I was very pleased to be invited by Francisco Munoz Alvarez to present at the first Chilean Oracle User Group. My presentation was scheduled on the 14th April (the second day of the conference) and we arrived well in time on the 11th of April. We were on the same flight as Francisco from New Zealand and he very kindly gave us a lift to the hotel from the airport. We had a few days to get used to the time differrence and enjoy the beatiful sites of Santiago. It is a very nice city and with a lot of interesting sites and places to see.

On the first day of the conference I had a chance to meet some of the Oracle ACE directors including Dan Morgan, Ben Prusinski, Robert Freeman, Hans Forbrich, Dennis Remmer, Tim Hall, Plinio Arbizu, Mauricio Naranjo and Graham Wood. It was a privilege to be presenting along side people that have given so much back to the Oracle community over the years.

Francisco did a great job of organising the whole event and most of it from New Zealand! The venue was great and the sessions were are also very interesting.

The second day of the conference it was time for my presentation. My paper was on “How to create a Technical Disaster Recovery Implementation plan“. The paper focuses on the plan of the actual implementation of the hardware and software at the disaster recovery location.
This plan ensures there are no unforeseen surprises when building the disaster recovery solution and that all critical systems and their components have been accounted for. This paper focuses mainly on Oracle centric applications in Unix/Linux environment. The Technical Disaster Recovery Implementation plan includes:

  • Creating a technical register of applications and servers.
  • Creating application consistency groups (different application must work together consistently to guarantee integrity in the data).
  • Define a server mapping (either one-to-one or many-to-one). Will each primary server have its own disaster recovery server, or will several primary servers be consolidated to one disaster recovery server.
  • Creating a configuration register for each primary server including OS, patches, firewall rules, etc.
  • Software licenses and media considerations.
  • Synchronisation methodology.
  • Oracle standby database implementation.
  • Best practise primary servers.
  • Best practice standby servers.

I had to remember to speak slowly as everything was being translated from English to Spanish. I was very happy with the presentation and had a few questions at the end. Always a good sign I think!

During the social time, I had the pleasure of getting to know Ben Prusinski, Hans Forbrich, Dennis Remmer and Tim Hall a little better.

After the conference we were in Chile for another 4 days and did some more site seeing in Santiago and around the area.