While we have been booting from EBS a month after it came out using pivot_root - most of our implementations are based on a couple of AMIs and many different EBS snapshots and volumes. We were nonetheless happy to see Amazon's announcement to allow AMIs to boot from AMIs, it makes some of our scripts much simpler. I put this article together to show migrating an existing Linux AMI to EBS can be a trivial task.

Note: To make it easy for anyone to get access to this data I chatted with the good folks at Amazon to expose all the data (both couchdb files and csv) as a public data set! I will also share an ami that you can spin up and use to start looking at this data almost immediately. Look for a post on that soon.

This post will have nothing to do with Analytics or Data Warehousing but I had such a tough time getting this to work that I figured I'd publish a post on it.

I have always been a fan of stripped down "just what you need" OS installations of Windows and Linux. Which is why we use nLite for creating custom XP builds and gentoo for general purpose linux machines. For Oracle applications we use a base installation of Oracle Enterprise Linux.

The advantage of a these minimal builds are: 

• Better Performance
• Smaller Footprint
• More secure (in theory)

This has worked well for us - our hosted instances boot in a minute or less.

Ah the joy of installing Essbase on Unix. Even better installing it on Linux. Installing on Linux took some doing. So with some fits and starts, a major doozie and some finagling, we have an instance running Oracle EPM 11.1! If any of you folks out there want to play with 11.1, shoot us a note and we'll hook you up.

Oracle has finally released EPM (Essbase) 11.1 for all platforms. Thanks to Ed Roske at Look Smarter Blog for the heads up!

We have started the process of building and testing the 32-bit and 64-bit (yea!) versions of Linux and Windows. Once we have that up, I will post an update on what we find in our testing. 

Oracle has now officially certified 11g, Oracle XE, Enterprise Linux and Oracle Fusion for Amazon Web Services' Elastic Computing Cloud (AWS EC2). Information about AWS and EC2 can be found here.

I am going to show you how to get started with Essbase using our Amazon Images. Using the AMI, I am able to have a fully installed EPM machine with Shared Services, Essbase, Administration Services, Integration Services, Provider Services, BI Services and UI Services in 15 mins. Not that you would EVER want to run all of those on the same machine! So lets get started