To a junior DBA

At UKOUG Tech conference in Liverpool last year I had an interesting talk with a DBA that had two years of experience. Being 23 years the DBA naturally stood out from the crowd. I talked about my thoughts on what is important for a DBA, and since I spend way too much on user group activities and conferences I argued that going to such events are useful for a DBA, and continued with other ramblings about what I think is important for a DBA to do. I hope I stopped soon enough, but stop talking and start listening is an art. Anyway, I decided to write down a list of recommendations for a new DBA. This is what I think is important.

Backup and recovery stands out. The database is your responsibility, that is why you are hired as a DBA. In the database, which in earlier times also was called a databank, the data is the money.  If you can't get the database back after a disaster they will blame you and no other. In fact if you can imagine one reason why you in some situation will not be able to recover the database you should mail it to your manager now. The concept of backup and recovery should be easy to grasp, but realities are that many different scenarios exist and how to deal with them depends on the situation. There are plenty of stuff written on this from masters of Recovery Manager (RMAN) to people more dedicated to risk management. This subject is more than just getting the database back running, it is also about keeping the system available, guard against data loss and testing systems for faults.

• Have a fire drill once in a while to test your routines and skills.
• Get some clear policies in place like, how much data are you allowed to lose, and how much time (downtime) do you have to recover your database. 

The costs and implementation will depend on  this. If you cannot lose any data and management starts talking about 99.999% uptime a simple backup is not enough. "How much data can you lose?" Is a phrase that can freak people out, but if you can't lose data, is your system  and routines really prepared for that?

Tuning and Optimisation is by many thought of as your problem and your problem only. Reality is that when a system is not performing it is usually not the DBA's fault. Obviously, a badly configured database will not work well, but the Oracle database performs remarkably well with default configurations.  Your database depends on the server it is running on, the network between the database and connected clients, and so on. But most frequently you will discover this: the reason for bad performance is bad design.

Design as in "invented by a developer who is a single user on his own PC with lots of CPU and memory, but little data and load to reveal bad algorithms". Tuning is a word looked down on by some in the community since it came from an era where quick fixes and esoteric queries would reveal problems in the database; with the right secret revealed to you, you could do some magic and have everything run perfectly. Still some people are tempted by black magic, so be critical to what Google brings you.

Optimisation on the other hand is taking what you have, see where the time is wasted, and take away as much as you can (or want) by replacing one or a few parts of the job by something that runs better. Often a redesign is necessary, or if you are lucky, fiddling with an index may do the job.

My best advice is to find a way to identify where time is wasted and zooming in on that. This means profiling in some way and work from there. By having some methods ready to detect waste or a time sink, you can stop spending time improving on what is already working reasonably well. In other words, stop the parameter tweaking (nobody changes the db_block_size these days), take one step back and ask, what is going on here. What you learned in computer science at the university may come very useful here. To put your mind on the right track I cannot think of a better place to start than to read through the papers at Method R, especially Thinking Clearly About Performance.

Get involved in a user group and go to conferences, meetups or whatever is easy for you. Many companies have many developers or IT-workers, but only one or two DBAs. In the community there are people who love to talk about their work, they will share experience with you, and tell you what is not in the manuals. If your manager won't send you to a conference, here are some arguments you may try:

• One course covers one subject, but a conference covers many, during one intensive conference you can get inputs and learning in many fields.
• Problems you may have at work can be discussed by others at the conference. Chances are that what you are going through is interesting and valuable input to others and you are likely not the first one to go through this.
• Make friends and discover that you are not alone. Getting friends and contacts outside your pool is possibly the best part of it. Meeting people IRL and being in touch on many channels is priceless to me.
• Many conferences are run by the community, meaning that a demand for a profit margin is lower at conferences than at a course delivered by a company. It translates to more learning for the money than at most other places.

Find a social network that works for you and become visible. Twitter works well for me, I meet likeminded people there and discover other things we have in common besides Oracle tech. Most of my friends I have now come from the Twitter community.

Take notes and start a blog Starting as a DBA today must be different from how it was 10-20 years ago. As you go, take notes and post it on your own blog. Even mistakes; DBAs are busy, if other can learn from your mistakes it is a valuable contribution. The problems you have now may be more relevant for another junior DBA than a beginner's post written many years ago. And, you will be surprised how useful your procedures will be later when you have to go back and perform a task you haven't done for a while.

If you are a senior DBA reading this, maybe you should blog about what you learned and want to pass on? I think many have had an experience that stood out, something that put their mind on the right track. Blog about it!

Why was my abstract (not) accepted?

You know, this is my blog, but I am aware of my role in our user group. The opinions here are mine; I haven't stolen them. Selecting abstracts for our conference is done by many in our board, but I wanted to clarify how I look at the task, what speakers I look for to our conference.

