A client of ours is just getting started with Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) and I wonder as time marches on how popular this cloud solution is going to play out for them and Amazon as a valid/useable service offering. Many times in the past we have encountered off-the-shelf solutions from vendor A based on [...]

With Oracle OpenWorld just around the corner & MySQL Connect already underway I can’t believe yet another year has passed.  This is my third OOW and I must have a following as folks are already reaching out to me on twitter @pythiansimmons (log buffer lady seems to be a handle I can’t seem to shake). [...]

In honor of our fifteenth anniversary, I have assembled a few nostalgic items from our earliest years in business.

On September 7, 1997 I went to the Ottawa U public library to come up with some names for the company Steve Pickard and I wanted to found the next morning. The goal was to choose the company name, register the dot-com, and then go incorporate it. I really felt that I lucked out when I discovered the word Pythian, which means “about the Pythia“. The Pythia was the Oracle of Delphi in ancient Greece. (Remember that we launched as an Oracle ecosystem services company, and our other practices came afterwards with MySQL launching in 2002 and SQL Server launching in 2005).

I was also delighted that the Pythian Games were also hosted by the Pythia, and those were the most important …

Isn’t that that time of the year again? Yes, it is — it’s time for our annual Oracle Bloggers Meetup and of course Oracle is piggybacking OpenWorld with the meetup again! ;) What: Oracle Bloggers Meetup 2011 When: Wed, 5-Oct-2011, 5:00pm Where: Main Dining Room, Jillian’s Billiards @ Metreon, 101 Fourth Street, San Francisco, CA [...]

Pythian’s Oracle ACE, Fahd Mirza appears in this month’s Community: Peer-to-Peer review “In With the New“, as published in the September/October 2011 issue of Oracle Magazine.

Fahd states that “Oracle Exadata Database Machine” has most changed his life – changing the game, and setting very high standards of performance, support, scalability, reliability and unification.

Shout out to Fahd from your peers at Pythian!

I guess there might be just a little truth to Pythian’s growing reputation as an “Oracle ACE Factory” ;), as recently mentioned by Justin Kestelyn in the May 11, 2011 OPN PartnerCast:

Please join me in congratulating Fahd by adding a …

Pythian is pleased to announce our speaking schedule at this year’s Oracle OpenWorld 2011, October 2-6, 2011 in San Francisco, CA.

We’re excited to be joined by our customers Western Union, and Worldwide Technologies (WWT) as we present real-world experiences and project success. If you’re attending, don’t miss the chance to hear our team of experts. Bring your toughest questions to be answered as they relate to any of the subjects below.

• Follow Pythian on LinkedIn for up to date OOW info
• Schedule a meeting with Pythian at OOW to discuss your database …

It’s a busy summer at Pythian, with our continuing wave of speaking sessions at upcoming community and regional industry events.

Coming to a city near you, watch for Pythian presenting hot Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server database topics:

IN CANADA:

Oracle Technology Days – Montreal
August 9, 2011 – 8:30am – 1pm, Hilton Montreal Bonaventure

• 11:00 am – Join Marc Fielding for Mixed Workload Management for Oracle Exadata
• More Pythian Oracle Exadata resources
• View the Evite
• Register/Inscrire

Oracle Technology Days – Toronto
August 25, …

Interesting question on human mistakes was posted on the DBA Managers Forum discussions today.

As human beings, we are sometimes make mistakes. How do you make sure that your employees won’t make mistakes and cause downtime/data loss/etc on your critical production systems?

I don’t think we can avoid this technically, probably working procedures is the solution.
I’d like to hear your thoughts.

I typed my thoughts and as I was finishing, I thought that it makes sense to post it on the blog too so here we go…

The keys to prevent mistakes are low stress levels, clear communications and established processes. Not a complete list but I think these are the top things to reduce the number of mistakes we make managing data infrastructure or for that matter working in any critical environment be it IT administration, …

Well day two here at PgEast has drawn to a close and it was another
very informative day.

Today I concentrated on the more common tasks of a Pg DBA so I attended three
talks (four if you count mine) that where rather heavy on the technical side of being a Pg DBA

Keven Kempter drew me back again with his excellent talk on Backup and recovery methods
this time giving some very good advice on how to use and abuse of pg_Dump_all and
PG_restore. He also touched on three different recipes PITR on ProstgreSQL and gave some handy
advice on when and why to use it.

I also caught another Mongo talk this time by Steve Francia it was on the application of Mongo
in a real world web retail store. He presented a very convincing argument for the NoSQL side of things in
the retail realm namely that RDBMS works great when you have but a few similar products
such as books, CDs and …

Sometimes I get questions as to whether Pythian is one of the competitors battling with Oracle for MySQL support. The answer lies in the distinction of product support and operational support.

At Pythian, we are laser focused on supporting applications and data infrastructure using Oracle, MySQL and Microsoft SQL Server products. A vast majority of our Oracle customers (there are few customers who have very old 7.x and 8.x products running without vendor support) have Oracle maintenance subscriptions that include product updates and product support. Product support entitles the customer to open support requests when the product doesn’t perform according to the specifications (bug reports) as well as fill in enhancement requests. It also covers deployment blue-prints and deployment guidelines in the official …