Friday Tips #30
Posted on June 1, 2013 at 6:01 am by Chris Kawalek | Comments Off
I'm always a fan of round numbers, and today we bring you the 30th edition of our Friday tips series!
This week, it's another video on the Oracle VM Command Line Interface video from Greg King, Principal Best Practices Consultant, Oracle VM Product Management. This one covers the object relationships in the Oracle VM command line interface:
Thanks Greg!
See you all next week with another tip.
-Chris
Oracle Database Appliance is a complete solution in a box
Posted on June 1, 2013 at 3:32 am by margaret hamburger | Comments Off
Just in case you missed the launch earlier this month, Oracle Database Appliance X3-2 hosts both databases and application workloads for a variety of complete solutions in a box.May 2013 Oracle Certification E-Magazine
Posted on June 1, 2013 at 1:56 am by Harold Green | Comments Off
We all want to get the best jobs, work on great projects, attract and retain top employees, and advance our careers. As we all know, there's no "holy grail" or single tool to accomplish all of that (despite my wishes). Rather, these goals require a multitude of skill combinations, work and life experiences, temperaments, ambitions, and a latticework of training courses/programs over the years. When the moment comes for you to find the best person for a project or acquire a full-time employee to work in your group, you get mere moments to try and assess all of these pieces and more. As a candidate, those same "mere moments" apply to you as you try and showcase your best in an extremely short amount of time.
Here at Oracle University we devote the specific attention of a cross-section of experts to architecting and delivering exams that separate the qualified from the 'not so qualified'. A very exacting science goes into the craft of building each test question, the resulting correct answer and each distractor (incorrect answer), the time allotments, the sequencing of the questions, the alpha and beta testing, and determine the exact cut score that is required to pass the exam.
Now while no employer should use this as a single tool to evaluate for advancement and new hires, it is an excellent resource to evaluate candidate technical ability. Candidates and management alike can review the knowledge domains and objectives for any our exams directly on our website at certification.oracle.com - where we list exactly what the qualified candidate has demonstrated that they are able to do and how well they can do it.
Candidates often use preparing for an Oracle Certification as both a training framework and an advancement tool, where the required work, study and practice pushes them in areas far outside the comfort zone of their day-to-day work. This broadening and deepening of skill sets is seen as a key advantage for both candidates and employer.
In this quarter's edition of the Oracle Certification E-Magazine, we focus on endorsing a new set of industry gurus in Oracle Database 11g Release 2 SQL Tuning and Oracle Exadata X3 Administration with the release of two new certifications: the "Oracle Certified Expert, Oracle Database 11g Release 2 SQL Tuning" and "Oracle Exadata X3 Administration Oracle Certified Expert" - both Oracle Certified Expert (OCE) certifications, and both requiring passing only a single exam. If you work in these areas, have people working in these areas, or are hiring in these areas - I encourage you to check them out.
Harold Green
Sr. Manager, Oracle Certification Program
READ
MAY 2013 Oracle Certification E-Magazine
Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For May 31, 2013
Posted on May 31, 2013 at 11:22 pm by Todd Hoff | Comments Off
Hey, it's HighScalability time:
- 4PB: Ancestry.com's House of Us
- Quotable Quotes:
- @kellabyte: XBOX Live scaling up from 15,000 servers to 300,000 servers. That's some scale right there.
- @giuseppegurgone: [...] that could work for small projects. "why do we worry about scalability on day 1?" because tomorrow it could be too late :)
- Max Boot: American troops found their tactics and technology, still designed to defeat an opponent like the now defunct Red Army, woefully inadequate to deal with these new threats. In this sort of war, there were no flanks to turn, few bastions to storm, no capitals to seize.
- Steve Jobs on the power of having 120 million credit cards on file: You need us more than we need you.
- Netflix: Dystopia as a Service. Adrian Cockcroft describes an out of Eden world where hardware and software by nature sin against man and how you can fortify yourself against them with righteous coding.
Don't miss all that the Internet has to say on Scalability, click below and become eventually consistent with all scalability knowledge...
Featured Certification: Oracle Fusion Financials 11g General Ledger Certified Implementation Specialist
Posted on May 31, 2013 at 2:14 am by Harold Green | Comments Off
The "Oracle Fusion Financials 11g General Ledger Certified Implementation Specialist" certification is designed for implementation consultants who possess a strong foundation and expertise implementing and configuring the Fusion General Ledger application. This certification measures key knowledge and skills in areas such as General Set Up, Journal Processing, Sub Ledger Accounting, Intercompany Settlements, Other Accounting Activities, Reporting & Dashboards, and Business Intelligence in Fusion Financials. This certification differentiates candidates in the marketplace by providing a competitive edge through proven expertise. Up-to-date training and field experience are recommended.
AVAILABILITY
This certification is available to all candidates but is geared toward members of the Oracle Partner Network. OPN members earning this certification will be recognized as OPN Certified Specialists, helping OPN partner companies qualify for their "Oracle Fusion Financials 11g" Specialization.