Thursday this week we sent out emails to 71 people who will present on our next conference that starts March 12. Another group received a more disappointing email. Some have questioned why they did not make it (again).

As a user group I think we have some community duties. These came to my mind now:

• Be there for our members, independent from any vendor, but still cooperating with Oracle and others.
• Enlighten and show new stuff to our members.
• Help them finding solutions to problems they may have at work - share experiences.
• Networking; remind DBAs and other professionals that may be alone in their day job that they are not alone in the community.
• Also network related: There are a lot of experts inside and outside Oracle worldwide that believe in what they are doing, and are willing to help. The community needs to know about them.
• Assist in recruiting new people into our fields of technology; more members and new colleagues. 
• Help new speakers into giving presentations, develop the community with even more good speakers.

This post is mostly about that last bullet point.

I have my heroes among the speakers. First I discovered Tom Kyte, and when he started blogging I discovered the Oaktable Network. From that group I can mention Cary Millsap, Jonathan Lewis, Christian Antognini, Kellyn Pot'Vin-Gorman and Douglas Burns, to name a few.  They always attract a lot of people. And I really enjoy the company of these, really smart, yet levels with you every time. The community is even more than the Oaktable, there are plenty of people who just love what they are doing without carrying any reward for it.

Many of these speakers have been rewarded for their community contributions through the Oracle Ace Program.  OUGN could never have staged such a good conference without the support from Oracle through the ACE program,  we have several ACEs every year and the ACE program covers a substantial amount of expenses. So if someone from OTN is reading this: Thank you!

In this program the best (according to some metric) are rewarded with status ACE Director (ACED). Before they got that far some started as ACE, this year the new entry level is ACE Associate. Now, according to someone's logic we should go through the list of submitted abstracts and pick all the ACEDs first, right?

Not according to mine. I think we have a duty in helping new speakers to the stage. One of the most uplifting experience I have in the community is to discover (new) people that spend time on becoming good at what they are doing through hard work, lots of lab testing, and blogging. The presentations that gave me most came from people who really care about what they talk about (call it passion, if you insist), not from a very slick and polished presentation.

This is one way we in OUGN can give back to the ACE program and the rest of the community: help the not so famous or people who aspire to become an ACE to get better at presenting their stuff. 

I like to think that some of those new ACEs became an ACE because they presented at our conference. One of our Norwegian members came to me after a conference was finished and said one certain presentation made the whole conference for him. It was delivered by one I invited to speak, he was not an ACE then, but is now. It is a lot of work to become an ACE, more then one conference experience, of course, but still I think we can contribute to it.

In addition to this group of speakers who I personally care much about, here is a list of others I look for:

• Product managers and others in Oracle who shares and cares about the community. PMs for SQL Developer, APEX, among others, are the best ambassadors for Oracle.
• People who are in the front with new trends and technologies.
• Famous people who attract attendees, because we need them.
• Really hard-core nerds that may not appeal to many, but makes the conference for the ones that go to the deep-dive session.

So, if your abstract did not make it, it means among other things:

• We were blessed with lots of submitted abstracts (over 250 this year, not counting people who said they was going to submit, but forgot about it.)
• We have to choose from different groups of speakers.
• Something else happened. (This is the miscellaneous bucket including faults on our side.) 

If you made it, it means that we literally want you on board and that you will succeed. You may have the best experience after your presentation from introverts who want  to know more about what you are doing. And the last night while sailing back to Oslo and you will have no presentation to worry about, you will understand why quite a few want to come back to the OUGN Spring Seminar, aka The Boat Conference :-)

By the way, the worst thing about abstract selections is not to say no to the pros (ACEDs), they can handle it, I assume, but there are some less experienced people that deserves to be speaking, but we couldn't find slots for them.

Cheers to everybody.

Analyze your social networks with ThinkUp

... on a server in the sky

I had two things on my agenda, test out HP Cloud and ThinkUp. HP Cloud is still in private beta, but I was lucky to get an invitation after registration. They aim to compete with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and so far I think they have a good chance. It is rather easy to just order and set up a new server in the cloud. A simple and easy interface with few buttons. It is tempting to include a few screen shots here, but I'm not sure if the agreement I just signed allows it. If they expand the interface with more features I hope they keep this simple version for impatient people who just need a server right now. I've had great fun with AWS also, but it is crowded with features and things to figure out. For my need of testing a web application the HP Cloud seems just perfect.

ThinkUp is a tool for you to analyze how you stand in your different social networks. It also has the added benefit that it actually does a backup of all your posts to your own private spot. Just go to their web site http://thinkupapp.com/ and check out the features. It does require a web server with php 5.3 and MySQL; a LAMP server in other words.

