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What has six conferences in six cities across India and features presentations by thirteen experts in Oracle technologies? If your answer was OTN Yathra 2013, give yourself a round of applause.

OTN Yathra 2013, organized by Oracle ACE Director Murali Vallath, begins in Delhi on Saturday, 16 February 2013, and then makes its way to Mumbai (Monday,18 Feb), Pune (Wednesday, 20 Feb), Bangalore (Friday, 22 Feb), Hyderabad (Monday, 25 Feb), and concludes in Chennai on Wednesday 27 February. Among the thirteen speakers for the event are eight members of the Oracle ACE Program.

The goal of OTN Yathra 2013 is to reach out to the 400,000-member Oracle user community in India to "bring the Oracle community together, giving them awareness,improving the level of knowledge, and increasing the networking opportunities in the region."

Click here for registration and more information

Pythian now officially supports MongoDB both as On-Demand and Managed Services offerings. We’ve been dipping our toes into the MongoDB pool for some time now, as more and more of our customers adopt MongoDB into their data infrastructure, but now its official. Part of the decision to officially support MongoDB was driven by our desire...

I’m sure we’ve all dabbled with VMs a time or two (and if you haven’t, you should). However, I had a specific goal of creating a robust purely virtual environment for training, labs, and testing. While a plain old Linux VM loaded over Windows, Linux, or Mac would have been fine, it doesn’t have the flexibility to really give me all the power out of my hardware. At best I’ll have a couple VMs running at once, because at some point I’ll run out of RAM and my host OS won’t be able to handle it.

So, enter the vSphere Hypervisor. Using this software, I was able to create my own ‘whitebox’ out of commodity equipment from Amazon. The whole thing came to about $840 (though price increases make it about $900 now). Check out the stats:

Server Setup:

• AMD A10 Trinity 3.8GHz Quad Core Processor
• 32GB DDR3 1600 RAM
• 64GB SATA3 SSD (OS and NAS)
• 4TB 7200RPM SATA3 Disk
• VMWare vSphere Hypervisor Free 5.1

An exact hardware list is at the bottom of this post. The high level process is like this:

1. Put the server together. That was easy, right?
2. Burn the vSphere Hypervisor software to a USB thumb drive and boot up with it. Pause to enjoy the new UEFI (replacement to BIOS) with mouse support. Important: Make sure you use a USB 2.0 port for the thumbdrive. The UEFI doesn’t seem to play nice with booting from a USB 3 port.
3. Install ESXi to the 64GB SSD and use it as your boot volume (a decent guide can be found here).
4. Once ESXi is installed and loaded up (minus the boot drive), you can use another computer to go to the link displayed on the ESXi server. From there you can download the vSphere Client and connect to your ESXi server to create virtual machines.
5. Once you’re in the client and connected, the first step is to create a FreeNAS Virtual Machine in the default “datastore1″ datastore. Here is a good guide for that.
6. Using FreeNAS, you can create a ZFS volume out of the 2x2TB drives (I used RAID0) and configure them for iSCSI. Another guide!
7. Lastly, you need to setup ESXi for iSCSI and create a datastore out of your new 4TB volume. And here’s a guide for that.

Once you’re done with all these steps you basically have the ability to create as many virtual machines with any combination of four CPU cores (1×4, 2×2, 4×1) up to 32GB RAM using 4TB of disk space on your new datastore. On mine, I have Oracle 11gR2 on OEL6, a three node MySQL Cluster on OEL6, MarkLogic 6 on CentOS 6, OpenVPN, Postgres, and two NoSQL/Apache/PHP boxes. With that, I’m at about 30% capacity and barely a whimper on the CPU monitor.

There are a ton of extra tricks and things you can do with this setup. Since the motherboard/CPU support IOMMU (AMDs virtualization passthrough), you can enable it in the UEFI and it will auto-enable in ESXi. This gives you the ability to passthrough PCI, PCIe, and USB ports straight to a VM for a lot of awesome possibilities. You could also look at something like PLEX to make a Media Server, set up a Minecraft Server for the kids (sure, the kids), anything you want. You’ll have tons of room.

