1Z0-536 The Oracle Exadata 11g Essentials

Mr. Larry Elison said in one of his recent appearance when launching Exadata X3-2, "SAP Hana is kinda small... about 0.5TB small. It is indeed small. Mine is bigger." and something like that, although I can't remember his exact words.

Too bad, Mr. Bill Gates' Microsoft ain't jump on the bandwagon yet on a totally Microsoft based appliance. Microsoft is working with alliance partners like HP or so in current appliance wave.

So what's the big deal about appliance based solution?

Yeah? What's the big deal?

Appliance is not something new. Seriously.

Early days of computing solution actually were appliance-based! Computer engineers assembled a dedicated computing machine using their own proprietary hardware, software, networking devices, storage and components with performance centric mentality to maximize utilization of available resources. Use some marketing catch words from principals like IBM and Oracle: Balanced Configuration.

Then computing components became commoditized, leveraging economic of scale, drastically lower down prices, improve adoption and innovations. Too bad, the commoditization happened individually for each component. Solutioning process nowadays spends a hell of time and efforts to assemble these "unbalanced" components together and it requires a hell of group of specialized people like systems engineer, storage expert, network specialist and so on together to make sure the end result can somehow meet the real customer needs.

Change is inevitable. Complexity sucks.

Appliance based deployment lowers complexity.

Wait! Oracle actually try to differentiate appliance and appliance-like platform. Exadata is actually a appliance-like platform. What it really means is that Exadata provides almost full flexibility in operating the Oracle database software as if it is in a non-Exadata environment. A true appliance is more limited in terms of configuration. Emm, the characteristics of these two kinds are usually overlapping and we shouldn't waste too much time to try to identify the idiosyncrasy of both since they shall eventually converge into single definition.

So, there are Netezza, Exadata, SAP HANA, Greenplum, HP Vertica, SmartAnalytics and the list goes longer with many smaller players in the market. Gartner Magic Quadrant paper should be able to point out few names in this area.

Anyway, enough of the gibberish speech about appliance.

I think appliance is great as it will cut down my time in assembling a BOM for proposals, although sometimes the price tag is hard to fit into the budget unless Oracle or any appliance vendor is kindly to give out GREAT bid price for us.

I took and passed 1Z0-536 The Oracle Exadata 11g Essentials. Scored 84% . To me, 84% is a score that has plenty of rooms for improvements. I would attribute this below-than-my-average score to the lack of literature about Exadata in the circulation. This is an area for enhancement. Oracle, please take note.

My preparation materials basically include OPN learning materials about Exadata under the specialization track, "Achieving Extreme Performance with Oracle Exadata (Oracle Press)" and many whitepapers/articles.

Some major subject areas tested in the examination are IORM, Database Machine specs and best practices. I got ambushed by some questions about ASM related attribute and state of the disks. OUCH! No idea at all what the hell they are and I can only count on my common sense. Non-Exadata Oracle specific knowledge would be a great use here.

MCTS 70-178 Microsoft Project 2010, Managing Projects

Suddenly I became nostalgic.

You know, Microsoft Project is one of some early batch of software that I used during tertiary education time besides the obvious DOS, Windows operating system, VB (Not .NET you young people!) and et cetera.

I remembered times when being instructed to present my project schedules which ended up with printing of few ten pages of "partial" gantt charts and stitched them together using double sided tapes or glues. Guess not easy to be a project manager during those times. :D

Anyway, transition from the yawning old version of Microsoft Project to the state of the art version of 2010 (2013 on its way) is phenomenal. Number of users grow into millions and with some quarter of them with a chartered PMP qualification. Still, more projects failed in this decade than the total of few previous decades added up. Microsoft Project is just a tool, and it really can't help if you don't understand the essential of managing a project.

Anyway, back to the story of 70-178.

You see, to me, this examination is nothing but just a milestome to tell people that I'm more proficient in using this tool than others. Technically, it's not a tough one either. I have passed various other exams, which I personally think at a different playing field than this exam.

So, don't worry too much if you are taking this exam anytime soon.

What you really need to prepare are:

• Download the trial version/buy the licensed copy of Microsoft Project 2010
• Use the software alot, and explore various of its features
• Understand the basics of project management (If you are a PMP, congrats that you are on a faster track to pass this)
• Read one or more books on Microsoft Project 2010. I scanned through most of them and I think "Microsoft Project" title from Sybex is short and concise (about 400 pages) whereby "Microsoft Project In Depth" from QuantumPM is indeed, in depth (about 1000 pages).

Well, my passing rate of 962/1000 should indicate to you that the preparation materials above are sufficient. Right?

Can't get the damned "Gangnam style" out from my head. Geez.

Atychiphobia

Suddenly I had this urge to write an entry after months of unintentional abandonment of this blog. "Unintentional" emphasized. C'mon, where got time taking care a pitiful blog which is not generating enough "ka-ching" to sustain my hunger for curiosity. Buy books, travels, being nerd, all need monies, agree?

