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Welcome to the programmer's playground

Written by Martin

Wednesday, 08 October 2008 00:00

The-playground... What an odd name, I have to admit now - I thought it'll remind visitors of the inspiring website run by Sun Microsystems, and which interestingly hasn't been rebranded with the Oracle logo: playground.sun.com.

However this is the domain name I have registered and there are quite a few hits on Internet search engines so it's not wise to migrate elsewhere.

Anyway, I am now trying to regularly update the site with bits and pieces, mainly around Oracle and Linux or Oracle on Linux.

About Myself

Describing oneself is always hard, let's try this: I started working with the Oracle DBMS since 2001. Since mid 2010 I have raised my bar considerably by starting my own consultancy company, "Martin Bach Consulting Ltd".

My main interests are high availability and disaster recovery solutions for mission critical 24x7 systems for which I possess a wealth of experience. For some years now I spent more and more time discovering the benefits of virtualisation technologies for Oracle products, mainly by using VMWare ESX Server and Oracle VM. With Red Hat's decision to back KVM in favor of their own virtualisation solution I started to look at KVM more carefully. One of the benefits of being a consultant is to get around-my current customer is one of the UK's biggest Exadata customers and I enjoy working with that technology a lot.

As of December 2008 I am a proud member of the Oracle Certified Master community, having successfully passed the exam for Database 10g Release 2. I am equally proud of my Oracle ACE status, a reward I received in August 2010. And if that wasn't enough, I am now a member of the Oak Table Network too.

When not trying to get the best out of the Oracle database or working on understanding its internals, I can be found presenting at various UKOUG meetings in the south of England. In the remaining spare time I contributes to the Oracle Scene and DOAG news, the UK and German Oracle User Group publications as well as the iX magazine which is read by over 50 000 people in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

Still curious? Google me!

Essential skills:

Oracle Exadata
Installation and administration of Oracle 8i through 11g R2 on Solaris, Linux, AIX and Windows in RAC, active/passive and single instance configuration
Very strong knowledge of all Oracle core technologies (RMAN, Data Guard, Real Application Cluster, Streams, Automatic Storage Management, Security)
Enterprise Manager Grid Control 12c and 11g Release 1
SQL Performance Tuning
Oracle database server virtualisation on VMWare and OracleVM
Oracle Database Certified Master 10g Release 2
Oracle ACE
Oak Table Member
Oracle Database 10g: Administering Real Application Clusters Certified Expert
Oracle Certified Professional (OCP) for Database Releases 9i and 10g

I have registered with the following social networking sites (click on the image to get to the profile):

Last Updated on Thursday, 24 November 2011 09:49

Publications Update

Written by Martin
Tuesday, 23 December 2008 16:28
New blog went online After some years now with my venerable joomla-based blog I have decided to go with the tide and get a wordpress-based blog as well. Check it out on http://martincarstenbach.wordpress.com/ This has been a great success, in the time it was up I got severely hooked on those blog stats. Keep coming, new posts will be announced via twitter: http://twitter.com/MartinDBA Pro Oracle Database 11g RAC on Linux It is my great pleasure to announce that I am co-author of Pro Oracle Database 11g RAC on Linux, together with Steve Shaw. The book is now released! The Apress website lists the book here: http://apress.com/book/view/1430229586 From the initial reviews it seems that we have fulfilled a big demand for an end-to-end RAC on Linux book, the initial reviews are very promising. Oracle User Community and iX A new article of mine has just been released in the latest issue of DOAG news, detailing Grid Infrastructure 11.2. I have submitted another article to Oracle Scene, this time complete with my biography to be published in spring 2011. The latest printed article in English was published in the (Summer) Oracle Scene about MRP0 problems and how to deal with them.In addition there is a paper for the 2nd part of my data guard broker article, which went out with Oracle Scene 38. Issue 01/2010 of heise's ix featured an article about execution plan stability in Oracle. I have another one in the pipeline dealing with RAC 11.2 improvements. The article I announced about detailing database consolidation using 10g RAC, with the use of services, resource manager and the like has been published in iX 6/2009. Speaking of an Oracle user group publication - there was an article about streams replication published in the summer issue of DOAG news (but unfortunately they don't provide a listing so I can't link there). Click on the "more..." link to see all my publications.
Last Updated on Friday, 18 February 2011 11:28
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Presentation Update

Written by Martin
Tuesday, 23 December 2008 16:37
Upcoming presentations and public appearances: To be defined I'm wrapping up the year, and get ready for new challenges ahead. I'll update this section of the blog once I have settled for an agenda. I can see myself present at the UKOUG Availability Infrastructure & Management SIG Meeting to start with... Recent presentations and public appearances: UKOUG Annual Conference, December 5-7th, Birmingham I am very pleased with the fact that for the second time was presenting at the annual UKOUG conference. Slides of my talks (except the one about the private cloud) are uploaded. Introduction to Oracle HA - webcast on www.OracleRAC SIG, October 27th, 2011 This introductory level session aims at providing an overview of Oracle High Availability options to users of traditional single instance Oracle deployments who are interested in ways to make their database more highly available. RAC & HA SIG, September 21st, London Cloud-computing is a big subject today and many enterprises invest a lot of time and effort into an evaluation of the hype. Instead of relying on external providers such as AWS or its competition for an application, many users start consolidating applications into their own, in-house or privately managed cloud. A recent announcement from Oracle Corporation about the Cloud File System underlines the importance the big players in the market attribute to the concept. Upgrading to Oracle 11.2 - webcast on www.oracleRACSIG.org, July 28th 2011 It is my great pleasure to be part of the numerous great presenters from oracleracsig.org, a superb RAC related site with lots of useful information about RAC and HA. My presentation details steps and user experience for an upgrade project, going from 10.2 to 11g Release 2. The presentation has not yet been announced on www.oracleracsig.org but should appear there shortly Grid Infrastructure and Database HA Deep Dive Seminar - June 22nd Vienna After the successful seminar in Switzerland I continued my summer tour in Vienna for a second seminar. Grid Infrastructure and Database HA Deep Dive Seminar - June 20th Baden (CH) The very first seminar I held over the course of a whole day details all the important aspects around Oracle HA in general, from single instance to the multi-node RAC system. Special emphasis is placed on the lower level components such as Grid Infrastructure and ASM. A session about workload managment and consolidation closes the seminar which was well received by the participants.
Last Updated on Monday, 12 December 2011 21:33
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