ODTUG Hyperion Sig Elections

The announcement just went out that nominations are being accepted for the ODTUG Hyperion SIG board. There will be a change this year in how the elections are done.

First, instead of elections being held at KScope, the nomination period has been extended to July 8th. This change was made to allow those at KScope to think about becoming a board member and still having time to act on it.

Second, elections will be online. I have mixed feeling about this. While I think it will be more efficient, I actually think we will get less voters than when we did it on site at Kscope. Along with this change, in order to vote, you now have to be an ODTUG member. If you were not before the conference and signed up, you automatically became a member. It would be people who did not re-up their memberships that would be left out. Please prove me wrong and when voting time comes, cast your ballot for the people who will represent you on the Hyperion SIG.

Third, in order to prevent mistakes that have happened in the past, After the election the candidates will all be notified of the results and a general announcement will go out on or around July 29th.

I’ve posted the description and requirements below. I think there is a slight type, It says you have to be a paid member to be a candidate, It really should say you have to be a paid member to be a member of the board.

It is very important for the board to have client representation. That is why at least 50% of the board has to be from clients. If not, it would allow us vendors to run amok. I don’t know about you, but there is too much Mok around already. So if you are a Oracle client, consider running. The board needs new fresh input. The time commitment is really not bad, the board meets on conference calls once or twice a month and during Oct, Nov and Dec is the heavy work of selecting content for the next conference. After that, there is some work on newsletters and other projects to make the SIG better for the community.

 

If you are at Kscope this year, look me up and say hi. It is noce to meet the people who actually read my blog.

 

The ODTUG Hyperion SIG is currently seeking nominations for its board. There are three (3) open seats. 1 of these seats can be filled by a vendor/partner.
The board’s responsibilities are:
• Enable communication with Oracle Corp on direction and strategy
• Share information and experiences among Oracle Hyperion developers and database administrators
• Facilitate training and education among the Oracle Hyperion developers and database administrators (DBAs)
• Provide representation for the Hyperion SIG at Kaleidoscope and Oracle Open World
• Develop the Hyperion tracks at Kaleidoscope
• Maintain Hyperion SIG’s web page on ODTUG.com with relevant and informative content to the development community
Board member requirements include: current paid member of ODTUG; regular participation in board conference calls; coordinating/contributing to meetings and conferences including ODTUG Kaleidoscope and Oracle Open World.
As a board member, one needs to support and promote the Hyperion SIG goals by taking an enthusiastic role in the activities that help continually provide value to the technical community. Giving a presentation at ODTUG’s annual conferences, assisting with membership and awareness campaigns, mentoring new members and encouraging other developers/DBAs to participate in the Hyperion SIG are just a few ways that board members can display leadership and contribute to the SIG's growth and success.
If you would like to help shape the future direction of the Hyperion SIG by joining the board, please submit the following information to doug_burke@paramount.com:
Name
Company
Title
Address
Email
Phone Number
Head Shot
Four to five sentence bio
Please be aware of the following rules/guidelines:
• Candidates must be a current paid member of the Oracle Development Tools Users Group (ODTUG).
• Elections are for individual volunteers, not the companies that employ them. The person elected will be a board member. It is recommended that individuals seek approval to run before submission as a candidate.
• Board will consist of nine members with no more than 50% from employees of Oracle Vendors (50% vendor rule).
• A board member’s term will last three years. At the end of their term, former members may choose to run for re-election after one year.
• On any given year, there will be 3 open positions on the board.
• If positions become open on the board during the year, board members may appoint members at their discretion as long as it does not violate the 50% vendor rule.
• Nominations will be open now until July 8th.
• Voting will be from July 11-25th on the ODTUG website.
• Results will be published July 29th.

Sometimes less is more!

I have a client that has two Essbase instances, a test server and a production server. Both are running on VMs and use the same number of CPUs(4), the same memory (8 gig) run the same Windows 64 bit operating system, have the same cfg file, the same SAN, running at the same time with the same exact data and nothing else running on them. So why am I writing this? The test server was processing everything much faster that the production server. When I say much faster, I mean test ran a process in 7 hours while production ran in 13 hours. Neither is fast, but this system is very complicated with a lot of data loads, calculations, extracts and reloads in the process. We were dumbfounded by the differences. Something had to be different.

We checked everything we could think of and finally found it. On the test server, the virtual memory was set at 6 gig while on production it was set at 11 gig. The normal wisdom is that you set your virtual memory (system page file) at 1.5 times your actual memory. Interestingly enough, in the very old days of Essbase we used to crank up the virtual memory as high as we could. We did some experimentation and increasing the memory on test degraded performance and reducing the virtual memory on production improved performance.

Wow was this counter-intuitive! Apparently reducing the memory allowed the 64 bit operating system to handle the memory better on its own. When you use virtual memory, it is actually writing to disk, real memory has no IO associated with it. I’m guessing  when we reduced the virtual memory, it forces the OS to use more real memory since it could not write it to disk.

We thought is 6 gig is good, maybe 5 gig would be better. We were wrong. For this server 6 gig seems to be the sweet spot. Does this affect 32 bit systems? I don’t know, but I do now know this can be an impact on 64 bit systems. This just goes to show that sometimes less is more.

I know everyone who reads my blog are cool kid (That’s why I’m not allowed to read my own blog), so I wanted to remind you that KScope11 is fast approaching. As I write this it is only 47 days away. I also know you have all registered for the conference already. You didn’t? what are you waiting for? You want a deal, register and enter the code IRC and get a $100 discount on registration. Also if you are not already a member of ODTUG, you get a complimentary  membership worth $99.  That way you have access to all the cool stuff like papers, presentations and webcasts.