Last night I watched almost the entire 5 hour live webcast announcing Oracle’s strategies regarding the Sun Microsystems acquisition. As a near-evangelist for Sun and Solaris, I’m very happy with the deal finally going through and even happier that most of what Oracle said makes sense to me as a customer.

Obviously, it is easy…

While the data sheet claims support for Solaris, there are several caveats which I have run into.

1. There is no mention of ZFS support in the data sheet and apparently, there is no support in the software either. One would expect this to be a non-question since ZFS has been part…

You may say, “It only takes me 3 hours to do a full backup of everything”, but over time backup windows are notorious for becoming too small. Backups are split over multiple days, technologies upgraded, etc. When planning a backup strategy, my approach is to eliminate the backup window altogether- that is do whatever…

When discussing availability of a service, it is common to hear the term “Five Nines” referring to a service being available 99.999% of the time but “Five Nines” are relative.
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In reality, none of those calculations are relevant because no one cares if a service is unavailable for 10 hours, as long as they…

Reporting projects are the kind of projects which never seem to end. After a couple iterations I’ve come to the following conclusions:

Absolutely no reports should run on a production database.
Moving/aggregating data from a production database to a reporting database using ETL tools prone to synchronization issues and pretty unreliable.
The best option is to set…