Random Notes:

• I’d recommend setting up a dedicated IP range in your home network for this. That way you can keep it all organized and assign static IPs to all the VMs.
• One really good VM is a VPN server. I used OpenVPN which is pretty decent and easy to set up. Forward a port on your router to it for an instant VPN into your home network.
• One downside of the FreeNAS setup of a VM inside your ESXi server is that when the server comes up, none of the VMs in your iSCSI datastore will be able to come on by default. You will need to start the FreeNAS VM and re-scan the iSCSI interface in ESXi each time after a reboot. Thankfully, you shouldn’t have to reboot the actual server very often. If you know a way around this, let me know!
• From what I understand, passthrough of a PCIe Video Card to a VM is possible with IOMMU enabled but is a pain in the butt. With Windows it’s nearly impossible, and a bug requires the Windows VM use no more than 2GB RAM. I think with Linux it is quite a bit easier. Also note, while the AMD A10 processor is an APU (CPU with a built in GPU), it can’t be passed through.

Here’s the final hardware list:

• $109.99 – Thermaltake ARMOR A30 VM70001W2Z Black SECC MicroATX Mini Tower Computer Case
• $58.24 – Corsair Builder Series CX 500 Watt ATX/EPS  80 PLUS (CX500)
• $4.40 – OKGear 18 inch Blue Premium SATA III Round Cable 6GB/s Straight to Right Angle w/latch
• $100.38 – Crucial m4 64GB 2.5-Inch Solid State Drive SATA 6Gb/s CT064M4SSD2
• 2 x $104.99 – WD Green 2 TB Desktop Hard Drive: 3.5 Inch, SATA III, 64 MB Cache – WD20EZRX
• $123.79 – AMD A10-5800K APU 3.8Ghz Processor AD580KWOHJBOX
• 2 x $89.99 – Corsair Vengeance 16GB (2x8GB) DDR3 1600 MHz (PC3 12800) Desktop Memory (CMZ16GX3M2A1600C10)
• $119.99 – ASUS AMD A85X SATA 6.0 Gb-s 240-Pin DDR3 2400 Motherboards F2A85-M PRO

TOTAL: $906.75

The post Make your own training/lab environment for $900 appeared first on Steve Karam :: The Oracle Alchemist.

Enkitec E4, the only exclusively Exadata-focused conference in the world, is going to be back this this year too! :-)

It will take place on 5-6 August 2013 in Four Seasons Hotel & Resorts in Irving, TX. It will be very hot in Texas then, but the hotel has a really cool pool there (which I intend to be able to use this year – last year I had to spend all my free time working in the hotelroom unfortunately). And they have beer inside too :)

There will be very good speakers showing up this year too (including the keynote speaker who’s awesome, but I can’t say the name yet) and I’ll hang out there too. I think I’ll deliver a live demo / internals hacking session this year (that way I don’t have to spend my night before the conference preparing slides and can focus more on the cool stuff).

So check out the Enkitec E4 page, it has a video from last year’s event and also a link for submitting your abstracts for the conference!

See you there! (in person or virtually :)

 

Related Posts

• ExaSnapper 0.7 beta download and the hacking session videos
• Do you like to watch TV? Watch Enkitec.TV from now on! :-)
• Enabling and Reading event 10046 / SQL Trace
• Even more Snapper – v4.03 now works in SQL Developer…
• Snapper v4.02 and the Snapper launch party video

I like design patterns.  Actually, I love design patterns.  I'd much rather leverage the experiences of others than burn my calories reinventing the wheel.

Oracle's UX Design patterns have really saved my bacon lately.  I've been working with building some very cool stuff with ADF Essentials.  Design patterns have not only made my work product better, they've also saved me time and prevented me from doing some really stupid things (all of which would have needed unwinding and rewinding prior to release).  It's really true:

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. - George Santayana, The Life of Reason, Vol. I - Reason In Common Sense.

