It’s been a long time since I blogged for the last time. My community contribution and knowledge sharing dropped significantly in the last two years. I had some major changes in my life and that had shifted my attention and time more to the family. My first son was born in 2020 and the second one just a few weeks ago.

I had my Oracle Ace level demoted from Pro to Associate, but during that time I was able to execute great projects and also got promoted at Pythian.

A few of the projects and recent interesting deliveries from the last two years are:

• Migrated 6 11.2.0.4 DBs from Exadata X4 to Exadata X8 Cloud at Customer Gen2 by upgrading and converting to multitenant in 19c with a low downtime window.
• The strategy adopted was a combination of physical and logical migration using incremental backups and transportable tablespaces to keep the downtime to be less than 3 hours.
• The client didn’t have enough storage space to provide a staging area for the migration so I used part of the new Exadata storage by creating an ACFS filesystem and exported it via HANFS to use it as the unified staging area for the migration. Had to tune the mounted NFS filesystem to achieve the best performance possible.
• Deployed three Exadata X9M appliances (Prod, DR and Dev/QA) before it was officially released and announced by Oracle for a power and gas utility company in the US.
• Implemented a disaster recovery solution with two ZDLRA X8M + one StorageTek SL8500 to protect 6 very large databases for a government agency in Brazil.
• The strategy adopted was to backup the primary databases to a ZDLRA in DC-A and then have its backups copied to the SL8500 while maintaining the standby databases in sync with their primaries and back them up to another ZDLRA in DC-B.
• Improved the performance of real-time replication from Oracle on Exadata to Snowflake for a World-wide Medical Supply company.
• Speeded up the data capture process in the source database by using a separate network filesystem to allow the log miner process to be more efficient than mining from an ASM diskgroup.
• Successfully merged dozens databases from two companies after an acquisition for a Major Insurance company in North America.
• Optimized the billing batch job for a Major Power Utility client in North America.
• Improved the data purging and archival process by 150x for a transportation company in North America.
• Developed a script to remove log4j vulnerabilities and automated it to fix thousands of database installations across many different clients.
• Implemented a data lifecycle solution using ILM+ADO+ACO+Partitioning for another Power and Gas Utility client in the US.
• Upgraded a few hundred databases from 11.2, 12.1, 12.2 and 18c to 19c using the AutoUpgrade tool.
• Designed and implemented the RBAC policy for a Snowflake ❄️ account for a supply chain logistics services company client in the the US.
• Troubleshooted and resolved a communication issue between OCI and an on premises environment for a medical insurance company in Canada.
• Optimized the product ordering process in a MySQL RDS database hosted in AWS for a retail company in Brazil allowing then to reduce by half their cloud bill.

Now with the second kid I am reducing the project work and expect to have some time to blog again.

Maybe I’ll try some other sort of knowledge sharing as well. Let’s see how it goes.

Stay tuned.

Franky