EARNING THE CERTIFICATION
Earning this certification requires passing a single exam - "Oracle Fusion Financials 11g General Ledger Essentials" (exam 1Z0-508). This exam has 69 questions, requires a passing score of 67%, has a time limit of 2 hours, and is available now for registration at Pearson VUE with its more than 3,100 testing centers available worldwide.
RECOMMENDED TRAINING
Although training is not required for this certification, Oracle University offers the "Fusion Applications: Introduction to Financials Implementation" and "Fusion Applications: Accounting Hub Fundamentals" training courses to help ensure success on the certification exam. Additionally, OPN members have access to further training resources in the Guided Learning Path for this certification (Oracle web account login required).
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"The Specialization exams are meant to be challenging. The exam covers all of the product’s features, not just what is implemented most. In addition to hands-on experience, training is recommended (see the Study Guides). The exams are a "stake in the ground" to indicate to the marketplace that the Implementation Specialist possesses a specific level of knowledge. The Specialist may then differentiate themselves further through deep implementation experience. "The Oracle PartnerNetwork provides a number of resources to help in preparation for the Specialization Exam:
-Kim Miller, Senior Manager, Applications Partner Enablement at Oracle
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To get started, register now for the certification exam.
QUICK LINKS
- Certification Track: Oracle Fusion Financials 11g General Ledger Certified Implementation Specialist
- Certification Exam: Oracle Fusion Financials 11g General Ledger Essentials (Exam 1Z0-508)
- Register Now: Pearson VUE
- Learn More: Oracle Partner Network | OPN Specialization | Certified Specialist FAQ
- Study Guide: Oracle Fusion Financials 11g General Ledger Essentials (PDF)
Google Finds NUMA Up to 20% Slower for Gmail and Websearch
Posted on May 30, 2013 at 11:25 pm by Todd Hoff | Comments Off
When you have a large population of servers you have both the opportunity and the incentive to perform interesting studies. Authors from Google and the University of California in Optimizing Google’s Warehouse Scale Computers: The NUMA Experience conducted such a study, taking a look at how jobs run on clusters of machines using a NUMA architecture. Since NUMA is common on server class machines it's a topic of general interest for those looking to maximize machine utilization across clusters.
Some of the results are surprising:
The Bitmap Conspiracy
Posted on May 30, 2013 at 2:34 pm by rleishman | Comments Off
(with apologies to Robert Ludlum and Eric Van Lustbader)
The Bitmap Betrayal (Introduction)
Oracle performance tuning is an excellent source of myths. The very best ones have a group of adherents who continue to support the myth even when presented with counter-examples. Who’s heard of these?
- Joins are faster than sub-queries
- Sub-queries are faster than joins
- Full Table Scans are bad
Those ones have been around as long as I can remember. Probably the single greatest concentration of Oracle performance tuning myths centres on Bitmap Indexes. Are these familiar?
- Bitmap indexes are good for low-cardinality columns, whereas B-Tree indexes are good for high-cardinality columns.
- Bitmap indexes are slow to update.
- Bitmap indexes don't support concurrent updates.
Part 1 – The Bitmap Identity
Posted on May 30, 2013 at 2:12 pm by rleishman | Comments Off
What is a Bitmap Index?
This is first post of the four-part epic - The Bitmap Conspiracy - detailing the structure and behaviour of Bitmap Indexes. Later in the series we will cover the internal structure of Bitmap Indexes, how Oracle uses them, and finally we will expose some of the myths surrounding them. But before we get there let’s just get a clear understanding of what a Bitmap Index actually is.
Part 2 – The Bitmap Supremacy
Posted on May 30, 2013 at 1:46 pm by rleishman | Comments Off
The Structure of a Bitmap Index
I’ve been tuning Oracle database applications for a long time now. I started out recognising some simple patterns and applying template fixes (Got a full table scan? Use an index!) but such a collection of “Do this; don’t do that” anecdotes will only take you so far. If you are curious (I was), you can uncover the reasons why one method is faster than another; i.e. what is the computer doing to make slow code so slow. I found that a good understanding of the internals meant that you didn’t always need to know how to tune a specific example because you could work it out for yourself.
In a database application, these investigations frequently lead to data structures; how does the database store its information and how does it retrieve it? Good information on the internals of Bitmap Indexes is hard to piece together, so in Part 2 of this Bitmap Indexing epic we will look more closely at the internals of Bitmap indexes.
Part 3 – The Bitmap Dominion
Posted on May 30, 2013 at 1:31 pm by rleishman | Comments Off
Bitmap Execution Plans
This is Part 3 of The Bitmap Conspiracy, a four part epic on Bitmap Indexes.
In Part 1 we touched briefly on how Oracle can use Bitmap Indexes to resolve queries by translating equality and range predicates into bitmap retrievals. Now that we know more about how they are stored (see Part 2), let’s look closer at some of the operations that Oracle uses to access Bitmap Indexes and manipulate bitmaps.
