It's not easy to become an Oracle Certified Master

Last week I was to take the Oracle 10g OCM exam in Berlin.
It is the second time that I had registered for this challenge this year
and it is the second time that the event was cancelled by
Oracle University Germany.

I had already booked my flight, made reservations for acommodation,
even taken a few days off of work, not to speak about all the prep efforts I had put into it again.

It is a pity that the next possible date is December 1st. in London.
I will be speaking in Parma at the Italian Usergroup Meeting at that time.

I think I will not try it a third time this year.
Hopefully the chances for such an event to actually take place will be better next year.

New special last week was the rental car I had rented at the airport.
It was a nice little Alfa Romeo, only that its software was a little buggy obviousely.
I all of a sudden could not close the windows on teh drivers side any more.
So I had to drive about 100 km across the highway with an open window.

It was not my week obviousely.

Oracle ACE awarded

Today I received an email with the following text:
... I am pleased to inform you that you have been nominated by XXX to receive the Oracle ACE award. You have been chosen based on your significant contribution and activity in the Oracle technical community. Like your fellow Oracle ACEs, you have demonstrated a proficiency in Oracle technology as well as a willingness to share your knowledge and experiences with the community....






This makes me feel very proud and I would like to thank all those people who have encouraged me to keep on blogging and writing on Oracle New Features in variouse tech mags.

I'll stay in touch with you!

The best Sushi in Geneva

Today I went for lunch to a little Sushi Take Away Restaurant in Geneva
with my group from CERN.














It is located under the train station of Cornavin.
Here are the contact data:
Zim Zun
Metro Shopping Gare Cornavin
Tel.: 022 7310182









They have this very huge variety of freshly made Sushies of all kinds












and the prices are really reasonable.
You pay between CHF 2 and 3,80 per piece













And the women who sell the stuff, there are only women working,
are so lovely!












... and they even sell other asian specialities from the wok.


I really want to recommend this restaurant!!

Teaching CERN how to pump the data

This week I deliver a special training in Geneva for a bunch of DBAs from the CERN.
These guyes are really special.


They are always a few steps ahead with their questions.
Very advanced students! They really give me a hard time.
And we have a lot of fun.
Of course they are more interested in the internals and the background than in GUIs, which makes it more challenging and more fun to teach them.

They told me that CERN is stiil in the testing phase and their large databases are in the terabytes at the moment.

Once they will go life with the experiments they will have databases in the petabytes range.
Of course they use ASM for the storage because they have periodes of very high high volume throughput. They also use Grid Control and of course everything is clustered at the CERN. Only RAC databases with 6 nodes for each cluster.
Today I will demonstrate the datapump and ASM and how to migrate a database into an ASM storage with RMAN.

30000 th pageload this year

I reached the 30000 th poageload this year with my blog.


The tendency is clear!
Thanks for reading my blog!

	Page Loads	Unique Visitors	First Time Visitors	Returning Visitors
Total	30,256	21,641	17,501	4,140
Average	2,751	1,967	1,591	376
Month	Page Loads	Unique Visitors	First Time Visitors	Returning Visitors
Nov 2006	2,712	2,081	1,674	407
Oct 2006	5,618	4,193	3,369	824
Sep 2006	3,608	2,691	2,125	566
Aug 2006	4,709	3,320	2,784	536
Jul 2006	3,770	2,766	2,211	555
Jun 2006	3,459	2,376	1,870	506
May 2006	3,504	2,355	1,913	442
Apr 2006	1,713	1,234	1,066	168
Mar 2006	704	431	360	71
Feb 2006	160	86	66	20
Jan 2006	299	108	63	45

Raising my own business

After six years of being an Oracle employee
I have decided to leave the company and
raise my own business.






Starting from January 2007
I will be available for the following projects :
- Oracle consulting projects
- Oracle coaching
- Oracle trainings

It was a great pleasure for me to deliver courses for Oracle University.
Therefore I will continue to deliver courses for Oracle University Switzerland and its partners.

Also I am available for projects internationally
and still have free capacitie for the first weeks of 2007.

If you are interesting in booking me,
pls use my email contact in my profile here for now.
I will have a new website for my company soon with a new contact
and will publish it here also.

I have been an instructor for Oracle 8i, 9i and 10g core courses and have delivered
in Switzerland, Germany, Great Britain and the U.S.A. the following courses:
- Database Administration,
- New Features,
- Performance Tuning,
- Advanced Backup & Recovery with RMAN,
- Database Programming with PL/SQL,
- Technical Overviews


I have delivered special courses and events like:
- Oracle Expert night (Zurich , Geneva)
- New Features Workshop 10gR2 (New York, Chicago, New Jersey, London)
- Performance Tuning Workshop - Memory Management Oracle 10g
- The new Oracle 10gR2 suggested Backup Strategy (Swiss Oracle Usergroup)

I am still working on upcoming special events about:
- Oracle 11g New Features Overview
- RAC 10gR2 overview
- Oracle Data Guard

DBMS_SERVICE and net service names

Oracle 10gR1 was the first release to come with the package DBMS_SERVICE.
This package can be used to manage services for single instances.
There are procedures for creation , activation, deactivation, and removing of services.
We can measure workloads and limit resources through services and there are more and more concepts which are using services.
A RAC has the capability of managing services across instances.

The package contains a number of constants, exceptions and subprogramms.

Here is an example for the creation of a service on a single instance:

SQL> exec dbms_service.CREATE_SERVICE(SERVICE_NAME=> 'HALLO', NETWORK_NAME=> 'OTTO')
PL/SQL procedure successfully completed.

SQL> exec dbms_service.START_SERVICE('HALLO')
SQL> show parameter service
NAME TYPE VALUE
------------------------------------ ----------- ------------------------------
service_names string OTTO

The confusing thing here is that the parameter NETWORK_NAME is in fact the value returned in the initialization parameter SERVICE_NAMES!

And the parameter SERVICE_NAME is the values used for the net service name in tnsnames.ora!!

This is crazy I think! How confusing and misleading this is!

Therefore you should use the same value for both parameters in the call of the procedure!

I will present @ Italian Oracle User Group in Parma

On December 1st. I will deliver a presentation of
Oracle's new recommended backup strategy
at the annual meeting of the Italian Oracle User Group in Parma.

I will use two ASM diskgroups,
and migrate a database from file system into the ASM storage using RMAN.

Then I will demonstrate how we can get around a full restore
by switching to an image copy of the database in the
flash recovery area, which I have incrementally updated.

Looking foreward to Parma!