Anyway, my part philosophical part empirical method of promoting the science of Failure generated few interesting insights.

Obviously, the idea of failure is wrongly understood by common mass. How say? People tend to shun potential failure unreasonably and without solid ground. Smart readers will notice I use the phrase "potential failure" instead of "absolute failure", this is because failure with likelihood of not failing could in turn mean likelihood for success. As usual, we want to avoid failure that could cause lives, significant financial impacts, bad ROI and all sort of outcomes where the actual/perceived cost outweigh actual/perceived benefit. If you're in the game, "High Risk High Return" should ring some bells, LOL.

It's all about risk management, like I always chanting to my co-workers.

Portfolio and Project Management -> Risk Management
Software R&D -> Risk Management
Financial Derivatives and Investment -> Risk Management
Career Planning -> Risk Management
Buy Life/Health/etc Insurance -> Risk Management

And the list grows longer and longer until you would have a reflex action closing the browser currently viewing this site.

The latest "sales" pitch of mine -> "Fail Fast, Fail Cheap, Fail Safe" managed to grab attention of the listeners whenever I used them in customer training sessions, motivational talks, project management meeting, coaching team members and even in interviews

:D Not bad as a way to get people to put their eyes and ears to you.

But I can't say the copyright of the phrase belongs to me as it relates to the works of many scientists, leaders, philosophers, mathematicians and all these successful people who contributely significantly to the society and nation. In the extreme case, they heroically "Fail Slow, Fail Pricey, Fail Deadly" to prove some hypothesises and perhaps to the betterment of mankind. Well, these cases were the end of the long tail if you know what I mean.

Anyway, to common man like us, probably more important is how the skill of failure affects our ability to reach optimal (even a local optima) state of our goals. If life is a constant deviation of any plan, then any plan should plan for deviation and if by definition any deviation is a failure, life is full with failures. It sucks right? Not really. Solution to any problem is the continous improvement of the sub-optimal/failed solution to the problem, monotonically. Well, biting my own tongue, to be precise, not always monotically, especially if you stucked in local optima and need to break out to find the global one.

With all due respects, always have the bigger and larger picture in your mind when failure is imminent or even planned. You will realize that you are moving one step further to success, just by failing.

Remember "Fail Fast, Fail Cheap, Fail Safe" Fail Fast -> Continous and Often Improvement
Fail Cheap -> Well, preserve the budget and $$$ for more trials
Fail Safe -> Don't screw up anything significant like your career, corporate reputation, life and so on.

Oil spikes above $108 US

Oil prices briefly spiked to near $108 US per barrel Friday after a report that exports from Iran had tumbled this month.

Light sweet crude for May delivery closed higher by $1.52, at $106.87, after earlier jumping by as much as $2.90 to $108.25.

Iran, the world's third-largest oil exporter, has been locked in a high-stakes standoff with the West over its nuclear program.

The U.S. and Europe, who fear that it is building a weapon, are using financial sanctions to pressure Iran to open its facilities to inspection.

The report said Iran's shipments have tumbled by 300,000 barrels per day, or 14 per cent, in March. That would be a strong sign that the sanctions are starting to impact the country's oil industry.

The gain helped the commodities-weighted Toronto Stock Exchange. The S&P/TSX composite index closed up 103.85 points at 12,465.66

Loonie rebounds

The rise in oil — Canada's biggest commodity export — also caused the Canadian dollar to take a u-turn. After falling below parity for the first time since March 6 and losing as much as 0.83 of a cent, the loonie rebounded to close up a tenth of a cent at 100.13 cents US.

The Canadian dollar initially lost ground on signs of growing strength in the U.S. economy, which would be positive for the greenback, and concerns about slipping demand for commodities as China's economy slows, have helped push the loonie down.

The fall came despite data from Statistics Canada that found gasoline and food continued to push up inflation in February to 2.6 per cent, the second consecutive monthly increase.

Sustained higher inflation would suggest the Bank of Canada would raise intererest rates, exerting upward pressure on the loonie.

Core inflation — the underlying pressure on consumer goods, excluding volatile items such as energy and fresh foods — rose two notches to 2.3 per cent, above the Bank of Canada's two-per-cent target line.

But Emanuella Enenajor of CIBC World Markets said it's not clear yet whether Canada has entered a period of sustained higher prices

Although February's data represented the fastest pace of price increases since 2008, said Enenajor, "the rise in the ex-volatile rate could prove temporary, so the Bank of Canada will likely look through today's elevated reading — suggesting limited policy implications."

How Africa’s largest island was colonised by Asians

MADAGASCAR is renowned for its unusual animals, particularly its lemurs, a group of primates extinct elsewhere on the planet. Its human population, though, is equally unusual. The island was one of the last places on Earth to be settled, receiving its earliest migrants in the middle of the first millennium AD. Moreover, despite Madagascar’s proximity to Africa (400km, or 250 miles, at the closest point) those settlers have long been suspected of having arrived from the Malay Archipelago—modern Indonesia—more than 6,000km away.

