Jeremy is the main creator of the IOUG RAC Attack! event that was held for the first time back in August 2008. He (with help from others) will also be putting it on as a half-day session at Collaborate 09. It’s a University Seminar on Thursday morning. All hands-on, all RAC, all the time. I’m looking forward to the event (I’m volunteering as a staffer). You should sign up now before it’s full! I can almost guarantee you’ll learn something.

Besides his work on this hands on lab/class for RAC, Jeremy has many other community contributions. His blog is full of excellent technical bits that always seem to come from a significant amount of research. He contributes occasionally to the Oracle-L mailing list. He also contributed some code to OCFS (v1) several years ago, so you can guess he understands a thing or two about programming and Linux, too.

His ACE Profile isn’t posted yet, but look for it to arrive soon. In the meantime, read some of the good stuff he wrote on his blog and look for him (and me too) at Collaborate in early May!

Congratulations, Jeremy!

Jeremy Schneider was the brilliant mastermind behind organizing the lab materials and did the majority of the work to build the lab exercises. Since we used VMWare virtual machines, it was relatively easy to “reset” a system back to a known working configuration after a participant tries something that didn’t work. Jeremy also created several “jumpstart” points that allowed participants to start their lab experience from several starting points. For example, they could start just after the Linux installation so they could immediately start installing Oracle software or they could choose to start after all installations were finished and with a RAC database already created so that they could immediately jump in to the backup and recovery or load balancing lab exercises. This method also allowed people to try anything they like and within 20 minutes (to reset the VMWare files), they had a complete refresh and were back where they started (or at any other jumpstart point). There were a total of 5 jumpstart points (including options for using ASM or OCFS2 for the database files) which made for extreme flexibility. I think the only criticism I heard was that we only allowed participants to be in the hands-on lab for one day–most wanted two days or more.

The technical sessions led by Ed Whalen (Performance Tuning Corporation), Alex Gorbachev (Pythian), Krishnadev Telikicherla (Oracle RAC Pack), Jeremy Schneider (recently acquired by UBS Bank), and me all seemed to go very well. I wasn’t able to attend many of them as I spent most of my time helping hands-on lab participants, but the participants that attended the sessions indicated that they went very well and were very applicable to their learning process. Thanks again to all the speakers that helped make the event a huge success!

For those that participated in the event, I’m eager to get your feedback. Please drop a comment on this post or send me an email with any feedback (positive or suggestions for next time) as soon as possible–before you forget! Oh, and thanks for attending the first-ever RAC Attack! event. The first group to experience an event always has a special place in making the future events that much better! For those that couldn’t make it to this event, be sure to join the Oracle RAC SIG so that you will get notices of future events of this nature. We’re working now to plan for holding the hands-on lab at the Collaborate 09 conference in Orlando in May, 2009 (watch this site and/or the RAC SIG site for details).

For any of the RAC Attack! attendees, please (really, please–like right now before you forget) drop me a line with your feedback and/or leave it here in comments. I am growing more and more confident that we’ll repeat this event at some point in the future. Plus, it’s highly likely that the hands on lab portion will be repeated at the Collaborate09 conference in Orlando in May, 2009 as well (sorry, no website up for it yet). Stay tuned for more details! So, if you didn’t get enough hands on lab time or have coworkers, peers or buddies that couldn’t make it to Chicago, there will be more opportunities for them to participate in the future. I hope Tuesday goes as well as Monday or better and I think it will!

My train is about to arrive in Chicago, so I’ll look forward to seeing today’s lab victims participants shortly!

As one of the RAC SIG board members, I’ve been involved with the planning and development of this event over the last 9 months and I think it’s going to be one of the best opportunities to get focused, high-quality education on RAC available today. Plus, you’ll get the chance to network with a group of people that are focused on RAC and it’s uses.

Of course, I’ll be there, so if you do make it to the event, please be sure to say hello. I’ll likely spend much of my time in the hands-on lab (when I’m not presenting my technical session) helping those that need it to build their cluster, test backup and recovery or exercise some new features.

Hope to see you there!