So, if you're building your own apps...especially if you're building them with Oracle tools or on Oracle technology...save your own bacon here.

Good morning and welcome to Monday...

Here in the States, this is the day to recover from whatever Super Bowl festivities you might have had last night. While I personally wish my Patriots had been playing the Niners, there is always next year.  But that same approach can get you in trouble when it comes to how your organization stores and provides access to information.  The idea that you will "get to it next year" can end up costing you a lot of time, money and angst this year.

I recently had a little Q&A with Bryant Duhon from AIIM about managing information.  We are planning for the upcoming AIIM show in New Orleans (http://www.aiimconference.com) and Oracle is pleased to be a platinum sponsor of the event.  We hit on a topic that has been written about before but still remains a vexing problem for companies around the world.  Over time, information that has real value, and needs to be reused or accessed by other colleagues is scattered across different locations and different systems - all of which are usually not connected to one another.  These locations are often referred to as "information silos" because of how they isolate information within individual repositories.

Bryant asked me this question, "We've been talking about information silos in this industry for at least two decades; how do we move from talking to doing?"  It's a good question.  Clearly if it was so easy to do, it would not still be coming up as an issue! Personally, I've come to the conclusion that eliminating information silos is a worthwhile but not always achievable goal for most organizations.  In my response, I stated that eliminating information silos has been the ideal scenario for many years. But the reality is that over time, organizations take on new technologies for information management but are unable or unwilling to wean themselves from the earlier, now legacy, technologies. Eventually a company may find itself with several different content management systems, each still used by one or more departments for a vital business function. Software vendors periodically attempt to address this problem with new technologies that often end up adding additional layers of complexity. IBM Lotus Notes and Microsoft SharePoint are popular examples of collaboration and information sharing tools that instead of delivering on the promise of simplified content management, have over time exacerbated the information silo problem for most organizations.  The Cloud and its many variations, now offers a new take on this decades-old information management challenge, but that's a topic for another day.

So what is an information management professional like yourself supposed to do?  Will you just throw up your hands and allow new repositories to keep popping up like so many groundhogs (slightly apropos this week) across the IT landscape?  Well, that is not such a great idea either.  The more disconnected your approach to information management, the more disconnected your vital business systems become, the more fragmented your operations become and the more inefficient your employees and colleagues will be.  If anyone ever needs to find anything, they will first need to know where to start looking.  Good luck with that!  

The approach that often succeeds for many businesses is to take a step back, evaluate the information landscape and consider strategic improvements to how information is shared, utilized, archived and controlled.  Then take positive steps to minimizing the number of repositories in use with an eye toward integrating as many business processes as possible around one "primary" information store.

Since content migration is frequently difficult or prohibitively expensive, the best opportunity for making actual progress on this front is for organizations to standardize on one ideal repository moving forward. When this is not possible, the goal should be to minimize and reduce the number of content repositories for all business applications moving forward. Using application integration frameworks and connectors, this new go-forward repository must be leveraged within the context of as many business processes as possible – which means that finding the right information management system that aligns with your overall business strategy should be one of the leading selection criteria.

Stopping the creation of new information silos is job one. Then over time, business processes and applications can be updated to take advantage of this new repository and legacy systems can be put into maintenance mode where older information is still accessible but no new content is being added. This takes time, proper planning, and a firm hand at the wheel that helps minimize distractions created by the latest shiny new technology in order to drive information management costs down over time.  If you can spare 30 minutes or so, I recommend you take a look at a webcast we did here at Oracle about ways to think about consolidation and the rationale (cost savings!!) for doing so.  Click here to register and watch it immediately.

You can read the rest of our conversation on the AIIM blog, here: http://www.aiim.org/community/blogs/expert/ECM-One-Repository-and-the-Key-Role-of-Classification. As always, we welcome your comments, suggestions, ideas and feedback here on the WebCenter blog.  If I don't hear from you here, I hope to see you at the AIIM Conference in New Orleans next month!

