Raw Power

Way Cool Additional Speaker for New York Coherence SIG

We are proud to announce a great new speaker for our upcoming October 1 Coherence SIG.

Aleksandar Seović is author of “Oracle Coherence 3.5” (Packt Publishing, 2009) and Oracle ACE Director for Fusion Middleware. He frequently speaks about and evangelizes Coherence at industry conferences, Java and .NET user group events, and Coherence SIGs.  When not writing about Coherence, Aleksandar Seović is a founder and managing director at S4HC, Inc., where he leads professional services practice.  S4HC offers professional services for Coherence customers.

Aleksandar Seović will provide an overview of Coherence Tools, a collection of Coherence extensions and utilities he created while working on the book and subsequently decided to open source for the benefit of the community.  Aleksandar will present more powerful value extractors, different ways to integrate Coherence and Spring, and utilities such as identity generator and cache loader. Best of all, because many of these use Coherence extension points you are already familiar with, you’ll be able to use them as soon as you walk out of the meeting.

See my previous blog posting for the registration web address.

Hope to see you there!

Fall Edition of the New York Coherence SIG

Autumn is in the air.  The Giants are ready to kickoff a new season, Fashion Week is in full bloom, and the second year of New York Coherence SIG's is about to kick into high-gear on October 1.

We have a great line-up for you this session.  Over the past year, I've received feedback from many of the SIG members that they would like more basic "how-to" sessions.  So to start the year, we've invited two Coherence developers to discuss two important aspects of deploying Coherence applications.

The first, presented by Patrick Peralta, explores the benefits that Coherence can provide to traditional persistent storage. Coherence bridges the gap between horizontally scalable, low-latency in-memory access and persistent durable storage. This is the case with a relational database (with or without object-relational mapping), a mainframe, a Web service, or any other persistence mechanism. The presentation explores various caching patterns and techniques to scale both reads and writes in order to meet current and future user demand.

The second talk, presented by Mark Falco, focuses on network optimization.  The talk will guide you through some of the key factors when tuning your network, and helps you understand how your choices interact with Coherence under the covers.

You can register for the event and read the full agenda, including speaker bios, on the Coherence SIG Registration Page.  Also, please stay tuned as we will be adding a special speaker to the agenda shortly.

Shopzilla.com at Velocity 09

Interesting talk by Philip Dixon at Velocity 09 about the rearchitecture of Shopzilla.com (view video).  Some interesting nuggets:

• Simple is the new clever.
• You get what you measure.

Oracle Coherence is mentioned at minute 12.  While Coherence is an important component of the re-architecture, it is not the focus of this talk.

Live Twittering the next NYCSIG

I will be live Twittering the next New York Coherence SIG meeting on June 24th.  My first time live Twittering.  The whole idea is to get greater real-time community participation, so I hope you'll join in.

We will be using #nycsig.  To follow the event on twitter, go to http://search.twitter.com and search for #nycisg. To participate in the event, include #nycsig in your tweets.  The search should update in real-time, but if not, you can always reload.  

Please let me know if you have preferred tools for live Twittering or following events.  

Announcing Summer New York Coherence SIG

The New York Coherence SIG is ready to complete its first year with a bang on June 24.  I will be hosting three very special speakers, including a veteran hedge fund developer and two Coherence core developers. The SIG will provide an in-depth look at Coherence*Extend from both an internal perspective and from a .NET user.  We will also dive in to the Coherence Incubator to see what's in the new release plus what's coming down the road.

Here is the complete invitation:

New York Coherence Special Interest Group

NEXT MEETING:  Wednesday – June 24, 2009 

Announcing the next meeting of the New York Coherence Special Interest Group (NYCSIG). Whether you're an experienced Coherence user, or new to Data Grid technology, the NYCSIG is the community for realizing Coherence-related projects and best practices.

Please email the NYCSIG directly to register for this event.
Your Full name and Company name are required for building security. 


