New Job Leads to Exciting New Topics. A Preview of Upcoming Blogs.

This is a hard blog for me to write. I'm attempting to tell you what we do here without this blog coming across as a blatant sales pitch. I am just very excited about the benefits that my new job will provide to readers of this blog. The scope of topics will be much more broad and I have access to technicians that are truly experts in the various database disciplines and advanced database features.

What We Do
I am finally beginning to get settled in here at Contemporary Technologies' RemoteDBA Experts. CTi RemoteDBA Experts provides remote database administration services for Oracle, Microsoft and IBM databases to customers across the globe. We provide both complete and supplemental database outsourcing services.

One of our more popular offerings is database project work. This set of services includes upgrading databases and applications (database vendor and third-party), installing and configuring highly available environments for all three major database products (RAC, Failsafe, Data Guard, SQL Server Clustering, etc.), database tuning and architecture design. We also provide remote operating system support for Windows, Linux and all flavors of UNIX.

Broadening the Scope of this Blog
When you work for one company, the technologies that you work with are limited to what is implemented there. You can certainly create your own test environments to learn new technologies and database features but you can't really become an expert until you administer that environment on a daily basis.

Working for a remote database services provides me with access to many different database features and technologies. Our customer's environments range the spectrum, from data warehouses to OLTP environments that have thousands of active connections. The range of technologies and third-party applications utilized is also broad. Name a database feature, third-party product, operating system or technology and I would be surprised if we didn't support it.

Leveraging In-House Experts
Customers who "give" their environments to you to administer remotely are doing so because they feel your organization has the expertise to provide a superior level of support. That takes a lot of trust on the customer's part. When you promote yourselves as "the experts", you better have the talent to back it up. I'm pleased to say that my fellow technicians at CTi RemoteDBA Experts have that high level of expertise required to keep our customers happy.

My new company has recognized that no single technician can become an expert in everything, so they are have created silos of expertise. All technicians here have strong expertise in day-to-day administration, but we also have identified certain database features that require a high level of expertise to administer successfully.

We have identified these silos of expertise and assign administrators to them. We have personnel that focus on security, regulatory compliance (SARBOX), highly available architectures (RAC, Failsafe, Data Guard), Oracle applications support, advanced administration tactics, monitoring, database/operation system interoperability, etc.. When a person comes on board at RemoteDBA Experts, we determine what areas of database support they are most interested in. We understand that technicians will be the best at doing things they like. We then assign them to that silo.

Since I am certainly not an expert in all of facets of technology, I intend to leverage my fellow technician's expertise to improve the quality of this blog.

A Preview of What's Coming in the Near Future

10G RAC
One area that we specialize in is highly available architectures. We support numerous RAC environments for our customers. My next blog will be an introduction to one of our resident RAC experts, Scott Rupnik. Before we delve into the technical details of installing and administering RAC environments, I thought it would be interesting to interview Scott to obtain a high level perspective of RAC, the benefits it provides and how to install and administer it effectively.

Data Guard
Data Guard is another feature that is often used to improve the availability of Oracle database environments. Oracle's Data Guard is becoming a popular solution to the problem of providing highly available architectures at a reasonably low cost. Oracle Data Guard is a failover environment that uses a single system to run the user applications until a failure occurs. Then the backup system is engaged and takes over for the primary system. The primary system can then be repaired or replaced. I'm pretty well versed in setting up and administering Data Guard but we have technicians here that have much more expertise than I do.

Oracle Applications Support
One of our more popular offerings is Oracle Applications Support. This includes Oracle applications as well as Peoplesoft. Joseph Greene, Bob Kline and Sandi Starr are three of our senior-level experts. I'll start the series of blogs on supporting Oracle Applications with another high level interview and then hopefully "turn the keys" over to them for a couple of blogs

Converting Oracle Applications from UNIX to LINUX
One thing that surprised me when I came here was how popular this conversion is becoming. Once I began to talk to the folks here, I understood why. The costs of supporting an Oracle application on LINUX are so much lower than supporting the same application on UNIX that companies are able to justify the conversion costs. This is a very popular service for us. I intend to write a blog that provides the details on the lower support costs and the tricks of the trade we use to make the transition as seamless as possible.

Oracle on Windows, LINUX, UNIX
One of the great benefits of Oracle is that it runs on many different operating systems. If you have worked with Oracle for any length of time you know that the standard interfaces to the environment are not dependent on the operating system. You execute the same SQL statements to administer a database on LINUX as you do UNIX and Windows. But you must also have a firm understanding of the operating system the database runs on to administer it effectively. DBAs don't have to be full-blown operating system administrators but they must know how the operating system works. In addition, DBAs should be able to write operating system scripts and understand the operating system's command line interface.

Several of our administrators here are not only database administrators but ex-operating system support technicians. We have folks that administer LINUX, most flavors of UNIX and all versions of Windows. I'll provide a few blogs on database/operating system tips and tricks for some of the more popular operating systems we support.

Regulatory Compliance and Security
My last task at Giant Eagle was to work with the SARBOX auditors. Although Giant Eagle isn't a publicly traded company, they felt it was important to comply with SARBOX regulations. One of my fellow employees, Sandi Starr has extensive experience in SARBOX and helps our customers put the proper practices and procedures in place to ensure that they comply with the numerous regulations SARBOX requires.

Summary
It looks like I'll have a lot to blog about in the future. I've covered only a few of the technologies and database features that are now available to me. I intend to mix the content up to keep the blog fresh. I don't intend to stop blogging about Oracle 10G Grid Control. Although my next blog will be on RAC, the one after that will be on 10G R2's DBConsole. I'm using it quite heavily here and I'm impressed with its capabilities.

Thanks for reading.