A friend of mine the other day said an amazing thing I like coding in C++ I mean, seriously?  The land of friends, of people writing C code and debugging nightmares, had things got that much better, I mean I know there are some good threading libraries now but seriously, C++ is nice? All of the idiots code in Java, they don't know C++ And there we have the point.  Its not about what technology

A spike in SQL injection attacks has caused enterprises to re-consider security measures to prevent a devastating breach from poor database monitoring.

International Business Times reported that after Yahoo experienced one such attack at the end of last year, security professionals began to focus on vulnerabilities due to third-party code. Hackers are increasingly exploiting these loopholes to gain access to the database, steal information and exercise complete control of all systems.

FireHost’s recent report on the “Superfecta” of major cyber-attacks revealed that Cross-Site Scripting and SQL injection occurrences like Yahoo’s have been on the rise since the third quarter of last year. In fact, instances of cross-site scripting increased by approximately 160 percent in the final three months of 2012. Chris Hinkley, senior security engineer at FireHost, commented on the study’s implications.

“The change in frequency of the types of attack between quarters gives you an idea of how cyber-criminals are constantly working to identify the path of least resistance,” he explained. “This is why it is important to have an understanding of the kind of traffic that is accessing your hosted infrastructure, so that you can make sure that malicious traffic is diverted and that there is less risk to sensitive data.”

Security requires continual supervision
A major reason for SQL injection susceptibility is many enterprises with cloud-based servers still have no logging capabilities for file exchange. David Gibson, vice president of strategy at Varonis, told the source that this lack of visibility into the network keeps businesses blind to impending threats.

“We have found that, after a workload is virtualized, the actual details of managing file permissions and monitoring access is considered to be automatically ‘taken care of,’ ” he said. “It is also quite possible that the teams managing virtualization projects see file security and governance as outside their discipline. The security team may have no visibility of what is happening.”

While virtualizing systems undoubtedly gives enterprise employees flexibility in accessing business-critical data, without remote support, the database is vulnerable to continually diversifying SQL injection attacks. Enterprises can utilize database administration services to constantly monitor the SQL database, as well as set permission controls for file access to grant the advantages to cloud hosting without the risk of attack.

RDX’s highest priority is safeguarding customer information. To learn more about how RDX ensures data security, please visit our Focus on Security page or contact us.

Well my Oracle Cloud trial versions are active now and I have something to play around for a month.
The activation took a long time for me and there are lot of people out there who already had their hands on.

So what are the tools that are basically used on the Oracle Cloud offering

• Oracle Database
• version provided is 11g release 2 enterprise edition
• managed and secured on exadata
• data access and manupulation with sql and plsql standards
• apex - my favorite 
• data movement using sql developer
• it has a lot of productive applications
• it is mobile enabled
• Oracle Java
• it is all java out there
• enterprise manager for managing
• it runs on exalogic
• its associated database runs on exadata
• it runs on weblogic
• it uses identity managment for user/group management
• it uses access manager for single signon

Good to here from Oracle and I am going to explore it in the next up coming days. 

In march 2011, my colleague Gregory Steulet published an article about Simulating and testing I/O performances with Orion. In this article, he wrote about a bug concerning Orion on Oracle 11.2, reported in Oracle bug number 9104898: "ORION FAILS WITH ORA-27061: WAITING FOR ASYNC I/OS FAILED".

 

Trying to compare performances of storage devices on a virtual machine between a classical and a paravirtual storage adapter, I experienced the same error when using large IOs. I was using a Red Hat 5 based environment, which seems to be especially concerned by this problem: 

 

Error completing
IO(storax_aiowait)
ORA-27061: waiting for async I/Os failed
Linux-x86_64 Error: 14:
Bad addressAdditional information: -1
Additional information: 1048576
Test aborted due to errors.

 

If you have already faced the problem too, there is good news! Oracle finally published a patch in November 2012 to fix this problem, reported in January ... 2009!!! The patch is available for Oracle RDBMS 11.2.0.2 and 11.2.0.3.  You can download it at My Oracle Support website, searching for Patch 9104898 or Patch ID 15597001.

 

It works fine for me now.

