www.xmldb.nl Posts

March 11

I never find it very easy to try to capture the atmosphere during a conference, the presenting part, the presentations or the discussions, for example, you could have with the presenters. Hotsos is such a cool and unique event were you have the opportunity, to listen but also to interact. The amount of people that attend isn’t that big, only a few hundreds, but they share all the same passion, the passion to improve on performance, mostly Oracle related. It has only two tracks and its not uncommon that people present and than go afterwards to a presentation to listen in what the other presenter has to say.

Due to the fact that it is manageable in terms of choice, located on a convenient location and well organized, you have the opportunity to pick just the thing you like and most of the time not miss out on “the other” presentation you would have liked to see. Besides that people stay in (overnight in the Hotel), so discussions about the technology, the method or an example during a presentation will be discussed in far more detail than you normally would do, from presenter to presenter or from presenter to the guy that attended and vice versa. The fact that all have the passion for performance or that they realize that performance is a beast with various angles to approach, bounds, and every point, every question is one to be heard and/or discussed. On equal terms. If you have seen my video impressions of Hotsos in 2009, you get a bit of what I am trying to say.

Anyway, not being a native speaker and with my new “flip” at hand (Ultra HD), I just show you how much fun and interesting stuff is going on, probably this will do more right to those presentations than me trying to explain what all those new ideas which were that popped into my head during this years Hotsos Symposium…although…sometimes technology helps and sometimes it just doesn’t…or is it a VMware thing Doug…?

My agenda is not that much different then the one from Doug. The moment it is mentioning RAC related stuff, then I probably would have been attending the other guy.

The Monday started great with a small introduction of Tom Kyte’s generally unknown other qualities…

…Enjoy…

March 7

Its Sunday and its raining outside. The nice weather on Saturday (approx. sunny / 20 degrees Celsius) has gone. After a decent flight on Friday where I actually made it to switch in Houston from the international Continental flight, going through customs and pick the next one, a domestic Continental Express flight, within the boundaries of 1 and 1/2 hour. I was so fast that switching for one flight to the other, that apparently my luggage didn’t manage to travel with the last flight. So after I found out that my luggage was still somewhere in Houston, I got from Dallas Love Field to the Omni Hotel in Las Colinas, Irving, where the Hotsos conference will be held again. The whole area is a bit in shambles because they are rebuilding a lot of the environment. While getting to the Grapevine Mills mall yesterday, I noticed that they also a building a new Irving Convention Center along the highway. Another addition to the already crowded Dallas/Plano/Irving Metroplex.

February 27

This story is long overdue and no its NOT about the Oracle Database 11g Database File System (DBFS). Its about an “undocumented” NFS functionality that, maybe someday, will be serviced by the XMLDB XDB Protocol Adapter. This post is “long overdue” because the actual attempts to try to figure it out were done during the bank holidays between X-mas and new year 2009.

So what is it all about. I once discovered in the Oracle 11gR1 documentation a small entry in the xmlconfig.xsd XML Schema regarding NFS elements that look like that they are or will be used for enabling NFS functionality based on the Oracle XMLDB Protocol Server architecture. In those days, when Oracle 11gR1 was just of the shelve, I made a few attempts, based on the xdbconfig.xsd XML Schema to adjust the corresponding xdbconfig.xml file that controls the XDB Protocol Server functionality, to see what would happen. At that time I only was able to get this far (see the picture) and I promised myself that I should look deeper into it trying to figure out if I could get it working and/or what the concepts were that made it tick in the XMLDB architecture but somewhere down the line I just didn’t come to it and it got “forgotten” by me due to my daily DBA workload.

NFS Protocol Server functionality enabled manually

Click picture to enlarge