this solution for our customers. This is highlighted in the following graphic:


Oracle's BI server provides the ability to abstract, model, cache, calculate, optimise, analyse and report upon data from a wide-variety of information sources – including relational databases and applications. The UCM platform provides four key capabilities to the enterprise include document and records management, collaboration, process management and web-content management – all falling under the ECM umbrella.

ThThis announcement brings these two technologies together by:

1. Providing the ability for information (e.g. reports) generated by the BI server to be stored and managed in Oracle’s UCM repository leveraging this environment’s version management and security features.
2. Providing the capability for the information to be published, under tight content management control, to an intranet or portal environment

Of course, the integration provides for more than a simple repository and publishing mechanism for our BI customers. The UCM platform is able to provide an unstructured repository that itself can be analysed and reported upon by the BI application which leads itself well into the world of eDiscovery. Supporting information can also be published by the UCM platform to support a report or a dashboard view of the enterprise, e.g. a set of scanned invoices can be made available to a report detailing accounts payable transactions from the ERP system.

Paul

Protected Enterprise Workshop

On the 3rd and 4th of March we (Barry Matthews, Martin Lambert) ran two one-day sessions of the Protected Enterprise Workshop. The workshop allowed invited Oracle customers to get their hands dirty and build their own clusters, no viewlets or canned stuff, real environments. HP kindly donated the workshop infrastructure, and although we are not using the highest specification blade servers, the comments were “Geez this is quick”.

The workshop consists of 6 ‘C’ Class Xeon X64 full height quad core servers, and one half-height management server, including two workstations allowing three people to access one set of blades (3) each.

So what is the workshop??? Each team gets to install and configure Oracle clusterware (3 nodes), install and configure ASM (6 Luns on latest HP EVA), install Oracle software across the 3 nodes, Configure Oracle DB (DBCA). Then using the Grid Control Console they dynamically add and remove disks from a disk group with ASM, then de-provision one node from the cluster and re-task that node as a distaster recovery server using cloning, with ASM/Data Guard.

We asked the customers to rate the workshop out of 5 and the mean score was 4.72.

Customer Quotes “Very good to have an hour at the end for customised scenarios”
“This has given me a lot more confidence in manageing a RAC environment”
“I enjoyed this tremendously, and because it was hands on I believe I will retain a lot more details”
“Even though we went wrong, this showed us how to use the tools to troubleshoot problems”

Now you may ask, how do I get a go????? Well we are running another set of workshops in April for the people who couldn’t get a seat. So talk to you friendly Oracle account representative and ask. BUT!!!!!! There is a caveat at the moment. As this is real infrastructure located within the HP demonstartion facilities at Rhodes we are only offering this in Sydney at the moment..

So Melbourne customers, go and beat up HP, go and promise to buy lots of blade servers and we will bring it to Melbourne. No just joking, we will bring this to Melbourne probably June/July and then base it on 11g.