 

Don't forget to download the last version of OPatch (6880880 in My Oracle Support) before applying this patch, as recommanded by Oracle.

Pour ceux qui se posent la question de la haute disponibilité de la solution Enterprise Manager 12c, vous trouverez des réponses dans le document "Deploying a Highly Available Enterprise Manager 12c Cloud Control" (complément à la documentation).

Once you have Migration Plans created the next step is assembling them into Migration Requests. The Migration Request is a collection of unrelated Migration Plans and associated filter criteria to decide the scope of the migration.

To create a Migration Request navigate to the Administration Menu and select the M --> Migration Request menu option and fill in the following:

• Migration Request - Name the Migration Request (it should be prefixed with CM to seperate it from the Migration Requests delivered with the product).
• Description - A short description to describe the Migration Request
• Detailed Descrption - A detailed description of the Migration Request
• Migration Plans - A list of Migration Plans to include in this Migration Request and the Selection Criteria to use to subset the requests. This means the following:
  • Migration Plan - The Migration Plan to include in the Migration Request. The Migration Plans in the Request are NOT related. Any relationships are documented in the Migration Plans.
  • Selection Type - The criteria to select the subset of records in the Primary object in the Migration Plan. The Configuration Migration Assistant supports SQL based, XPath based or Algorithm based criteria.
  • Key Selection - The selection criteria to use in the format as specified in the Selection Type. This is SQL WHERE clause, XPATH statement or algorithm to use for selection. You can yse the help icon to find examples.

   For example:

The above example uses the (1=1) SQL clause to indicate that ALL records are migrated.

Note: The product supplies the majority of the Migration Requests you would use in the implementation. This step is only necessary if you wanted to copy a base Migration Request and alter it or add custom Business Objects to Migration Plans/Requests.

This concludes the configuration of the Configuration Migration Assistant. The next blog entries on this subject will discuss the execution components of the feature.

For more information about this aspect of the Configuration Migration Assistant and other aspects refer to the Configuration Migration Assistant Overview (Doc Id: 1506830.1) whitepaper available from My Oracle Support.

A very informative Post by Rajesh Dhanapal from Infosys.

In the current era the customers are not interested to wait for months and years for BI project implementation. The customers are keen on quick wins rather than implementing the BI solution from scratch by following traditional BI approach. The Oracle BI Apps solution provides head start for the organisation to reach the to-be state quicker with reduced time and effort, and reduced risk.Read Details

One of the great things about working here at Rittman Mead is our corporate ethos of sharing our knowledge and experience. Of course, much of this is “paid for” work with our customers where we train, mentor, consult, develop, implement and support all manner of things Oracle BI. However, sharing with the community is also a major feature of our culture; there is, of course, the Rittman Mead Blog, but we are also keen supporters of user groups throughout the world.

I am delighted to say that Rittman Mead will be at the RMOUG conference being held in Denver, CO between February 12 and 13, 2013. I love this conference – it is large enough to allow several parallel streams and attracts many world class speakers, yet the conference also manages to remain a close gathering of friends.

This year we will have four members of our team presenting: Stewart Bryson, Jordan Meyer and Michael Rainey from Rittman Mead North America, I will be representing the European offices. Between us we will presenting 7 sessions over the event.

• Reporting against Transactional Schemas with OBIEE 11g – Stewart Bryson, Feb 12 8:30 am.
• Aggregation: The BI Server versus the Oracle Optimizer - Stewart Bryson, Feb 12 2:30 pm.
• GoldenGate and ODI – A Perfect Match for Real-Time Data Warehousing – Michael Rainey, Feb 12 5:15 pm.
• Social Network Analysis with Oracle Tools – Jordan Meyer, Feb 13 9:45 am.
• Data Science for OBI Professionals - Jordan Meyer, Feb 13 11:15 am.
• Extending Oracle’s Data Warehouse Reference Architecture for a Real Time and Big Data World – Peter Scott, Feb 13 1:30 pm.
• Tuning “Real Time” Data Warehouses – A Guide from the Field - Peter Scott, Feb 13 4:00 pm.

