Geo Me This

Photo by .schill from Flickr used under Creative Commons

Wow, geo is a hot topic lately, with coverage, announcements and features dropping every day.
Here’s a summary of what I’ve seen lately that caught my interest:

Gowalla appears to be preparing an API.
MyTown has 500,000 users, even though no one talks about it.
Yelp is adding location checkins to [...]

Waiting Your Turn in the Import Queue

Our mothers taught us to wait our turn. We learned that lesson, but it’s much easier said than done. When we do things like import records into CRM On Demand, we expect immediate results. Usually, our imports are processed in 4 minutes or less and we move along happily, but every once in a while [...]

No time for downtime but still want to be secure?

The October 2009 Critical Patch Update (CPU) was released earlier this week. Applying security patches is the foundation of Database Security as per Noel Yuhanna’s Database Security Strategy report. But a lot of customers struggle with applying the quarterly CPU because of 7×24 operational requirements which prevent them from bringing their database down for more [...]

Maximizing Siebel Uptime

For all those of you who have a technical bent, we have published a white paper with our recommendations on how to devise an architecture to keep your Siebel application running. This is one of the many benefits of owning both the application and the technology stack.
Check out Reducing Siebel Downtime with a Local [...]

Out Of Time? – Use The Shotgun or Reboot..

Preface
Last weekend was pretty exciting. We were upgrading our customer’s production 11.5.9 Oracle Applications instance to 10.2.0.3 and part of the effort was applying the ATG Family pack H.RUP6 patch. We were getting some really weird errors while doing the production run, something we had never seen before in the pre-production rounds (we did 6 [...]

The CIO asked: How long has my production database been down?

And I had no answer for him. I couldn’t blame him. CIOs want to know this kind of information. Better still, he would have liked a pie chart depicting it like this:

I wish..
Well, for once, it would have been nice if Oracle 9i or 10g kept the historical startup or shutdown information in the v$ [...]

Time saving tactic: How we saved 6 hrs of downtime in production 10g upgrade

Preface
So you want to upgrade your database to 10g from 9i. Well, welcome to the club.
If you have RAC, then you will definitely need to install the CRS and database binaries, along with some RDBMS patches.
When we were challenged with keeping the downtime to within 24 hrs by a customer, that set us [...]

crsctl start crs does not work in 10gR2

Preface
Nowadays, we are doing a 10g upgrade for one of our clients and hit upon the idea of pre-staging the 10gR2 CRS + DB technology stack on their RAC servers that are running 9iR2 RAC on HP service gaurd already. This is nothing but a downtime reduction technique, that saved about 5-6 hours. Thankfully, [...]

Wednesday OpenWorld Sessions…

Wednesday was a slash and burn day for me. I woke up and decided I couldn’t cope with any more sessions so I ditched the lot. Some of the RAC ones looked really cool, but I just couldn’t drag myself out of the seat to go to them. Instead I went to the OTN lounge [...]

Programming Note

So, we changed hosts last week, and now, Network Redux (@networkredux) in beautiful Portland, Oregon is handling our beloved blog.
If you’re wondering, it’s pronounced re-ducks, not re-do. That one always gets me.
Anyway, this move should clear up some of the issues we’ve had recently with downtime and running out of memory.
There have been some oddities, [...]