Oracle Week 2017: Docker Concepts for Oracle/MySQL DBAs and DevOps (slides)

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Oracle Week in Israel is a reason for celebration. Every year (and for the past 24 years), between a 1500 and 2000 Oracle professional are gathered for a 5 days conference on Oracle related educational topics. Each day is a full-day seminar on a specific topic – 9am to 4:30pm talking about something related to Oracle technologies. This year, I had 4 full-day back-to-back seminars – which is way more than the average speaker. Some of the sessions were on topics I spoke on last year and the year before (SQL and PL/SQL), but some were completely new.

This seminar was about Docker Containers: introduction and how to use them combined with Oracle RDBMs and MySQL.

Before the conference, I wasn’t totally sure if it’s going to open. The minimum requirement to open a session is around 10-12 people and the organizer warned me that the chances are slim – but I was sure this is a “hot” topic and submitted this topic anyway.  I was surprised to see that over 30 people registered to the session – and stayed just until the end. The feedbacks were also great (4.95 out of 5) so thank you guys! 🙂

Docker Containers

Docker is an open source software development platform. Its main benefit is to package applications in container, a lightweight, stand-alone, executable package of a piece of software that includes everything needed to run it: code, runtime, system tools, system libraries, settings. The container isolates the software from its surroundings, for example differences between development and staging environments, and helps reduce conflicts between teams running different software on the same infrastructure. That means that we can create and maintain a simple deployable “boxes” of “application” (or micro-services) – including code and databases.

One of the cool things you can do with it is to deploy a full-scale Oracle RDBMS (or MySQL or other NoSQL solutions) in a matter of minutes. No need to install OS, pre-requirements or even create an instance – it’s all self contained in the container itself.

In this session we learned how to use Docker, how to use it with databases and why it might be a good idea to combine them. We even had an open discussion about ideas how to implement this in different environment.

This is the Agenda for the session:
Docker overview – why do we even need containers?
Installing Docker and getting started
Images and Containers
Docker Networks
Docker Storage and Volumes
Oracle and Docker
Docker tools, GUI and Swarm

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Zohar Elkayam at ilOUG meetup

ilOUG meetup: Oracle 12c New Features For Better Performance (slides)

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It’s been a while since the Israeli user group (iloug) had a technology meetup (SIG meeting). The last time that happened was over two years ago – and since then, we only had the bigger conferences with guests from all over the world. Yesterday we renewed that long time tradition and held such a meetup.

Although I am not part of the OUG board (and not for the lack of trying, just no elections for a very long time), I volunteered to help host the meeting together with Oracle Ace Associate Oren Nakdimon (@dboriented, http://db-oriented.com). I also presented a new session: “Oracle 12c New Features For Better Performance” (see below for the agenda and slide deck).

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Oracle Week 2016: Introduction to Apache Spark (slides)

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This is the presentation for Rapid Cluster Computing with Apache Spark session I did in Oracle Week few weeks ago.

I wrote about the Oracle Week conference in a previous post so I won’t go over that again – this was my 3rd session of that week.

Although Oracle Week was for years about Oracle related products, this year they decided to open it up for other technologies as well. They had NoSQL sessions, Hadoop sessions, and even open stack sessions (including ElasticSearch and others). I was fortunate enough to be accepted to give this session which was about Apache Spark.

Apache Spark is the ad-hoc solution for every new Big Data project we encounter in the last year or so. Spark is a cluster solution which uses the Map Reduce paradigm without the need for a Hadoop cluster. It is based on handling the different map-reduce function in-memory and orchestrate everything internally. If you do have a Hadoop deployment, it can interact with it very easily using its internal master or using YARN instead.

This seminar is an introduction level for Oracle DBAs and other database developers. It’s main goal is to get to know this amazing technology. In the session we go over Spark Core, RDDs, how to develop for clusters and some behind the scenes for better understanding. Some of the presentation does require programming backgrounds (Java, Scala, Python) but I tried to cut it to the minimum.

To my surprise, this seminar had around 35 percipient (which was way more than I expected), and got 4.91/5 in the feedback. I presented a similar session in another conference back in March but this is an updated version of that slide deck.