In addition Stewart will also be co-presenting with Kent Graziano on “Using OBIEE and Data Vault to Virtualize Your BI Environment: An Agile Approach”

After the meeting we will posting our presentations on the articles page of our website.

If you see any of us in Denver then come up and say hello – we would love to meet you.

After boring myself to tears watching The Hobbit, I lost my cinema mojo for a while. I’ve struggled to motivate myself to get involved. Tonight I decided to give Bullet to the Head a shot ( ouch ) at revitalizing my cinema spirit and you know something? It did it!

Stallone is a low grade hitman. His partner gets killed, so he accidentally teams up with a cop and goes on an ultra-violent killing spree of revenge.

The film plays to all Stallone’s strengths. He is doesn’t get involved in lengthy dialog. His lines are simple and direct, with a lot of attitude and a reasonable amount of humour. It’s a very basic action flick, but I think it delivers very well. If Stallone can keep delivering stuff like this, I’ll keep going to the cinema to see it.

On a mildly related note, I watched Dredd (2012) last night on cable at a mates house. It was pretty good. I should have seen it on the big screen.

Cheers

Tim…

Bullet to the Head… was first posted on February 2, 2013 at 11:13 pm.
©2012 "The ORACLE-BASE Blog". Use of this feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this article in your feed reader, then the site is guilty of copyright infringement.

The recent ruling on the Oracle vs. HP case throws a lifeline to those customers already committed to Oracle on Itanium, like my current company, but what does this really mean as far as new customers are concerned?

Now this is just my opinion and you are free to disagree, but as far as I’m concerned, making the decision to go Oracle on Itanium is a massive mistake. In fact, it has been a mistake for the last 5+ years. During the death of Tru64, HP sales people were advising us to go HP-UX on Itanium and HP engineers were advising us to go Linux on x86-64, at approximately 1/10 of the cost. Who are you gonna believe? I’m sure there are workloads where Itanium used to work well, but from what I can see in my company, the regular Linux on x86-64 kit kicks the ass off the HP-UX on Itanium kit. When you consider the price difference between the two, that’s really the final straw…

I’ve now lived through the death of Oracle on Tru64 and I’m experiencing the slow death of Oracle on HP-UX. Forcing Oracle to support Itanium is all well and good, but it doesn’t make it a good choice for the future. Like Tru64, new versions and patches of Oracle products take ages to appear and the level of support for these platforms has always lagged far behind. I’ve heard plenty of people make the same complaints about Oracle on AIX, but I’ve got no recent experience of this, so it’s just hearsay.

When I’m asked my opinion, this is pretty much what I say:

• For any 3rd party product (that includes Oracle DB), always pick the platform the stuff is developed for. In this case, I would suggest that Oracle Database on OL/RHEL x86-64 is the natural choice. Pretty much everything else is a port from there. Solaris (SPARC) has some life, having been bought by Oracle, but that would still be further down the list for me, especially as the hardware is crazy expensive. Solaris on x86-64 is such a small user base I don’t even count it yet.
• The Oracle middleware products are Linux-only gear IMHO. Yes, they are supported on other platforms, but personally, I would not go near them. I’ve had a couple of bad experiences here and it’s just not worth it. Once again, new versions and patches come out quickest on OL/RHEL, so it’s a no-brainer for me.

To emphasize the first point, we recently initiated a project for a non-Oracle 3rd party product and were told it was supported on Linux or Windows. I asked the question, “What do most of your user base run on?” The answer that came back was Linux, so we went Linux. If they had said Windows, we would have gone Windows. Of course I have my preferences, but I don’t want to be anyones guinea pig where production applications are concerned!

When I arrived at my current company, the general strategy was Oracle DB on HP-UX and middleware products on RHEL. We will have some HP-UX kit for a few years to come, but Oracle databases for all new products are going on to Linux from now on. Most of those will probably be on VMware, since that is a strategic platform for our x86-64 installations. It looks pretty likely we will ditch RHEL in favour of Oracle Linux. Suits me just fine!