We are very excited that Timur Fanshteyn, Jason Howes, and Noah Arliss will all be presenting. See the presentation details below. We hope to see you at our next meeting.

Date:  Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Time:  5:30pm-5:45pm ET social and 5:45pm-8:00pm ET presentations
Where:  Oracle Office, Room 30076, 520 Madison Avenue, 30th Floor, NY, NY Google Map
We will be providing snacks and beverages.

Register! Registration is required for building security.

Presentations:


“Using Oracle Coherence in .NET Environment” - Timur Fanshteyn (speaker bio) Technology Manager

Oracle Coherence can be successfully used in a Microsoft Window and .NET Environment. It can be a excellent media for connecting .Net and Java applications. It can provide .NET applications with a caching solution in front of a database server. It can even be used to provide real-time data to the desktop clients. All with minimum or possible no java coding.

The presentation will go through requirements of setting up Coherence .NET Client. Go through use cases and point out some limitations. We will focus on general data caching, object serialization (through POF), event notifications and LINQ to coherence.

“Coherence Incubator Update” - Noah Arliss (speaker bio) Senior Software Engineer (Oracle)

The Coherence Incubator hosts innovative example implementations for commonly used design patterns, system integration solutions, distributed computing concepts and other artifacts designed to enable rapid delivery of solutions to potentially complex business challenges built using or based on Oracle Coherence.

This talk provides an update on new and upcoming Incubator functionality, including

·       New push replication functionality - filtered replication, improved batching, coalescing of updates

·       Command, Functor and Messaging Pattern - Support for extend and Command Batches.

·       Sneak Peek of upcoming functionality - Processing Pattern and Task Execution Pattern

“Coherence*Extend Internals” - Jason Howes (speaker bio) Consulting Member Technical Staff (Oracle)

Coherence*Extend extends the reach of the core Coherence TCMP cluster to a wider range of consumers, including desktops, remote servers, C++/.Net clients and machines located across WAN connections. Typical uses of Coherence*Extend include providing desktop applications with access to Coherence caches (including support for Near Cache and Continuous Query) and Coherence cluster "bridges" that link together multiple Coherence clusters connected via a high-latency, unreliable WAN.

This talk provides a unique look at the internals of the Extend implementation from one of Coherence’s core developers. Starting with the internal Coherence messaging API, Jason will go on to discuss such topics as connection and channel lifecycles, the TCP initiator/acceptor implementation, the CacheService, NamedService, and InvocationService protocols, and the ProxyService implementation.

We look forward to seeing you all at the third NYCSIG meeting on June 24th.

Contact NYCSIG with any comments, questions, presentation proposals and content suggestions.

Join the NYCSIG online community on our New York Coherence SIG Group on Oracle Mix.

Banana Problems and The Banana Cream Pie Theory

Not often does literary world of The New Yorker and the uber-logical world of technology intersect, but Heather's McHughes poem "Hackers Can Sidejack Cookies" has given me hope this will happen more often.  In the poem, Heather talks about "the banana problem"

Ooblick is play sludge.
A buttonhook is a hunchback.
Logic bombs can get inside
back doors. There were published bang paths
ten hops long. Designs succumbing
to creeping featuritis are banana problems.
(“I know how to spell banana,
 but I don’t know when to stop.”)
Before you reconfigure.

I have worked on my share of complicated projects/products (Tuxedo, the Unix kernel, compilers, proxy servers, application servers, and now in-memory data grids).  When I think about creeping featurism in projects, several sources come to mind.  Some are worse than others, and some lead to outright complexity:

• Well-intentioned engineers optimising existing features.  Combined with the requirement of backward compatibility, this leads to real complexity.  Managers should ask themselves whether the extra complexity is worth the cost.  If it is, old features should be phased out as quickly as possible and customers migrated to new features.
• Product managers adding features for specific customers.  Features should be added in as general a way as possible, not just to maximize return on investment, but to limit product complexity.  When features are added for the most demanding customer, managers must keep in mind their broader market.
• Product Managers who add features that attempt to address a new market.   Like before, product managers must think about how to do this without making life more difficult for customers who want to accomplish simple tasks.