In short this is what you have to do:

• Create a compute server with CentOS 6
  
• Create the ssh-keys and test connection with ssh
  
• Install packages for MySQL, Apache and PHP
  
• Configure database, web server and php
  
• Download ThinkUp and unpack it in the webserver's public html directory
  
• Access ThinkUp and start setting up connections to your social networks
  
• Enjoy the reports on your digital social life.
  

I created the smallest version of a compute server (standard.xsmall) at HP Cloud with CentOS 6.2 Server as image. It comes with 1GB of memory and two partitions of 10GB and 30GB disk space. When the server is ready with status 'running' CentOS is already installed with a root partition of 10GB. You don't need more to run ThinkUp, but you have another 30GB partition available if you want to format and mount. First time you need to generate a key pair to be used with SSH when you want to connect to the server. This is the same mechanism that AWS uses and works perfectly on Unix/Linux and on Windows. Once generated you store the private key in a text file, not to be lost unless you want to scratch the servers that depends on them. Since I also have a Windows laptop, I had to make a version of this key that works with Putty. The tool PuTTYgen can be downloaded from the same place as Putty http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html. To convert to a key that Putty can use you select Conversions -> Import key, select the file with the key from HP Cloud and save the converted private key in a new file (do not overwrite the original key). I used SSH-2 RSA which seems to be the default.

Before I could connect to the server I had to attach a public IP. This is of course done from the management console at hpcloud.com.
To connect with Putty I entered the assigned public IP address, loaded the key file under Connection -> SSH -> Auth. Login as root and the connection is established without a password since you are using a private ssh key.

From my MacBook I connected with:

ssh -i original_key_file ip-address

The same works on Linux or most other mature OS.

Before ThinkUp can be installed you need an http server that supports php 5.3 or higher, that is, a LAMP server. I used this guide: http://library.linode.com/lamp-guides/centos-6. It contains a link to a guide on how to set your hostname and timezone. (If you change the timezone, remember to repeat it after running 'yum update', since it resets the link /etc/localtime).

Download the ThinkUp software with

cd /tmp
wget http://thinkupapp.com/download/

This downloads the file zip-file, in my case thinkup_1.0.4.zip. Unpack it under the public_html directory, using foo.example.com as hostname hereafter:

cd /srv/www/foo.example.com/public_html
unzip /tmp/thinkup_1.0.4.zip

With web server, PHP and MySQL up you are ready to configure ThinkUp. Open up a browser and go to http://foo.example.com/thinkup. You probably will see this:



Just do what it says, as root:

chown -R apache /srv/www/foo.example.com/public_html/thinkup/data/

Then hit F5 to reload page. Next screen will look like:



Hit the link in the page to configure ThinkUp for the first time. Various requirements are checked and in my case I was missing GD and PDO; whatever that is.



Hit the links to continue (See? You get everything almost free of efforts here). OK, maybe it was not obvious what to do get GD installed (hint: click Installation on next page if you want to know how). To install GD for CentOS I did:

yum install php-gd

PDO for PHP and MySQL is installed and configured with:

yum install php-pdo
yum install php-mysql

Restart web server and MySQL after this, then reload page, the configuration continues to next page when all requirements are in place. On next page you create your ThinkUp account and configures the connection to the MySQL database. Before you can do that, create the database for ThinkUp and a user. Connect to MySQL as root:

mysql -u root -p

Create database and user with:

create database thinkup;
create user 'thinkup'@'localhost' identified by 'strongpassword' ;
grant all on thinkup.* to 'thinkup';

Then enter respective information on webpage. On the next page you will be presented by an error message saying that the apache user cannot write to config.inc.php. As usual you are told what to do. Execute this as the root:

sudo touch /srv/www/foo.example.com/public_html/thinkup/config.inc.php
sudo chown apache /srv/www/foo.example.com/public_html/thinkup/config.inc.php

This is enough, you don't actually have to copy and paste the script presented in the window below.


Hit next and you are finished with the installation.


After you have verified your ThinkUp account (check your mail) you can login to your ThinkUp web application and start adding accounts for your social networks. Happy analyzing, remember it is about the network.

When playing with this I once again understood that Twitter is the most important social network for me, I'm following people who shares a lot of useful information, usually quick quotes and links to good stuff. If you have attention deficit, Twitter is perfect, 140 chars and then time to think. It was through a few tweets I discovered that HP had opened their beta program. In another about ThinkUp as an alternative to Klout. Facebook is less important to me and I often forget to check it, it is just a collection of faces... Google+ is used by some of my Oracle peers, but it is just much easier to check Twitter when I'm on the run. Links to good stuff is either checked out immediately or sent to Read It Later.


I've met quite a few that are frustrated by the tardiness of many IT departments, getting a new server takes too much time. Having the possibility to create one in the cloud, in minutes, from a easy to use web interface such as what HP Cloud offers; that is something many will consider.