Cheers

Tim…

Note. The legalities of what Oracle did is not my concern in this post. The courts say they were in the wrong and they will have to pay for what they have done. My point is from the perspective of a user of Oracle products on this platform.

Oracle and Itanium… was first posted on February 2, 2013 at 1:13 pm.
©2012 "The ORACLE-BASE Blog". Use of this feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this article in your feed reader, then the site is guilty of copyright infringement.

I was recently part of a 3-part podcast about the ACE program. You can listen to all 3 parts here:

• An inside look at the Oracle ACE program

Thanks to Bob Rhubart for the invite and to the other members of the panel (Vikki Lira, Alex Gorbachev and Debra Lilley).

Cheers

Tim…

 

An inside look at the Oracle ACE program was first posted on February 2, 2013 at 12:32 pm.
©2012 "The ORACLE-BASE Blog". Use of this feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this article in your feed reader, then the site is guilty of copyright infringement.

Un nouveau plugin est disponible permettant à Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c de superviser les composants déployés dans le cloud public d'Oracle.

Plus d'informations :
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/oem/grid-control/downloads/oem-cloud-plugin-1900008.html

Firstly the Daily WTF
"The forums have strong feelings about Oracle. Not a single one of those feelings is positive." 
This was actually a post in their "I hate Oracle" forum so it may be a bit biased. But the fact that the Dailt WTF have opened a forum just for Oracle with that name, well I get the hint.


It doesn't help that the only time Oracle hits the big news is when there's another major hole in Java. It's the only installer that comes with a revolving door as standard. Oh, and the Ask.com toolbar being foisted on people. 


Then I saw the video linked on the highscalability blog . The whole relational / SQL database market has all the cool of, well, a Blackberry phone. It doesn't help that no-one can decide whether to pronounce it S-Q-L or see-quel.

While the video suggest a few fresh naming options, I think we need to be radical. ACIDbase recalls the core requirements of the relational model, suggests danger with a hint of rebellious substance abuse and coolly trips off the tongue. The only disadvantage is that the chemists seem to have wrapped up the best domain names. 

Now all we need is a fresh mascot. I suggest...Beaker




I'll have my people call his people....

Update (2/15/13): Per Apollo Group, the billion-dollar investment mentioned in the Chronicle article (quoted below) refers to total infrastructure – not just the learning platform itself. The total infrastructure includes new CRM, portal, and administrative systems.

*****

Earlier this week I wrote about the new patent awarded to the University of Phoenix (the for-profit institution owned by the Apollo Group) for the activity stream within their new online learning platform. The patent gives us a glimpse into a billion-dollar bet that Phoenix is making on this next-generation LMS that will power their move into adaptive learning.

The University of Phoenix has always been known for using a homegrown LMS, which is understandable given the large size (360,000 students) of the school. In 2009, Phoenix began investing in a completely new learning platform as part of the “Learning Genome Project”. While the company has traditionally been reluctant to describe its internal systems, starting with the 2010 EDUCAUSE conference Phoenix began sharing more information on this project.

The promise of adaptive learning

Steve Kolowich at Inside Higher Ed wrote an article on the new learning platform in October 2010 based on information shared by Phoenix’s Director of Data Innovation.

Where Facebook has shown unique value is as a data-gathering tool. Never has a website been able to learn so much about its users. And that is where higher education should be taking notes, said Angie McQuaig, director of data innovation at the University of Phoenix, at the 2010 Educause conference on Friday.

The trick, she said, is individualization. Facebook lets users customize their experiences with the site by creating profiles and curating the flow of information coming through their “news feeds.” In the same motion, the users volunteer loads of information about themselves. [snip]

This is where the University of Phoenix is headed with its online learning platform. In an effort ambitiously dubbed the “Learning Genome Project,” the for-profit powerhouse says it is building a new learning management system (or LMS) that gets to know each of its 400,000 students [ed. now reduced to 360,000] personally and adapts to accommodate the idiosyncrasies of their “learning DNA.”