My biggest bugaboo is the first category.  Since most software groups I've worked on comprise a set of talented engineers, their first inclination when thinking about how to improve a product is to either improve an existing feature or add a new one.  This is perfectly natural, and we usually call this innovation.  Who would say innovation is a bad thing?

Yet we also value simplicity of design and ease of use.  Too frequently the nature of the aforementioned "innovation" is at the expense of these two values. 

We do have at least one mechanism to encourage innovation while limiting complexity and ease of use: Prototypes.  Because prototypes are meant to be thrown away, they can be evaluated before inclusion in a product.  Only when the prototype meets all goals, including ease of use and simplified design, should the feature be made part of the product. 

Furthermore, building a prototype allows cooler heads to prevail; a feature that seemed vitally important six months ago may be unnecessary today.

I have an analogy I like to use for this.  In sticking with the banana theme, I'll call it my Banana Cream Pie Theory.  After a filling meal, it is never wise to order a Banana Cream Pie.  But if you do, it is better to throw it away than eat it.

If You Think Education Is Expensive, Try Ignorance

Harvard ex-president Derek Bok's quote makes good copy for someone trying to sell education, so I've decided to re-use it.  Not that the cost of the course I am about to tell you about can be compared with that of Harvard.  But, oh, the value.  Let's just say, hypothetically, that you have completed your baccalaureate in English from Harvard, complete with a thesis in Romance Literature (I have a thing for Shelley, Byron, and Keats myself), maybe even drawing a line from the great romantic poets right up to the New Romantics of the New Wave.  Well, even after that $250k, you would still need an education in Coherence if you wanted to design a scalable and reliable high-performance computing solution.

We have just the course for you.

Oracle University now offers a 3-day course in Coherence that takes you thorugh the basics to more advanced topics.  The course covers the following:

Introduction to Coherence

• Explain the concept of a data grid
• Provide an overview of eXtreme Transaction Processing
• Describe what happens when applications do not scale
• Describe How Coherence provides scalability, availability, reliability, and manageability
• Define Coherence
• Explain the architecture of Coherence
• Provide a high-level overview of Coherence editions

Using Coherence

• Explaining clustering
• Installing Coherence
• Introducing NamedCaches
• Provide an example for creating and using Coherence caches
• Identifying protocol support for Coherence
• Provide an overview of Coherence topologies and configuration
• Identifying the different topologies

Working with Data Objects and the Portable Object Format

• Provide an overview of serialization
• Explain the Java serialization overhead
• Discuss Portable Object Format (POF) and how to make objects portable

Querying and Aggregating the Cache

• Describing the QueryMap interface
• Explaining how to return a set of data given a query criteria
• Describing the various filters available
• Describing how to aggregate data in a cache by using the InvocableMap interface
• Describing how to apply an index to help query and aggregation performance

Listening to Events with Client-Side Listeners

• Provide an overview of the ObservableMap interface
• Describing the ObservableMap methods
• Implementing the MapListener interface
• Explaining how to listen for All events
• Explaining how to listen for Events that satisfy a filter
• Explaining how to listen for Events on a particular object key

In-Place Processing of Data

• Manage concurrent access to data
• Discuss TransactionMap with an example
• Update data in Coherence without locking
• Implement the InvocableMap interface
• Implement your own EntryProcessor

Coherence and Fusion Middleware

• Provide an overview of Coherence integrating with other products or technologies
• Using Coherence with TopLink
• Using Coherence with Weblogic Server

Integration with Databases Using the Coherence CacheStore

• Provide a brief overview of data source integration
• Explain the process of persisting data to a database
• Implementing data management features - Read-Through caching
• Implementing data management features - Write-Through caching
• Implementing data management features - Refresh-Ahead caching
• Implementing data management features - Write-Behind caching

Configuration, Tuning, and Sizing

• Tune and configure a Java Virtual Machine (JVM)
• Size a Coherence system
• Tuning a network
• Tuning an operating system
• Testing datagram and multicast
• Monitoring Coherence

Coherence Extend

• Providing an overview of Coherence*Extend
• Configuring Coherence*Extend

To learn more about the course go to Oracle University and search for "Coherence".   We are working on scheduling a course in New York, and you can indicate your interest either on the site or by contacting me directly.  