There are three reasons for this suspicion. First, it has been recognised for centuries that the Malagasy language, though distinct, borrows a lot of words from Javanese, Malay and the tongues of Borneo and Sulawesi. Second, the islanders’ culture includes artefacts ranging from boats with outriggers to xylophones, and crops such as bananas and rice, that are (or, rather, were then) characteristically Asian, not African. And third, genetic evidence has linked the modern Malagasy with people living in eastern Indonesia as well as farther off in Melanesia and Oceania.

Now, Murray Cox of Massey University in New Zealand and his colleagues have put the matter beyond doubt by showing not only where the first settlers came from, but also how many of them there were. And the answer is surprisingly few. Though Dr Cox is unable, with the method he used, to work out how many men were in the original party, the number of women was 30.

He drew this conclusion, just published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, by sampling the DNA of 266 Malagasy people and comparing it with existing samples from 2,745 Indonesians. He concentrated on DNA from mitochondria. These are cellular components involved in energy production that are descended from bacteria which became symbiotic with humanity’s ancestors almost 2 billion years ago, and thus have their own genes. People inherit mitochondria only from their mothers, which is why only the female line of descent can be tracked using them.

The advantage of studying mitochondrial DNA is that it is not shuffled around by sex. Dr Cox and his colleagues were therefore able to make a statistical comparison of Indonesian and Malagasy mitochondrial genomes knowing that any changes which had occurred since they separated would be the result of rare mutations. These can be spotted and accounted for. Indeed, because they can be tracked they add to the information which can be extracted from a sample.

Having confirmed that Malagasy and Indonesian DNA separated about 1,200 years ago, which is statistically close to the date archaeologists suggest Madagascar was colonised, the team then asked their data how many women, drawn at random from the Malay Archipelago of that period, would have been needed to explain the variation in mitochondrial DNA in Madagascar. The answer was about 30.

That answer bears on a second question: was the colonisation of Madagascar a deliberate act or an accident? The first is possible. At the time, much of the Malay Archipelago was in the hands of the Srivijayan empire, an entity that could certainly have sent expeditions across the Indian Ocean, had it so willed. But there is no historical evidence that it did. In any case if it had, it is likely that a successful colonisation by one group would have been followed by others, as happened when Europeans discovered the Americas.

Most likely, then, the first Malagasy were accidental castaways, news of whose adventure never made it back home. But there is still a puzzle. Most ships’ crews are male. Though the number of men in the original party will remain obscure until an analysis like Dr Cox’s is done on the Y-chromosome of Malagasy men (Y-chromosomes include DNA passed exclusively down the male line in the way that mitochondrial DNA is passed down the female line), the presence of women on board a trading vessel would have been unusual. Unless, of course, the women themselves were the objects being traded. Possibly, then, Madagascar was colonised by an errant slave ship. Which would make its history even stranger than anyone had previously thought.

Angry Birds launches into space

IT’S HERE: Angry Birds Space features 60 levels, with more coming in the near future via free and paid in-app updates.

Angry Birds Space, one of the most hotly anticipated mobile phone apps of the year has blasted into this galaxy and is now available for iOS, Android, Mac and PC users.

“This is Rovio at its finest, and we are more than excited to bring Angry Birds Space to all our fans worldwide,” said Mikael Hed, chief executive officer of Rovio in a statement.

“This launch marks a huge step for us as a company, and our whole team and partners have really pulled together to bring out a fantastic array of exciting products and experiences. We hope that our fans will find all things Angry Birds Space as delightful as the Rovio family does.”

Angry Birds Space features 60 levels, with more coming in the near future via free and paid in-app updates.

The iOS and Android app is priced at 99 cents (RM3), the HD version for Tablets is US$ 2.99 (RM9) and the Mac version is US$ 4.99 (RM15). All are available now.

In other big app news, OMGPOP the maker of virally popular social drawing app Draw Something, has been acquired by social gaming platform Zynga for a reported US$ 210mil (RM630).

In November Rovio announced that its Angry Birds games had been downloaded a total of 500 million times across various platforms with users collectively spending 300 million minutes playing the game daily. – Relaxnews 2012

COG-622: IBM Cognos 10 BI Administrator

This is a pretty simple test, perhaps due to the simplicity of Cognos 10 BI administration? Not really, I think the exam is out-of-sync to the actual administration needs of Cognos 10. Too many theoretical questions and the test misses the more essential adminitrative aspects and not reflective of a milestone that only a seasoned administrator will achieve. OR, most likely, I'm just too over qualified for it ;-)

My study materials are:

Cognos 10 Hand Book
Cognos 10 Architecture and Deployment Guide
Cognos 10 Installation and Configuration Guide
Cognos 10 Administration and Security Guide
Few VMs to play with

I have also developed a 3 days Cognos 10 Administration Boot Camp training course with tons of learning slides and hands-on labs.