Brian Oliver

It’s finally done!  The first book about Oracle Coherence is now available for pre-ordering from the publishers website here. Supporting it’s release, an interview/conversation with Aleks Seovic (the lead author) and Cameron Purdy (VP of Oracle Coherence Engineering) about the book is available here (mp3).  If you pre-order it’s about 10% cheaper!
<snip>Authored by leading Oracle [...]

The registration page for the UKOUG London Coherence SIG are now up.  Details are here.  Space is limited, so register early!
Here’s an overview of what’s happening.  See you there!
Session 1: TopLink Grid: Scaling JPA applications with Coherence (Shaun Smith – Principle Product Manager – Oracle)
JPA, the Java Persistence API, is the Java standard for relational [...]

One of the important tasks when designing software (or probably anything for that matter) is creating appropriate/correct/reasonable names for things, whether it be for classes, interfaces, methods or variables.  Why?  Simple… When someone reads your code they should ideally require little additional documentation, third party contact or alternative education/context to work out what something means, [...]

Save this date:  26th of February 2010 (Friday)
This is when the next London Coherence SIG will be on, in London, at the usual place, the Oracle City Office.
More details to come next week… including the place the register.
PS: Look forward to some very cool Toplink Grid (think Toplink JPA running purely on Coherence – all [...]

So I’ve finally managed to get a few seconds to upgrade my 13″ Mac Book Pro and Mac Pro to Snow Leopard.  For the most part the upgrade was a very simple process.  For the Mac Book Pro, I simply inserted the DVD (while running Leopard), clicked on Install and let it do it’s thing. [...]

Bio

Has the process of developing and delivering software really changed?
(click the image for full size version)

As announced at the London Coherence SIG last week, we’ve released a new set of updates to the Coherence Incubator, the major highlights being;

Introduction of the new Examples Project: This contains a set of Coherence Incubator Examples.  Once easy download that includes all of the patterns, including multiple push-replication deployments.
A significant update to the previously [...]

So cool.  Just saw the latest Sun Microsystems home page.

Sun have just released their first in depth Oracle Coherence blue-print (white paper) documenting the architecture, performance and scalability impacts seen in a large application.  As a comparison, the document outlines the performance and scalability of an application both with and without using Oracle Coherence.  Apart from [...]

Coherence clustering technology makes a lot of sense for customers to be able to scale applications horizontally and reliably with very fast predictable performance.  This is of course easy to do within one data center on a fast network.  One of the common challenges that customers have is around High Availability and Disaster Recovery and keeping data synchronized across data centers.  Normally Coherence is optimized to use UDP unicast or multicast, but what happens if the network is unreliable and/or has high latency which is common when networking multiple data centers?&nb

It’s hard to believe but another year has passed and it’s time again for Oracle Open World in San Francisco. Like last year, it’s going to be big.  Apparently San Francisco is bracing itself for an influx of 85,000 or so delegates, not all talking about Coherence obviously, but there will be a lot more than [...]

Here’s the current agenda for the next London Coherence SIG event, to occur on the 29th of October, from 2pm to 6pm at the Oracle London Office.
[Updated] Registration is now open at http://www.ukoug.org/calendar/show_event.jsp?id=4563
1. Coherence and Incubator Update
Noah Arliss: Coherence Engineering, United States
In this talk we’ll look at some of the new features in Coherence 3.5.2 [...]

Be among the first to take a look Oracle Coherence 3.5, the new release that enables applications to work with massive data sets in-memory. Listen to this webcast by Cameron Purdy, VP of Development and creator of Coherence, to hear how the new features and functionality can:

• Support multi-terabyte data grids while reducing the operational complexity of large deployments

• Improve service levels by automatically detecting and correcting service disruptions

Oracle this week shipped an update to its Coherence in-memory data grid, a member of a class of middleware that some say may be on the cusp of broader adoption for cloud computing.

In-memory data grids store information that applications need in memory across a pool of servers, instead of reading it off disks, resulting in major performance gains.

Whilst setting up a development environment for Coherence is relatively trivial, planning and moving this into production requires considerable testing and careful consideration to ensure the full benefits of Coherence are realized. The following observations and guidelines are meant to supplement those outlined in the Coherence Production Checklist, Performance Tuning and Best Practices guides, not to replace them. These documents should be read prior to reading this document, as the contents of these documents are not going to be replicated here.

A common requirement when using Coherence is for the data in it to remain synchronised with database. If all changes to the database flow through Coherence or the cached data can be periodically refreshed (using the refresh-ahead mechanism) then Coherence will be aware of of any database changes.

Organizations can gain significant advantage by managing and exploiting their information systems more effectively than their competitors. But with today’s tight budget constraints and technology limitations, many miss the opportunity—sometimes with disastrous results. This white paper addresses how you can gain a measurable competitive edge without compromise—today. 

One of the challenges with Coherence has been the limited management tools.  There is a built support for cluster wide JMX, but this only provides a limited management capability and requires a JMX console, see documentation for more details.  Using a JMX console is fine but it isolates the management of the cluster from other management tools, such as database and web servers.  Last month Oracle released a new Enterprise Manager pack, the

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