Also, you may want to check out the online-learning option for Coherence.  The current tutorials focus on using Coherence*Web to manage application server session data.

Review of Enterprise Manager Talk

Shawn Gandhi over at Lab 49 attended last week's SIG and posted a nice review of the Coherence Management Pack offered by Enterprise Manager.  Here is an excerpt:

When using Enterprise Manager 10g, you now have the ability to deploy, manage, and maintain multiple coherence clusters all from a simple web interface. It works by connecting to coherence clusters using JMX.

The management dashboard allows an administrator to monitor the health of your cluster from a single point. You can compare the performance of various nodes, caches, clusters, and connections. Upon the detection of a faulty node, you can simply evict it from the cluster so it can’t cause any damage.

I was happy to find the ability to monitor publisher/receiver success rates, which are conveniently graphed to show outage severity throughout the day.

Shawn has much more to say, both positive and negative.

High Fidelity at the NYCSIG

Maybe its a stretch to bring British author Nick Hornby into a conversation about the latest New York Coherence SIG, but, uh, I'll try anything once.

First some stats:

• About 45 people attended, down from the average of 70 in prior meetings.  (Note to self: schedule special edition NYCSIG in Cancun during next year's spring break.) 
• Once again 18 pizzas.  No white pizzas this time. 
• Over 40 companies have attended the SIGs.  Awesome.

Despite the smaller audience, evidence points to a growing Coherence community in New York.  Yes, the German beer at Papillon helped - I finally left for the Speaker's Dinner around 10:00, leaving many attendees behind to continue the party.  I also noticed much tougher questions, especially for Patrick, who's POF talk elicited some real brain-teasers.

But our customers and partners were not the only one's who tried to attend.  Yes, two of our competitors tried to storm the gates too.  Not to say I blame them.  In fact I think its pretty cool in general to have a forum to discuss data grid technology.  We all want to grow and educate the market.  But this is not the event for that really, since it would inhibit open, candid conversation with our customers.  But, if you are reading this, dear competitor, we are happy to come to meet your customers at your next event.  

Why did they want to come?  Was it the free pizza?  Was it to learn how to build a better data grid product? 

Or maybe Nick Hornby offers the best explanation in High Fidelity.  Rob, our hero, is slumped across a sofa with Charlie, an ex-girlfriend, trying to understand what went wrong with their relationship.  Charlie suspects that's why Rob is there, but Rob has yet to confess.

"Charlie, Why did you pack me in for Marco?"

She looks at me hard.  "I knew it."

"What?"

"You are going through one of those what-does-it-all-mean things."  She says "what-does-it-all-mean" in an American accent and furrows her brow.

I cannot tell a lie.  "I am, actually, yes.  Yes, indeed.  Very much so."

Yes, that must have been it.  They must have been there to see why, in the end, they were jilted for Coherence.

What's a poor New York Java developer to do?

I just received this email from Frank Greco at the New York Java SIG:

Unfortunately due to NYJavaSIG liasons at Sun Microsystems and Google no longer working for these firms, we have to cancel the April Glassfish meeting. [...]

Also our 4 new workgroups were scheduled to be held at the Sun Microsystems office in midtown, but due to personnel changes at Sun we have to revisit the meeting schedule for those workgroups. 

Left with too much time and not enough Java technology to learn about?  We have a solution for you:  The New York Coherence SIG is here to rescue your lonely nights.

The event is this Thursday, April 16.  More information is available in my previous blog posting.