Oracle Open World - lucky me

Last year was my first time at OOW. I made a write-up every day on my blog, but this year I will maximize, meaning it will be little time for blogging while being there. It is now less than four two one hours before I start on my trip OSL-SFO. Writing about what I plan to do seems like a great way to kill time. Also I'm doing some proactive jet-lag prevention research, may be staying up late will make the transition from CET to PT easier (or is it CEST and PST now?).

I have a schedule packed with interesting stuff, but based on experience from last year, I expect to feel some conference fatigue setting in around noon at Wednesday. I may just as well see Mogens in his office.

Besides all these good presos I am really looking forward to two events. One is the Oaktable World (formerly called Oracle Closed World; guess what happened). Good thing it is early in the week from Monday to Tuesday. Those guys are not giving out 101-courses, and will demand my attention.

The second event is the Bloggers Meetup organized and held by Pythian. This may very well be the best networking opportunity at OOW :-) Last year I met a bunch of people I have known virtually through Twitter and their blogs for years. Nothing beats a conversation in person. You will be surprised how many nice people there are out there that share our somewhat narrow interest.

I'm always interesting to talk to potential speakers at our annual conference. If you have any questions regarding our user group (Oracle User Group Norway) or our conference, please get in touch. Btw, here is our call for paper

Paying slightly attention to Twitter, I just noticed a link to the kick-off for the IOUG Big Data SIG. Think I want to check it out too. Not sure what I can make out of this Big Data thing, but it seems to attract a lot of smart brains.

Luggage is ready, and it includes a cool t-shirt from Method-R, Oaktable World will be a nice occasion to wear it.

VirtualBox 4.2 released

Version 4.2 of VirtualBox was released two days ago (so far for Linux only). Download it from here: https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Linux_Downloads

Probably not important, but I'm using Fedora 16 for the moment, and since I was running VirtualBox 4.1 I had to remove the previous package first and install the 4.2 version. This will not destroy the guest hosts.

rpm -e VirtualBox-4.1
rpm -ip VirtualBox-4.2-4.2.0_80737_fedora16-1.x86_64.rpm

After a new start with the VirtualBox Manager the old VM guests are in place.

Easier installation of Oracle on Linux

This is more a note to myself... Installing Oracle on Linux has become much easier with a package that prepares the OS before installation of the Oracle Server software. In previous versions the rpm package used to be called oracle-validated, but for 11gR2 on OEL6 it is called oracle-rdbms-server-11gR2-preinstall.

Probably the easiest way to install the Oracle database on Linux is to install Oracle Enterprise Linux 6 and before the installation of Oracle do two things:

1. Enable the public yum repository at Oracle:

cd /etc/yum.repos.d
wget http://public-yum.oracle.com/public-yum-ol6.repo

Edit the file and enable the relevant version by setting enabled=1.

2. Install the package that prepares the server for Oracle database installation:

yum install oracle-rdbms-server-11gR2-preinstall

No need to run any commands after the yum install command. Continue with runInstaller.

Update 2013-07-12:
With the release of database 12c Oracle has released a new package to prepare Oracle Linux 6 for it.

Get the info from Oracle here. The procedure remains the same as for 11g, only the name of the rpm file changes. I installed it on a fresh new OL6 without any extra configuration of yum repository with:

yum update
yum install oracle-rdbms-server-12cR1-preinstall

The outline from Oracle tells you to do step 1 above, but the repo file was included in OL 6.4.