We will start at 5:30PM with pizza and drinks and roll on from there as usual.
Note that we are meeting at the level 3 this time!

This meetup will be focused on storage technologies for Oracle database. It looks like a short presentation on Oracle Automatic Storage Management is in order - quite a few people are missing the concepts of Oracle flagman storage solution and it's useful to understand the approach whether you use it now or not.

So the presentation is - Oracle ASM 11g - the Evolution:

This is a short (30-40 minutes) presentation that starts by overview of non-ASM storage technologies for Oracle and what are their shortcomings that Oracle tried to address with ASM. Then we will introduce the principles of ASM and shortcomings of ASM 10g when it first was released. At the end we will touch 11g improvements (we already reviewed them during the past meetup) and see what's still not addressed by enhancement of ASM 11g Release 1.

After the break, we will start an open ended discussion and I will keep us focused to avoid the havoc. :) I will also try to encourage few attendees to provide a short 10-15 introduction on some of the technologies you are using and benefits or problems.

If we find it useful, I will introduce Oracle IO benchmarking tool - ORION and give you few real-world examples how we used in the past. However, it will need a separate presentation if we want more details so if there is interest - we will definitely schedule one of those.

Some of the typical areas we could touch (though, we won't have time for all of them at this session):
- shared storage options if you decide to use cluster / RAC
- NFS (NetApp and etc) storage
- OCFS
- Advantages and disadvantages of different file systems
- raw devices - do we still use and want to use them?
- 3rd party filesystems (like Veritas)
- ZFS and why it's so super cool

As usual, make sure you leave the comments on the meetup registration questionnaire -- we will try to make sure it's on the agenda.