Virtualization Technology - Introduction

It's more than month now since my last post, and I guess I was occupied of a lot stuff. While I am trying to get back myself on track to improve myself in my field or to remind me again what are the technologies that I can learn that will help me to improve myself in the field of database administration.

There are few webinars that I already attending when I was caught of virtualization product. Few years back I started to use VMWare already but since I was indulge with other work I don't have so much time to explore it but I am planning to learn it again.  There was incident wherein I was checking other online seminars in Oracle Site because of location and schedule contraints, I was ended to sign up to attend VirtualBox webinar which happened last June. Honestly before I attended that webinar, I have no idea what I am expecting to learn to until I watch and listen to the webinar. During that time, I am looking for a tool  aside from VMware that can help me to put virtual laboratory so that I can start exploring, testing, studying existing and new technologies related to database. For the reason that I have to keep myself updated.

When I attended the webinar, the current release of VirtualBox is 3.2.6 but as of this writing 3.2.8 was already the latest release, while browsing I was amazed that this product was existing few years ago. And said to myself, what happened to the world, I felt to myself that I was outdated and my knowledge in new technologies are obsolete already. And its a good thing I am trying myself back on track.

While listening to the Virtualbox webinar, I just discovered a right tool that I really need at that time, because I plan to create my laboratory to explore database technologies as part of my own growth. I am actually planning to buy refurbished servers as startup, then, after the webinar, my plan changed immediately and decided to take advantage of the virtualization. During the webinar, I learned that I can create my own virtual lab instead of having physical laboratory because I know I need to invest money for refurbished servers. After the seminars, I started to read some documentations of and just realized I found my answers to my plan.

Notes:

Virtualbox webinar link that I attended (thanks for Fat Bloke blog site because the link I have was the link sent to me during registration - not sure if unique to every attendee), just try the link and if it request to register, then register and you will be able to view the webinar that I am talking above.

Virtualbox documentation - the Virtualbox Org site includes documentation.

You may see that I am featuring specific product of Oracle, it just happened that Virtualbox is an open source and its available in Mac OS and helped me to address my plan. As of this writing, I still need to experiment VMware for Mac OS like VMWare Player or VMWareFusion (will give you updates once I had a chance to lay my hands on VMware products not to make point who is better but as part of awareness in the technology available).

Virtualization And Open Source Technology

I am writing this simple post since I am currently working with my virtual lab composed of virtual servers, virtual storage and those virtual servers are connected to each other by taking advantage of virtual  networking.

In my next coming post I will put details about my virtual working lab that helped me to expose in the world of virtualization.

As you can see my subject in this post consist of open source, because while I am working with my virtual lab, I really do appreciate all the people and the community who involve in developing and creating a lot of stuff in open source, its not because its free, because even if the technology is free and you don't know how you will use them, it still meaningless, but after I started to involve in virtualization, it made me realize how open source is so important.

Stay tune with my next post about virtualization and open source technology, I can see that these are both the future technology.

Database Administration - A Vast and Wild Forest

When I finished my computer engineering course few years back, there is one thing back in my head that if I will find a job, it must be in software side (programming) and not in hardware side (server side, networking) since I am a woman.

My reasoning behind these thoughts are the following: If I will be working in hardware side, that means I should be able to bring huge servers back and forth. If I will be in networking, I should be ready to climb the ceiling or go under the floor to layout the cables and troubleshoot network problems. If I am man, I may consider the hardware side jobs but I am not. I knew and I understand that in IT world, gender is not important but if we are speaking the hardware things like computers / servers assembling and troubleshooting, these requires physical strength and physical touch with the products itself. I remember before, I was in sophomore in my college course, I started to disassemble my own personal computer and try to put it back together. And when there is issue with my own PC, I troubleshoot it in my own. When I am in my fourth year in university, I realized that I have to decide which field I must focus and excel in the long run? Until I found myself decided to be a programmer.

I decided to learn a language and that time I chose Visual Basic 6 (I know its easy because it's almost object oriented language already) but during that time I should have a starting point.

How am I became a database administrator? After two years focusing in programming and development in semiconductor company, and since I am dealing and touching a little bit of database during those time and it happened that my boss is database administrator, she started to groom me in her own work. This how I started to learn database administration. I started to learn Oracle 8 (not 8i).

After working in database administration in few years now, I learned one thing about this job, its like a vast forest, where there are lots of trails to go through. And each trail, it will lead you in different directions. What I mean on this statement?

Database administration consist different categories and focus to do the job itself, there is the architectural design, performance consideration, backup and recovery strategy, security design and so on. For the time being, the list goes on and on, there is identity management as part of security, there are scalability and high availability for the architectural design and recovery, performance improvement are becoming in demand. Database administration is enjoyable yet exhausting too. Its like a forest, you feel great adventure even getting tired sometimes.

And when years are passing, there are lots of things that still going on with database administration. Sometimes information are overflowing and overwhelming and we lost focus but we must keep trying - just remember we are just in the wild forest, there will be always challenges that we must encounter and bravely face it with confidence.

Blog Introduction

To The Readers,

I am database administrator and consider myself as intermediate dba and not yet in the level of expert of any field of database administration.

I created this blog to start documenting all my personal experiences and learnings in my world at work. This may focus in technical stuff but I am not limiting myself on that part. I may sometimes will share some other learning experience that does not tackle technical thing.

One of my main objective for this blog is to use it as my personal reference in what I do, but if anyone feels to share their views by commenting in my post, I do appreciate it since I am eager to grow and develop myself  to be better and be best in doing database administration.

Regards,

The Explorer.