Here is the Agenda:

  • The Big Data problem and possible solutions
  • Basic Spark Core
  • Working with RDDs
  • Working with Spark Cluster and Parallel programming
  • Spark modules: Spark SQL and Spark Streaming (by Ishay Wayner)
  • Performance and Troubleshooting

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Oracle Week 2016: Advanced PL/SQL Optimizing for Better Performance (slides)

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This is the presentation for Oracle Advanced PL/SQL session I did in Oracle Week 2016, a few weeks ago.

I wrote about the Oracle Week conference in the previous post so I won’t go over that again… 🙂

This presentation was all about PL/SQL. Most of it are things that are quite some old, but for some reason people seem to miss out on them. The presentation is divided into 3 parts.

The first one is development and it takes up most of the day. We talk about complex data types, cursors and things that are into PL/SQL should probably know. In this part I also try to add some new features and stuff that people will find interesting, or else it gets really boring. The second part is about the compilation processes and the last part is about tuning.

This year presentation was quite big – around 40 people in the class and got excellent feedback: 4.97/5 for overall satisfaction.

Here is the agenda:

  • Developing PL/SQL:
    • Composite datatypes, advanced cursors, dynamic SQL, tracing, and more…
  • Compiling PL/SQL:
    • Dependencies, optimization levels, and DBMS_WARNING
  • Tuning PL/SQL:
    • GTT, Result cache and Memory handling
  • Oracle 11g, 12cR1 and 12cR2 new useful features
  • SQL Developer Command Line tool

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Oracle Week 2016: Oracle Database Advanced Querying 2016 (slides)

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This is the presentation for Oracle Advanced Querying session I did in Oracle Week few weeks ago.

Since most of my readers aren’t from Israel, let explain a bit about this event. Oracle Week is by far the biggest Oracle oriented conference/event in Israel. It’s a 5 days conference that is being organized by John Bryce Education (a technology schooling company) and has around 1500 participants each year. It’s an educational event – meaning, as less promotion/sell speeches as possible.

One of the main differences between this event and other conferences is the platform: instead of having five or six 45-60 minutes sessions, back to back – the event has 10-12 different day long sessions every day, for 5 days. Each session is from 9:00 until 16:30 (with breaks, of course) so there are enough time to go over many different aspects of the same topic.

This session is one of the crown jewels. For years it was considered to be the largest session in the conference (with 60-80 attendees) and couple of years ago it landed in my laps.

This year session was very good. The participant reviews was around 4.8/5 and course material were around 4.9/5 which was awesome.  We had around 45 people in the class what smaller than last year but still the biggest session of the day.

This year agenda included some of 12.2 new features (the ones I got to actually test, not all of them) which was a big improvment on last years session.

In the agenda:

  • Aggregative and advanced grouping options
  • Analytic functions, ranking and pagination
  • Hierarchical and recursive queries
  • Regular Expressions
  • Oracle 12c new rows pattern matching
  • XML and JSON handling with SQL
  • Oracle 12c (12.1 + 12.2) new features
  • SQL Developer Command Line tool

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MySQL 5.7 New Features for Developers (slides)

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This is a presentation from outside my comfort zone – MySQL. So as most of you know, I usually do sessions about Oracle core technologies (rdbms), Big Data (Hadoop) and Spark. Even though I’ve been working with MySQL for quite some time, I never considered myself to be much of an expert – it was just always in the background.

Since I decided 2016 is going to be a year of challenges in my last year resolution, I choose to take the things I learned using MySQL 5.7 and make them into a public session. I consulted some of my co-workers, and decided that the best thing will be to start with MySQL for Developers. I took everything I thought that might interest developers and off we went.

I submitted this session to couple of user group conferences (and to the Oracle Open World) – but the first conference that it actually was presented at was DOAG 2016 in Germany. Since then, I presented this in two other events (the MySQL meetup in Israel and in a private event) and got some really positive feedback.

In the agenda:

  • Optimizer, Performance and InnoDB changes
  • Native JSON datatype
  • The Performance Schema and SYS Schema
  • Other features we should know
  • What are we waiting for in MySQL 8.0?

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