The article goes on to describe the Phoenix vision of adaptive learning powered by the learning platform, stating that data analytics is going to kill the standardized curriculum dominant in higher education.

Additional insight was provided in a February 2011 article by Josh Keller in the Chronicle that further described the scope and approach of the learning platform development.

Two years ago, leaders at the University of Phoenix decided that its software for students was outdated. So it hired tech-industry heavyweights from Yahoo and elsewhere, installed a team of more than 100 people here in San Francisco, and gave them free rein to rebuild the college’s online-learning environment from scratch.

The team created a social network that borrows heavily from Facebook. It developed a data platform that collects and analyzes billions of clicks, messages, and interactions among students and their instructors. And it started profiling students’ online behavior to personalize how they are taught. [snip]

When students log in, they see recommended tasks for that day and a personalized discussion feed that resembles one pioneered by Facebook. They can see who else is online and chat with other students and instructors.

One goal is to better help students find the right people among Phoenix’s vast network who are online and could help them learn, says Michael White, Apollo’s chief technology officer. “My faculty member’s not online, but 700 faculty members who teach the same thing are online, so it’s really the power of the network,” he says.

The billion-dollar bet

How serious is Phoenix about this approach? Quite serious, as the university appears to be making a billion-dollar bet on personalized learning directly powered by this new learning platform.

The Chronicle covered the Phoenix announcement from October 2012 that they would close 115 locations, including this mind-boggling statement:

Mr. Brenner [senior vice president for corporate communications and external affairs at the Apollo Group] said Apollo was investing $1-billion in a new online-learning management system [ed - see below].

Update (2/15/13): The billion-dollar investment is total infrastructure and not just on the learning platform.

Not all of the investment is pure development as it includes the 2011 acquisition of Carnegie Learning for $75 million. From the press release:

The acquisitions allow Apollo to accelerate its efforts to incorporate adaptive learning into its academic platform and to provide tools to help raise student achievement in mathematics, which supports improved retention and graduation rates.

‘We are excited to partner with Carnegie Learning, which will allow us to integrate their high quality educational and adaptive learning technology into our platform,’ said Gregory Cappelli, Co-CEO of Apollo Group and Chairman of Apollo Global.”

The full significance of the University of Phoenix bet on adaptive learning platforms goes beyond pure dollars and became clear when the school announced the closure of 115 of its 240 locations. The stated usage of the savings from campus closures is primarily to further invest in the platform as described by the Phoenix Business Journal.

The $300 million in savings will be used to invest more heavily in the company’s online learning platform as well as renovating and modernizing Apollo’s existing 112 locations.

“This decision is in direct response to student demand to what students have told us and demonstrated what they want,” Clark said.

The potential for a new learning platform in the marketplace

This is a massive investment in a next-generation LMS, and there are clear signs that Phoenix does not plan to merely use the system for internal use. In October 2011 the Chronicle reported on Phoenix’s potential plans to sell their services including access to this learning platform. Perhaps the real intent of the patent is to protect intellectual property for a system that they plan to license and sell. From the Chronicle.

Facing new regulations and slowing enrollment for their degree programs, companies like the Apollo Group, parent of the University of Phoenix, are quietly developing or expanding other educational services that they could sell to nonprofit colleges and corporations, moves that could signal the future direction of the for-profit college industry.

Among other things, that means it might not be long before the Apollo Group seeks out other colleges as customers for the electronic learning platform it has spent years and millions of dollars developing. A company spokesman said licensing that platform to other colleges is one of the many options its new Apollo Educational Services division is exploring. Although the entire Phoenix student body won’t be fully on the new platform until spring, Apollo has been inviting higher-education leaders to its San Francisco development center to show off the new system for the past several months.

“We’d love to partner with existing educational institutions. We’d love to partner with global companies,” says Mark Brenner, Apollo’s senior vice president for external affairs.

What we might be seeing soon is the release of a billion-dollar adaptive online learning platform available to other companies and institutions. But what is the reality and does the patent award give indications of the limits of big data in education? I’ll explore those questions in my next post.

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