M-A-O-L

A quick post on a Linux for Oracle Tuning Checklist I found in Ronny Egner’s blog. If you’re doing Oracle on Linux, this is a must read (best while sitting at a Linux terminal), else just ignore this post.

Greg Rahn’s post about The Core Performance Fundamentals Of Oracle Data Warehousing – Set Processing vs Row Processing is so good, everybody considering a migration from a standard RDBMS to a VLDB platform (such as Exadata, as in Greg’s example) should be forced to read it.

To paraphrase Greg: the performance improvements of the new system not only allow to run today’s jobs faster, but will allow you to do jobs that were entirely impossible with the old system – if you’re willing to do a little re-engineering, and throw away old assumptions and ‘optimizations’ that make your code slow instead of fast on the new platform.

Go read the Licensing Consulting blog! I know this is a non-technical post for once, but it’s a very good read for anybody remotely interested in the financials and business methods of Oracle and other Database vendors, to some extent. Good posts to start with are  Oracle ULA contract agreement risk factors and The Oracle Support Recalculation issue.

Oracle’s Critical Patch Update July 2010 is out, with two easy to exploit DoS vulnerabilities in the Database network stack (although one on Windows only), and one critical vulnerability in the OLAP component – let’s just hope that this one opens the DB for attack if OLAP is actually linked in… because I guess most people’s Oracle will not have OLAP built in.

There are three more DB vulnerabilities – check the DB matrix in the appendix for details.

As usual our lucky French Eric Maurice gives the full rundown at the Oracle Security Blog.

Oracle’s Critical Patch Update Pre-Release Announcement – July 2010 arrived online, and the nice folks at Integrigy already published their standard CPU pre-release analysis.

I’m a bit worried about the number of highly critical Database alerts, four out of six vulnerabilities are remotely exploitable without authentication. Hope that’s just on Windows (as was often the case in the past), or in obscure features or functions that aren’t enabled by default.

Oracle is inviting for its Oracle Business Intelligence 11g Launch on 7. July. Charles Phillips, President, and Thomas Kurian, Executive Vice President, Product Development are going to be at the London launch event, and will be broadcasted to local events throughout Europe. I may go to the Zurich launch event.

Oracle asks How Good Is Your Database Storage Management? I’ve not had time to go through the storage assessment form, so this is more a reminder for me to eventually look at it than anything else.

Oracle released APEX 4.0 a couple days ago. I’d be interested to hear if anybody knows of any enterprise grade deployments where APEX is used as a (lower tier) application layer, instead of full J2EE servers such as JBoss or Websphere.

Quest to combine Oracle with Hadoop: another one to show that Oracle is the clear market leader, and everybody trying to position themselves around them.

Quest Software has announced a new partnership with Cloudera to create an Oracle connector for the Apache Hadoop database. [...] The new tool not only handles data transfers, but also implements the meta information in Hadoop classes, allowing applications to be run with Oracle as well as Hadoop. Ora-Oop is to ensure that data can be exchanged equally well in both directions.