Advert for the Management and Infrastructure SIG

I’m a bit late doing this (life is just too busy at the moment) but I want to mention the next Management and Infrastructure Special Interest Group meeting of the UKOUG next Week. Tuesday 30th, being held in Oracle’s London City office.

I get asked by people what exactly the MI SIG is? {Honest, I do, I got asked twice this month alone!}. Is it a management meeting or is it another one of the technical SIGs, like the UNIX, RDBMS and RAC/HA SIGs? I’ve struggled to come up with a single line to sum it up. Other than to say “Both”.

It might be easier to sum up the target audience. The MI SIG is for technical people who need to deal with Oracle as a component of a large IT environment. Most of the audience could knock up a PL/SQL script to create a new set of tablespaces each month, would be able to instal Oracle {if given a couple of days and the manuals to peek at} and could explain two-phase commit. Maybe.
But what they have to deal with in their working lives are things like using Grid Control to manage 500 instances, understand what options are there for providing disaster recovery {if not the exact commands to eg set up physical standby or active/passive RAC}, knowing enough about storage options to make a sensible decision on which is best for each type of Oracle system they have. So it is a technical SIG, but covering general principles and, well, Infrastructure.

And the Management? Well, when the SIG started this bit was really interesting to me. When you have a lot of IT going on, especially in large organisations, the people looking after Oracle are not the people looking after Networks, or Storage, or Backups or half a dozen other things. And you probably have a team of people doing all that Oracle stuff with/for you. So you have to hire staff and keep ’em happy and deal with teams who you have no power over but you need them to do stuff for you. And that Management part can be a lot harder than the technology, especially if you never planned on being a manager but just woke up one day with that monkey on your back.

So with the technical aspects of Large IT Infrastructure comes the management component too. The SIG is there for that audience.

I chair this SIG, so I am more than a little bit biased, but I think it is a good line-up of talks for this up-coming meeting. We have two talks on using OEM/Grid Control, one around using it for deploying clusters, one about how you go about integrating it with the likes of LDAP, Kerbros and using the Custom Metrics, ie plugging it into the wider infrastructure.

We also have a presentation on the latest/greatest Exadata2, from some Oracle friends.

To wrap up the technical talks I am going to try and explain some of the guiding principles for gathering statistics for you oracle databases. Not the details of DBMS_STATS command syntax, but why you need good stats, how you get them and the issues we all seem to end up facing with it.

Balancing the techical side is a talk on Birkman and understanding teams and people.

So, you can see it is a line-up matching the diversity of the SIG’s purpose.

As I said earlier, I initially was very interested in the management side of the SIG and I worried I would be pretty lonely in that opinion. For various reasons, those of us on the technical side tend not to have much time for those “soft skills” we associate with management theory. However, when I took over the SIG over a year ago, I asked the audience if they would want some talks on hiring staff, dealing with people, motivation… Over 60% of the audience said “YES!”. Quite loudly. About 30% said “OK, so long as we get technical stuff as well”. 6% said “over my dead body”.

I think the reason so many wanted the management side as well is, whether we like it or have an affinity for it or not, it is part of the job. And so we need to be able to do it. Personally, I quite like the human side of IT, but my wife tells me I am strange.

If your organisation has UKOUG membership it is free to come along to the SIG (one person per membership, excluding Bronze membership) Anyone can come along for £80. You would be very welcome and I am sure you will learn new stuff. Don’t let the fact that we retire to a pub afterwards where the chair buys a round sway your decision to come along at all.